Hi Danny,

> Yeah, that's all fine now and for a large displays but
> as this grows it will start to collapse the other tools and
> the ping-pong effect will still be inevitable, unless I'm
> missing something

The inline mode is limited to only grow up to a max of 40% of the height of the side pane, after which point it gets a scroll bar inside of it.

You can adjust the max percentage height in moi.ini .

But if you want something of full height that you plan to just open and close all the time (like you seemed to be describing with the vertical tabs stuff), then the "adjacent" mode where it opens up along side is pretty effectively the same kind of thing, really.

I mean in the one that you showed you have to switch back to "modeling" mode to get back to all the modeling tools, I don't see how switching off the adjacent full pane is really much different than that. If you are going to switch it off after you use it why would it make any difference if it temporarily squishes your viewports in? When you close it the viewports will be unsquished with the same end result at that point as what you were showing.

> what's going to happen when the communication tools
> come to MoI and all the other future tools for V3,4 & 5,
> where are you going to stick them ?

They are going to be more palettes in the side pane, collapsed by default. If you go to expand one and there is not enough room for it, one of the other open palettes will collapse (this happens currently if you shrink your window down to a small size for example).

I don't expect for this to be a big problem because many of those tools like dimensions, rendering, etc... are not going to be things that you tend to do rapid ping-pong style use (in a sequence of just a few minutes or seconds I mean) with the other modeling tools.

I prototyped this all early on in the UI design of MoI... The initial designs that I worked on had a lot more tabs with more stuff in them to make sure this kind of expansion was going to be incorporated into the design.

It is possible that in the future if something needs a whole lot of space and is more of a dedicated task, that I could still want to do a kind of "full panel switching" mechanism. It is something that I have thought about before, but I ruled it out for the browser because I expect it to be used in more combination while doing general modeling rather than as an exclusive task by itself.


> Anyhow, I'm sure what ever you come up with will work
> and we will wait in anticipation for the next beta :)

I'm certain that it will not be perfect! But it should also definitely be better than what I have now for this kind of stuff which is basically nothing, right? :)

- Michael