[Bf-funboard] usability improvements and a feature

[Matt Ebb]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 7:42 AM, Nathan Vegdahl <cessen at cessen.com> wrote:
>> ctrl-c copies attributes (from a menu) from active to selected; change
>> one, box select the rest, then ctrl-c and you're there.
>
>    To be fair, this takes notably more clicks/keystrokes than, say,
> the XSI way of doing it.  And also is not, IMO, an elegant solution
> with good feedback to the user, and just throws a hotkey/menu-item at
> a problem that could have a better solution.

The copy attributes menu, while it's better than nothing at all, is
also a horrible solution since:
a) The copy attributes menu is located in the UI nowhere near the data
that you're actually trying to copy. It doesn't make any kind of
intuitive sense to set a value in one place, then go somewhere
completely different to copy it
b) It's only available for objects, in object mode, without any
ability to do the same with any other kind of Blender data
c) It's extremely coarse grained, and often involves copying data that
you don't actually want to be copied. i.e. rather than just copying
the object draw option 'transp' you have to copy everything, or you
have to copy an object's X, Y, and Z scale rather than just X.
d) It's very limited - it's only able to copy a very small amount of
things, which is related to
e) It's not built into the system - programmers must manually add in
exceptions in the 'copy attributes' code and menu, in order to make
stuff work. Not only is this quite messy within the code, with
duplicated ways to toggle those settings in different areas of the
source, but also for 99% of new properties that are added, this
doesn't get added, because programmers don't know, or care, or can't
be bothered about it. (similar to the ipo situation).

As for Blender's hard-to-distinguish UI controls,  proper check marks,
etc, yes, thats something I've been waiting to be able to get in for a
while [1]. Hopefully with 2.5. And yeah I do like the sound of that
XSI approach, it sounds very simple and fast to use.

cheers

Matt

[1] http://mke3.net/blender/interface/layout/render_panels_dec.png