Hi Thomas, thanks for the feedback!

> I'm not sure if you need to introduce new elements at all.

Well, those are some new controls that have some different behavior than previous elements. So having a look that is in the same general theme but slightly different is actually something I consider to be a positive thing - things that work a little differently but look exactly identical tends to cause problems. A lot of people will assume that things that look identical should behave in an identical fashion as well.

The main issue is when the browser is in "inside" mode, where the browser is another palette located inside the side pane with the other tools such as Construct, Draw curve, etc... In this mode, the browser sections are child elements inside of the "Scene browser" palette, and clicking on the "Scene browser" palette header hides or shows the entire browser palette, while clicking on one of those child sections only expands that sub-section.

If there was no "inside" mode, and only an "adjacent" mode, then I would have very likely have done it right along the lines of what you are showing.

But there is an "inside" mode to consider as well.


> First I created a header for the Scene Browser (without a + sign)
> that would be collapsible like the other toolboxes to be consistent
> there.

It looks like you are talking about a collapsible title for the "adjacent" mode there?

But what purpose would be served by collapsing that?

When collapsed you would then have a panel that was nothing but empty space inside of it, I don't really see what would be the gain from having that... If there is no purpose for something, it can be nice to just not have it - and there are actually benefits to having less UI, for example having that header means that there is not as much space for the actual browser items, there would be something like one less item able to be shown before getting a scroll bar.

In the future at some point I may be able to have some purpose to have a title section there, like 2 different panel options to switch between (like Browser / History), so it is something that may be good to add in the future, but only when it actually serves a useful purpose.

When in "inside" mode, there is a title there because it may be useful to collapse the browser there since it is sharing space in the side pane with other palettes in that mode.


> <..> works for me and fits in pretty well with the rest of the GUI IMHO ;-)

It does work well for the "adjacent" mode like you are showing - I'm pretty sure that if that was the only way, that I would like to set it up like that.

But with "inside" mode, having the child sections look the same as the parent one is not good - they look too much like they are siblings on some kind of equivalent level rather than the palette being the parent and the sections being children and distinct from the palette header.


> I also wasn't too hot on the light blue header color (again more
> a consistency thing).

Yup - again too much identical consistency between the parent header and the child sections in "inside" mode is a bad thing - that's the reason for the intentional difference there.


> Also having some basic "file-like operations" in the right
> mouse menu would be interesting (copy, paste, delete...).

Actually, right-click actions are already filled up - right-click on an eye will do an "isolate" where it shows only that item and hides others, right-click on a style swatch will set it as the active style, and right-click on an item's text will do an "isolate selection" which will select just that item and deselect others.

So making right-click put up a menu would mean sacrificing some of this other existing functionality.

But in the future I do want to make a drop-down menu, probably with a drop-down box that appears on the right-hand side of the item, which you would left-click to pop out.

That will probably be fine to put in a few frequently used operations on that menu, but I don't think that will be happen for v2 though, probably that one will have to wait for a bit longer.


Thanks very much for the ideas and the image tests!

- Michael