Hi Tony, thanks very much for your feedback and illustrations!

Your UI looks very clean as you have presented it, but I think it will be tough to put in more real-world kind of values into the tight spaces that you've got there.

Numeric values in MoI's UI are specified by default to 2 decimal places of accuracy.

You've currently listed coordinates like 100,226,27 in there - it would certainly be nice if coordinates were always as nice and compact as that!

But a control like that will really need to be able to handle coordinates more like this: 1002.53,225.23,10.6 then with more digits they get hard to read without a space in there, so probably more like: 1002.53, 225.23, 10.6 . Really I don't think it is feasible to have a proper full point control jammed into just half the width of the side pane, I think a point control is going to need to take up a whole line by itself.

Additionally there will probably be some kinds of objects which have different properties that don't map directly to a "size". Like for example an arc could possibly have a radius, start angle, and end angle values. It is probably fine to start with just a radius, but it would be good for the property editor to be set up with the idea of being able to expand to handle more kinds of properties.

Another example - for just a line it would probably be good to have start point, end point, length, and angle in the plane.


Some replies to your comments:

re: Swatch
> Not sure why we need this? The current style is the one the
> object is displaying in the view port which we can already see.

Yeah it is not a truly necessary thing, but it will probably match well with the list of styles that are shown in the drop-down, I think that style picker thing will have a set of swatches with names under them, so having the name + swatch bubble up to the top after you pick it will match nicely.

Also I don't think that the object will always be displayed as you mention here - using the browser panel I think it will be possible to select an object that is currently hidden and edit its properties.

At first the names and swatches will be kind of duplicated, like "Red <red swatch>", but as you add your own custom styles you may want to use the name for a different kind of description, more like: "Outer hull <swatch>". I think having the name + swatch there will could make it a bit more comfortable to use other kinds of names for the styles.


> I would really like to see this in the panel not buried in
> a dialog. I believe that size and position is one of the
> things a properties panel should show at a glance.

For me, just looking at the object on the screen in relation to the grid gives me a good enough general idea of its size... I guess that's why I don't really understand why you would need this always at the top level.

It's unfortunately very difficult to jam a lot of information into a tight area.

One benefit of moving it to a secondary dialog is that I won't need to skimp at all on the information, I'll be able to provide a lot of details there.

I was originally going to have this on the top level but it just does not end up really being compact enough and not very extensible.... That's basically what drove me to push it off to a secondary thing.


> Hiding advanced editing away in here doesn't, IMHO, match
> the clean and obvious way the rest of your UI works.

It's definitely true that it doesn't match the rest of the UI.

But these things are also in a different category of use from the rest of the UI.

This will be a kind of "pressure release valve" UI where I can dump less frequently used tools.

It is not very good to have specialized or less frequently used tools incorporated into the same UI as the more heavily used ones... That leads to clutter and a reduction in the effectiveness of the frequently used tools.

I need to have a secondary mechanism for launching commands that does not kind of pollute the more standard, mainline tools.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not exactly thrilled at putting them there, but I definitely need a kind of auxiliary area to hold a large list of specialized commands. So I need to have a launching point for that somewhere.


> I really want to be able to see properties update as
> I'm editing, not have them disappear as soon as a
> command is run.

That would be cool... But hiding UI and re-using existing space is really needed to keep the UI streamlined and easy to use. There are some sacrifices that have to be made that go along with that though.


Thanks very much for the ideas and feedback! It is definitely useful to get other viewpoints.

- Michael