Hi Paul,

> The answer is to make a work space that is customizable,
> Sketchup is a very very good example of this, but I would
> agree that other things should have a higher priority, groups
> and layers for example!

Yeah easier customization would definitely help with that.

But it tends to be a difficult area to implement especially when the UI is different than the kind of "standard toolbar UI".

Early on in MoI's development I had to make a decision whether to spend a lot of time working on UI drag/drop type customization, or instead to work on developing just a single UI that was as good as I could make it, and I chose the latter. I would definitely make the same decision again. If I had forever to develop it, it would have been possible to do both, but my time is limited so I have to be careful which big projects I undertake. Now that the UI is really well defined it will probably help to make it more feasible to do a more targeted type of customization than it would have been trying to focus on customization earlier in MoI's lifetime.

Customization actually tends to be an area used by a fairly smallish number of users. For example in Microsoft Office, after gathering a substantial amount of data on how people use Office, they found out that less than 2% of Office sessions ran with any kind of customized UI:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/06/27/648269.aspx
That's one reason that made it possible for them to shift to a much different UI model in Office 2007 which actually has a lot in common with MoI, including actually losing a lot of customization type functions.


> I have the impression that you dont want to use right
> click menus but I think they will be almost essential to
> keep the organisation of palettes simple, no?

I think that I will be adding some right-clicks in some strategic areas for advanced commands. But it tends to make things pretty hidden so I try to avoid it a lot for basic functions.

In the future as I add more functions the plan is to mainly add new palettes, but that will be collapsed by default. To see what this will look like you can actually collapse a palette currently by clicking on its tab again after it is already active.

So there will be tabs like "Render", "Dim", "Analyze", etc... below the current palettes but with them being collapsed by default they won't add hardly any complexity to the top level UI.

- Michael