IMOHO, the single biggest problem for first time users is that they don't get it at all. So from this perspective I think we should make the opening screen as simple as possible. What we have now can be left as the default but then we can add a new one called something like beginner. It would open with everything gone but for the edit screen with a default monkey or cube (I would pick the monkey because it is the blender icon and is good adverting and a more exciting first render plus you have somewhere to go with it like painting it or animating it.)
For first time users blender would open with a screen that has a good picture like now but also some basic directions like right click to select and R for rotate, S for scale and G for grab f12 to render and E to extrude. Escape to drop what you are doing. Or something like this, KISS. This would be the beginner mode. Normal users could turn off this mode in the preferences and have our current normal Blender settings. I think this would go a long way towards keeping first time users. I would also not be against have a 3 point lighting on the monkey and a ground plane so that the first render looks really good. I think this would really help sell Blender to new young users. Keys: 1 Easy to use. 2 Makes a really cool first picture. For normal users I would also turn on by default rotate around selected and new object enter edit mode. How often do you add an object and not edit it? Only problem I can see is that newbies would then keep adding in edit mode and that will lead to questions about how to split meshes out of one object. -- Douglas E Knapp Creative Commons Film Group, Helping people make open source movies with open source software! http://douglas.bespin.org/CommonsFilmGroup/phpBB3/index.php Massage in Gelsenkirchen-Buer: http://douglas.bespin.org/tcm/ztab1.htm Please link to me and trade links with me! Open Source Sci-Fi mmoRPG Game project. http://sf-journey-creations.wikispot.org/Front_Page http://code.google.com/p/perspectiveproject/ _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list Bf-committers@blender.org http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers