Hi Phil,

> PS, Michael, you are correct in that the Blender file dialog
> box is AWFUL! It's so cluttered. Hopefully it will continue
> to evolve and improve as 2.5 is only in Alpha 0 status.

It's just generally a problem to use a totally custom file dialog at all - that's one area where it really makes sense to use the platform specific UI.

If you know a place to put Blender requests, maybe you could post a suggestion for that. I think it would remove a pretty major stumbling block for brand new users.

I know that Blender wants to have a cross-platform overall UI that works the same on different platforms and that is fine in general but the file dialog should be an exception to that.

They must already have some platform specific stuff in there anyway since on Windows there seems to be some shortcuts to stuff like "My Documents", which is a Windows specific thing, why not just use the whole standard dialog (which is very easy to call) ?

It's not just about ease of use either, there are things like shell extensions that may be adding additional file access functionality which won't be functioning in a totally custom replacement dialog.

- Michael