Hi Diego,

> Check out this article and website on "Sketching and
> Composing Widgets for 3D Manipulation"

Very interesting!

But these systems that use a variety of special gestures seem fairly difficult to learn initially - for example most people would just not intuitively know to make a "pigtail" gesture to turn the manipulator into a special mode.

There seems to be many special gestures like that in that system - use a double line for one thing, pigtail for another, pigtail with a longer stem for another, L shaped for another.... It's something that would need a level of training and time spent learning how it would work before it would be possible for someone to use it at all. I think it is hard to justify putting something basic like scaling and rotating tools into that kind of situation where nobody just sitting down at the software for the first time would even have a chance at knowing how to use it without doing some training courses.

MoI's edit frame in contrast looks like this:




There's just much more chance with this system that someone is going to know to drag on the corners of the frame to scale, and drag on the rotation one to rotate. There is some additional functionality to be learned such as having additional options when you click on one rather than drag on one, but the very basic stuff is handled in a very intuitive way which is good.

Having intuitive operation really helps people that need to use multiple programs, where they may not have a whole lot of time to learn some specialized UI gesture scheme that is very specific to just one program.

- Michael