I volunteer for this UI business but of course it's up to the existing devs.
As far as William Raynish's blog post goes, yes. Oh my god. Yes. I'm going to draw from that a lot as I work on this. I think I can implement many things he suggested. On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 9:14 AM, Knapp <magick.c...@gmail.com> wrote: > > * I would like to see a right click menu that provides copy and paste > when > > right clicking text areas. > > Currently ctrl v,c and (x?) > I know I know but it's good to provide another method. You clicked it by mistake and do NOT want to save. I have done this many > times. > Having a prompt does not solve this problem. If there's a prompt then accepting the prompt becomes an automatic part of the user's muscle memory. Then the user has saved when they don't want to and bam, same problem. Unless you mean, the user was trying to Ctrl-D instead or something? There's better ways to solve this problem. Incremental saves. Undos. Version control. Saving is such a universal feature that Blender should confirm to the norm, which is to only produce a popup dialog if a file name has not been chosen. Yep, done that too but I have never lost my work due to Blenders > rather odd way of saving stuff. > Step 1. Open Blender Step 2. Modify the default cube somehow. Move it around for instance. Do not save. Step 3. Click the window's X button. This closes Blender without asking to save changes. I'm on Windows so perhaps this behavior does not appear on other platforms. It's unacceptable. I have tried a lot of ways and totally disagree. The outliner keeps > you from getting lost ... > You need > the properties all the time, what would you do with them? ... > The time line is small and does not take up much space and is > needed any time you do animation or anything else with time like > particles. > You need properties and scene view and timeline to do anything of substance, of course. That doesn't mean that these things should be part of Blender's default view. The point of the default view is new user experience. I realize that nobody here is a new user, so nobody here necessarily wants things that are only good for new users. But I consider myself a new user advocate, and not so long ago, a new user. I think that Blender can change and add new functionality that doesn't stifle existing users while making it easy for new users to learn. I get the sense that many people disregard the new user experience in exchange for power and information, I think this is a mistake. There are many more people who do not use Blender than there are who use it. If you want to increase Blender's adoption, you need to start thinking about new users. New users are concerned about two things. 1. How do I control the camera? 2. How do I edit the mesh in the most basic way? That's it. They don't yet care about animation, rendering, properties, cameras, materials, anything. All they care about is learning how to make an object worth animating, rendering, etc. Look at any tutorials, the first thing they go over is camera controls, the second thing is basic mesh editing. If you make these first steps confusing or difficult then they will abandon Blender as junk. Here are the steps a new user must go through to start editing a mesh. (Note: Yes all of this information is available through tutorials, but people don't like watching tutorials, especially if they're already familiar with other tools. Everything needed to operate Blender at its most basic level should be learnable through Blender itself.) 1. Change to edit mode. A new user doesn't know that this is necessary to edit a mesh. A new user doesn't know that the mesh can't be edited in object mode. The new user must look it up. It's not in a menu. It's in a dropdown labeled "Object Mode" - the user may not know what that means, or that it's a dropdown, or that clicking it allows mode changes. "Edit Mode" in that dropdown isn't visible unless the user clicks something. 2. Choose an edit type. The new user doesn't know how to do this. There are three buttons on the button bar that do this but they are buried in other crap and not obvious. This is also not available in a menu. 3. Select something in the mesh to edit. This is a problem since the user will try to left click and select is right click. It may not even occur to some people to try right click. It's really damn frustrating not to be able to select things. 4. Choose whether to Grab, Rotate, Scale. The user does not know these shortcut keys exist. The buttons on the toolbar that provide Maya style manipulators are not obvious, and not the recommended way of operating Blender. By now many people have quit. Even if they persevere, Blender has many other similar interface problems. Here's what I would like to see: 1. Change to edit mode. There is a larger button on screen that does this directly from Object mode. In fact, there should be four, one for Vertex, Edge, and Face, and one to return to Object. They are by default present until specifically hidden by the user. 2. Select something to edit. Using left click like everything else does. Nobody cares that right click is superior - they already closed Blender because how the hell do you select things? Really I have no idea how right click select has persisted this long. 3. Choose whether to Grab, Rotate, Scale. Just like edit modes, there are buttons on the screen that do this. They can be hidden later of course, for when the user learns the advanced keystrokes. So like this: http://i.imgur.com/ErmDd.png Simple. Clean. A great first impression. I did it before I saw Raynish's version, but I love his too: http://goo.gl/xUsfW (PS the last link broke because the mailing list added a space. Here it is on its own line: http://i41.tinypic.com/8yuet5.png Sorry :P) Anything that the new user doesn't need to accomplish his first goal should be hidden until it's needed. Once the user needs to assign a material or find something in the outliner, they can just open one. The method of doing so can be obvious or tucked away in a menu somewhere. ("Open Properties") Once they want to animate it's easy to drag out a timeline. In the meantime, showing too much on the screen is just information overload, and will confuse new users. Best of luck, you are fighting a lot of sticks in the mud, including me. :-) > Aha! At least you admit it! :) That's okay though, I'm not trying to get these changes for you. You can keep using Blender the way you like it. I'm doing these changes for new users like myself and a lot of people I know who can't use Blender because of all these problems. The standard reaction from existing Blender users is "No don't change it!" I think it should be, "Sounds great! Just make sure we can do it the old way too." Cool. Answer me this: Did I say a single thing in this email that can be done to help new users that must change how existing users use Blender? No, I didn't. Anything can be made an option, or a basic/advanced feature. Nothing I have said is mutually exclusive with current practices. Buttons on the screen can be hidden or ignored. A menu option to change between preset viewport configurations can offer Simple, Standard, 3-view, 4-view, etc. Keys can be rebound, etc. Since we can keep existing user functionality and still make it easier for new users, then that's what we should do. -- Jorge "Vino" Rodriguez jo...@lunarworkshop.com twitter: VinoBS 919.757.3066 _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list Bf-committers@blender.org http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers