Hi Martin, the thing is MoI is in beta for version 3.0 , not version 1.0 - the stuff that you're referring to here has been a fundamental part of the UI since the very first pre-1.0 beta quite a while ago (I guess about 6 years ago now for the first public release). So that is indeed a buttoned up area and has been for quite some time.

I don't doubt that you're having some problems with the UI - different people can have all kinds of different UI preferences and I absolutely realize that MoI's UI structure may not be a perfect fit for every single person out there. There does not exist any single UI that works absolutely optimally for every single person, different people can have pretty different preferences in what they want to use.

I guess all I can tell you is that making the UI very easily browsed was definitely an important consideration in the fundamental UI design of MoI, that's why it's kept sparse and with particularly large buttons and with text labels everywhere. I guess despite these parts of the design it's just not working for you though.

This area though is what I'd consider to be a mature and finished area of the product, and it's not a particular area that I'm experimenting with now.


It's difficult in general to get a good and stable behaving interface that has too many large pieces opening and closing simply by mouse-over movement alone like you're asking about, that's just so far off of the overall established UI design of MoI that I can't see setting up anything for that, sorry.

Since this is such a fundamental area of MoI's UI, if it's not working for you I think I'd mainly suggest that MoI just isn't suited for your particular needs and you'll instead want something with a more conventional UI, like something that only uses regular pull-down menus or something like that. I personally find those to be quite a bit slower than MoI's approach, because although it's highly consistent you're also consistently needing to do more actions to do anything at all since you have to go open the menu each time you want to do anything...

MoI's overall UI design philosophy does indeed sacrifice consistency to some extent, since it does not guarantee that every single button in the entire UI is always fixed into one single place in every circumstance. It's an intentional part of the overall design that this is not the overall goal of what the UI is trying to do, so if you absolutely need that 100% fixed position consistency I just don't think that MoI's design is going to deliver what you need.

I've already made the decision quite a long time ago to allow flexibility in the UI for position and instead focus on other kinds of qualities, with more of a hybrid toolbar/menu kind of combination approach. There's still some hidden things (other tabs that are not currently active), but also once you activate a tab you then get its contents persistently available and accessible with just one single click after that, that's the value that MoI's system delivers with the price being that fixed location consistency not being present.

- Michael