Hi, Michael,

You raise a good point - I hadn't really scaled the thing up to include a lot of items. And I agree that other programs keep things in columns, so I withdraw that suggestion :-)

However, my main concern is that there is no visual connection between the icon and the item. Photoshop, Fireworks and Hexagon have a grid type visual system to keep things together. Modo and Silo use a highlight.

The icons in your browser are kind of floating in mid air, they don't really have a visual relationship with the item. This makes it hard to quickly identify which eye to click. With even more nesting and items the distance between the eye and the item will be even greater and compound the problem. If you add further controls, such as locking could make things worse.

I like the highlighting bar best, looks neater and less cluttered (you may already have thought of this, just not in the screen shots)



As an aside, I did notice that modo doesn't use the connector lines - and I can't say that I have missed them :-)