Here at Carbine, users like the MMB to repeat a menu command. It's popular. They're not as fond of tear off menus. They don't hate tear off menus, but given the choice they'll use a custom key as 1st option, custom toolbar as 2nd option, and tear off menu as last option. The issue being that tear off menus don't allow for customized menus. You only get the existing menu structure in a different place.
What users want is clutter free and minimal effort to execute commands or a series of commands. Tear off menus are good for situations where the entire menu is a custom menu of commands like a custom toolbar would be, and the commands in that menu are very closely related to the task at hand. If the menu is full of built-in commands, they're less liked because usually the user only cares about one or two tools in the menu but is stuck having to take all of them as part of the package deal resulting in clutter. For example, go to the property menu and you have entries for visibility, display, etc..., but also a lot of unrelated tools such as rendermap or gator. It's a very tall menu but the user only wants 3 or 4 items out of 30. If tear off menus allowed individual items to be torn off and merged into a toolbar, then that would be ideal. Implementing MMB to repeat a command in a menu would be a popular move. Matt -----Original Message----- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2014 11:51 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: humanize Maya, SOFT top 5 On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 7:40 AM, Martin Yara <furik...@gmail.com> wrote: > While I like this MMB repeat function, but I don't see how it could be > implemented in Maya without having to heavily change its interface. I think technically MMB could possibly be implemented in Maya's menu (although perhaps not on OSX), but I'm not 50% sure that this is a true problem. In Sofitmage, we structured some menus knowing that you would be doing MMB on those big buttons to repeat commands burried in there two levels deep. (More so in Softimage 3D, for example to set keys, but anyway) But in Maya, you'll be interacting with the software differently, including using marking menus, hotkeys, and hotbox. In the XSI viewport, you can MMB to toggle between the two last modes, for example wireframe and textured, but that's not a 'repeat last command', it's a special case for that button. I'm not opposing MMB, but I'm not totally sold on whether this is essential and not simply a legacy user / muscle memory thing. Don't forget also tear off menus as a way to repeat commands quickly. we did add to Maya the ability to keep a menu open to do check several checkmarks like in XSI; in Maya in on the CTRL key
