[Bf-taskforce25] [Bf-blender-cvs] SVN commit: /data/svn/bf-blender [17906] branches/blender2.5/blender/source /blender: 2.5

[Matt Ebb]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 2:38 AM, Ton Roosendaal <ton at blender.org> wrote:

> - Added this confirm call for most of the keys you'd expect it for.
>  (user settings, delete marker, rip area, split region, etc).

Good to see the functionality back, but I think this is something that
needs further thought, too.

IMO there's far too many of these popups scattered throughout Blender
and it can get quite annoying when you're using it a lot, with way too
much clicking needed. I think much of it is historical, from before
when Blender didn't have undo, it nagged about everything, since if
you did make a mistake, you were screwed. Nowadays it's different, and
we shouldn't have to worry about Blender constantly asking "are you
sure? are you sure? are you sure?" for *simple procedures*.

I think a good guideline for these confirmations can be to err on the
side of no popups:
* For things that are easily reverted (either with undo or by a simple
click or two) -> no confirmation.
* For anything that can't be undone (like ripping an area out,
perhaps) -> confirmation
* For anything that can involve loss of data (like closing a file
without saving) -> confirmation

Under this guideline, the ones added in the last commit would be:
User settings -> confirm (overwriting old data)
Delete marker -> don't confirm (easy to undo)
Rip area -> confirm (can't undo)
Split region -> not sure, will this be undoable?

The other thing to note is that these confirmations should *only* show
when accessing tools from hotkeys. Not to mention using operators in
macros, but the current situation now when they show from menus as
well is very annoying, and unintuitive. While it can help to have some
confirmations for hotkeys (since hotkeys can be accidentally bumped
quite easily) it's very different for menus - you've already navigated
to the right spot and clicked. Having to click again in exactly the
same spot is very redundant.

But not only this, combined with the way Blender's confirmations
disappear when the mouse moves away (which is usually really nice),
having confirmations on menus can cause real problems, when users
expect that they've chosen the menu option, then move the mouse away,
but the confirmation was actually cancelled in a split second.

This has actually caused big problems for us at the studio - here's
the real world example that actually happened, and it's happened for
two different people, my boss and another experienced animator that we
brought in here to train with Blender. On separate occasions, they'd
both experienced loss of work and they couldn't understand why. One of
them would be working for a period of hours, opening up new files,
saving all the while through, then at the end of the day, he'd save,
quit Blender and go home. Then the next day, he went to open up his
old file, and all the work he'd done was gone (which is very bad, that
was paid hours on real deadlines!). I searched around on the server,
and couldn't figure out what was going on.

It was only then when I was watching him save the file, that I noticed
what was happening. He'd choose File->Save from the menu, and then
move the mouse pointer away to continue working, not noticing that in
a split second there was another confirmation popup that flashed away.
Of course this is expected, in just about every other application
known to man, it doesn't confirm on a simple Save command, only on a
Save As, and those confirmations don't disappear when you move the
mouse a few pixels away. So all the time they thought they were
saving, nothing was happening at all, then next time they opened a new
file, the work was gone.

So in short, this needs to be controlled somehow so that we *don't*
get these extra confirmations when using menus to launch operators :)

cheers

Matt