[Bf-funboard] UI talk + session at bconf

[Ruth Ivimey-Cook]

Gatis Kurzemnieks wrote:
> I know interface pretty good, and with UI work I mean adding the missing
> things - proper outliner behaviour, materials window, your mentioned
> dependancy graph, multi object editing etc. No need to change what is good
> - only add what is missing and do little cleanup. Seems like high priority
> work to me.
A materials window would be nice: indeed, extend that for all resources.

Multi-object editing is my bugbear: the ability to have several objects 
in edit mode at once. Mostly I want this because the unit of 
replication/effects/transform - array/mirror et al - is the object. 
Perhaps we could have group objects that can be manipulated as single 
objects are now?

 From my PoV the UV editor auto-mapping is still in need of a lot of 
love: it still takes far longer to do some tasks than it should.

The facility I would like most is to be able to replicate (somehow) a 
specific hole in a shape (take arbitrary extrude, intersect with a plane 
and make hole to match shape's intersection). Use-case: replicating 
complex window surrounds over a building's face.

So: There are several good ideas in this discussion, and perhaps the 
Conference is the time for someone to arrange a talk/meeting to arrange 
how it will happen and who does it. I would agree the Blender community 
needs someone to "own" the UI so we don't have these apparently endless 
discussions. I expect the disconnect is something like: those who 
understand UIs and using Blender and can produce an interface that works 
well aren't in a position to (perhaps can't) code them, while the ideas 
of those who might be able to code it aren't so popular. The solution is 
obviously someone/some team who can assemble a group together and say 
"do it".

FWIW, mostly I like the Blender UI. There are niggles but few are big 
enough to get upset about. I'll mention just one niggle: on Windows the 
default window selection is of course click-to-type, so if you duplicate 
a window (view menu) because like me you have two monitors, it would be 
nice if there was a way Blender could auto-select the other window when 
the mouse went over it, because that is the way Blender's interface 
works. It may be that the only issue is that the dupe'd window should be 
a parent of the main one, and not independent, so it's always active.

[Setting Windows to point-to-type is a Bad idea: lots of UX things break].

Someone mentioned the undesirability for windows to be topmost including 
other app's windows. In Win32, a child window of an app window - 
whatever it looks like - that is topmost is always topmost just of the 
child windows of that app. The app window has it's own z-order of all 
app windows, so a "topmost" child can be hidden by other apps.

Ruth

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