[Bf-taskforce25] New tools mockups

[William Reynish]

Hi all,

One of the main large hurdles left for 2.5 is the tools system. How  
the tools work, and how to present them in the UI.

We've talked before about adding a 'Tools' subregion within the 3d  
view for common 3d tools, and putting them in there. It'd be nice if  
there was some way of customizing the contents of this, however.  
Perhaps users can press a special key while using the menus to make an  
operator a 'favorite' or a discreet '+' icon within the tools pane can  
give a menu full of operators.

http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/tools_region.png

One of the questions is also what to do with active tools that aren't  
in that list. And what if the tools pane is hidden? Where do we then  
tweak the tool settings? After all, these are vital options, and are  
needed for everything from adding objects to subdividing. One idea is  
to then have a transparent panel within the 3d view that presents the  
settings for tweaking the current tool, like so:

http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/tools_collapsed.png

Since I love slick feedback, it'd be lovely (and useful) to have these  
sub-regions slide in and out gracefully:

http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/tools_anim.mov

;)

Slightly related to tools and operators is also presenting a sort of  
history stack of all operators, where things can be repeated and made  
into macros. To avoid adding too many new view types, this can  
probably nicely go into the same view as the new integrated Console  
View:

http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/console_view.png

Also here, you could perhaps tweak the last operator used in any view  
- could be useful for non-3d tools, like doing stuff in the Graph  
Editor, perhaps? Or does that even make sense? Come to think of it, I  
think only 3d tools have additional settings...

Cheers,

-William