Hi Michael, everybody. Not had much time on MoI for a while but been following the beta threads. Good stuff so far.


However, I think I'm with George here on this one. Though maybe confusing rather than complicated. So, I am not really convinced by this concept. Some thoughts for your consideration:

>>#4 is a swatch to show the current style visually.

Not sure why we need this? The current style is the one the object is displaying in the view port which we can already see.


>>For example with a circle it would list the center of the circle and its radius and let you change those values.

I would really like to see this in the panel not buried in a dialog. I believe that size and position is one of the things a properties panel should show at a glance.


>>Then #5 Tools will drop out a big menu, probably with just lines of text on it instead of icons and it will have a whole bunch of
>>somewhat more "advanced" tools on it that can be applied to the selected object. I think this menu will be where I'll be able to add many
>>commands such as Rebuild, Simplify lines & arcs, etc... This one probably won't be ready for a while longer.

This worries me a bit. Unless I am not understanding this you seem to be saying that you will hide these tools away in properties. I think this should be separate from properties perhaps in an advanced tools panel. Hiding advanced editing away in here doesn't, IMHO, match the clean and obvious way the rest of your UI works.


For the object properties I am also concerned with the idea that this appears and disappears every time I select/deselect something and disappears again when a command is run. I really want to be able to see properties update as I'm editing, not have them disappear as soon as a command is run. Skellos comments in the previous post also apply here. In properties I was expecting:

Object Type - group, line, solid, etc
Object name
Colour
Size x, y, z
Position x, y, z

I was also hoping for each of these to be editable in the properties panel directly not with another pop-up box that needs to be okayed. So you can type in the name of the style if you know it. If not, or you want to create a new style, click the style manager button. For numbers the current 'popup-calculator/type in the number' system seems appropriate here too.

Here's my humble suggestion for a simple properties panel:





As I said earlier, I believe the advanced editing tools would be better placed separate from the properties.

Sorry for the long post, I was going to say this is my tuppence worth - but it ended up more than that :-)