Hi Pilou, I can understand why he wants it that way, but it is not practical for me to do that by default for several reasons.

First, the text is so small for many of the icons on the bottom as to be unreadable. For example, I need to approach very close to the screen to read the text for "separate" in that screen.

For text to be useful it has to be of a certain legible size. That means that the buttons need to be generally fairly larger than what he has shown in this example.

Larger buttons also require more space - to have legible button text means that the number of buttons that he shows here would not fit on a 1280x1024 screen (let alone a 1024x768 one).

User interface design is a very tricky thing. I would be a lot more free to do a design like this if made MoI only run on a 1600x1200 resolution screen, but there are a lot of people that don't have that high of a screen resolution. I want MoI to work well for people who also have lower resolution screens instead of only being a specialized tool that requires specific hardware.


The other major problem is scalability. By which I mean the ability to add more functionality in the future. If I completely fill up the screen with all available tools now, then that makes it difficult for me to add functionality in the future because there would be nowhere to put it! One big reason for the current tabbed design is that it includes scalability built in, since not all the tools are displayed simultaneously. This will make it easier for me to add additional functionality in the future.


At some point in the future I would like to make the UI more easily configurable so that you could have some control over it. However, I decided for V1 to put my effort into making an easy to use default UI instead of putting a lot of effort into making it easily customizable (by drag/drop, etc... - it is actually possible to modify it right now if you editing the HTML UI code).


If I had the luxury of designing the UI for a specific resolution and without the need for future expansion, the it would be possible to do as he suggests. But these are important limitations that I have had to work within.

A lot of UI design is about compromise, because if you optimize a whole lot for just one person, it can be detrimental to a large number of other people.

I appreciate the suggestion though!

- Michael