[Bf-funboard] UI rules

[William Reynish]

What about making more standard UI rules to go by?

The following are a few things I think we should agree
in the UI. One of the things that should be adressed
in 2.30 was consistancy, and therefore we need to
agree about certain things, otherwise we will end up
with thousands of different ideas being jumbled
together and we'll just end up where we started.

These are some of the things I vote for:


HOTKEYS
We could standerdise a few of the hotkeys. I think we
should settle on using ctrl as the standard modifier
in Blender. We already have ctrl-s for saving and
loads of other commands, but why is ctrl-o Reopen Last
and not simply Open? It would make much more sence to
use the standard behavior of opening with ctrl-o. Also
for copying cutting and pasting text (both in the
Blender clipboard and in the OS clipboard) we should
have ctrl-c, ctrl-x and ctr-v which are the standards.

Most hotkeys should stay the same though. Blender has
some good hotkeys for alot of things like moving,
scaling, rotating, navigating around and many other
things.



PANELS
We should strive to collect things logically and
consistantly in panels. Things that are relavant to
the same aspects should be grouped together in the
panels, instead of the fairly random setup that is
implememted currently.

An example:
This is my idea of how the buttons ahould be
organised:


In the Renderbuttons for example, all the settings
that affect how the scene looks should be collected in
one panel. These buttons are:
OSA (with OSA settings), Mblur (with Mblur settings),
Shadow, Envmap, Radio, Pano (with XParts and Yparts)
Gamma, Sky/Premul/key and Edge/Edge settings.
This group of buttons should be caled Options.

Next we should take everything that has to do with the
format of the rendering. These buttons are:
Frs/sec, Sta[rt], End, SizeX, SizeY, AspX, AspY,
Border, Fields (with settings), Size percent setting.
This panel should be called Format, just like the
current Format panel.


Then there are options relevant to the output of the
the rendering. These are:
Save destination path, filetype, quality, BW/RGB/RGBA,
Daemon/Network rendering and Extension(I think).

Ofcourse there is also a group of buttons that do the
actual rendering. These are: Render (should be called
Render Image or just Image), Anim (Should be called
Render Animation or just Animation) Do Sequence
(Should be called Render Sequence or just Sequence,
and act as an action button, not a toggle button),
DispWin, DispView, Window placement buttons group,  .
These options should be in a panel called Render.
Play could be in this group, and we could a button
called Show Image or something like it that, like the
Play button, showed the buffer, however it should show
the image buffer and not the animation.


I propose we remove the Backbuf feature completely,
because the same thing through the world buttons. it
just creates clutter. I don't know what the Ftype
image does, so I havn't included this in the proposal.
RT should be removed, or put into the menu under Help
(it is just a debugging tool for developers, so it
just confuses residing in the render buttons), and the
preferences should have its own panel, where you could
save/load preferences. Putting them in another panel
will make you think it only applys to that panel.
Ofcourse we could make it so that they only applied to
the Format panel (which would be logical, since
everything that is relavant to a TV type, size, fields
and so on, are in my proposal placed in the Format
panel). It could be just a single dropdown menu, and
if you made any changes to the settings, the name of
the preset would jump to "Custom".


We could do something similar in the other button
windows.


Other rules for buttons:
Radio buttons (buttons where only one option can be
selected at a time) should be connected together with
no border at all, just a line.

We could expand on the use of dropdow menus, for
example they could be useful in the material buttons
in the texture section  when choosing a mapping type,
or when choosing what texture channel to operate on.
One advantage of dropdown menus are that you could
have many more possobilities without cluttering the
interface. For example you could put the maximum
texture channels to something like 100, or you could
easily add in extra render presets or other options.

I propose that all numerical buttons should be
editable by just leftclicking on them. The arrows on
the sides could be used for dragging just like the old
functionality. Thus we don't loose any functionality,
we just make it simpler and easier to understand.



These are just some of the thoughts I have had, I do
have more specific thoughts on how to reorganise the
Material buttons ect. that I will post with mockups
later.

I just thought it would be good to settle on some
basic ideas. What do you think? Anymore rules or
general ideas to incorporate?


-William Reynish (Monkeyboi)

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