V2 beta Apr-12-2009 available now
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 From:  igor
2570.176 In reply to 2570.175 
Michael,

Thank you for quick reply!

I do not use beta - v1.1 trial, but i have read all your posts concerning and explaining the new obj management interface.

In SketchUp the layers palette is much of a redundant tool and used very occasionally. For obj management needs we employ outliner exclusively... Not only because it is more convenient but because layers have some nasty issues if you try to use them as obj management.. I think the layers palette only exists there for imports from CAD..

As a note I actually used to design application interfaces in the past so I usually pay attention to how they are implemented. MoI, so far as, I said, has a superior interface.. Although there's always room for improvement ))

Also I'm impressed with the convenient API implementation.. javascript comes in very handy (no need to learn ruby, actionscript lisp or any other stuff BUT have searched and couldn't find any sort of help on it? (just commands but they do not provide any systematic description..)

Another major point is that the interface also exposed to a user (not everything but enough to play with!!! less work hopefully for you in the future.. very good decision.. thank you!

re interface:

It might be useful to be able to hide some of the tabs as in sketchup (styles or types or objects - especially styles for me)) as they will eat up space if I use inline mode (i have 1200 px ver resolution and am going to use this mode most of the time) but it is not urgent - in v04 shall be OK.

What also may confuse new users (and confuse me a lot) is that there's a little inconsistency in highlighting tabs and buttons (eg Grid snap, Object snap) - these ones have orange highlight - which clearly indicates they are ON but the tabs on the right have a different highlight to show they are ON (actually every time I click I stumble over those which is ON? white or light blue? )) I'd stick with orange - same as office and Max (although I know I can tweak it myself, hopefully).

Other interface improvement I'd suggest is making clear which numbers stand for X, Y, Z coord. as they are in the same box.. (I know it was designed to serve as a command line as well - so maybe just sort of a prefix for a number?

re obj management:

There's definitely some reasons for the current layout I admit, so my comments here are from a mesh modeler viewpoint (I haven't been modeling too much nurbs) but what I would first have implemented is just two tabs - objects (as in sketchup - show grouped items and components), and types (types are modeling aids like those in max if understood correctly?) not sure if it is the best solution - Max people kept complaining that it makes them click too much (rhino as I understand was trying to reduce clicks with pop-ups) but nevertheless I highly welcome all this improvements..

And thank you for taking time to read all this, hopefully all this can help make MoI more productive..

regards,
I
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 From:  Michael Gibson
2570.177 In reply to 2570.176 
Hi Igor,

> Also I'm impressed with the convenient API implementation..
> javascript comes in very handy (no need to learn ruby,
> actionscript lisp or any other stuff BUT have searched and
> couldn't find any sort of help on it?

No, there is not currently any organized help file for the scripting interface.

Unfortunately producing documentation is not really a very easy task, it tends to take quite a bit of time to do it.

If I were to focus on producing documentation for the scripting interface stuff, that would mean taking time away from other areas of more "typical end user" type work areas such as implementing the browser, making meshing multi-core enabled, etc... There are just too many basic bread-and-butter features that are taking priority still.

Since I am the only person working on MoI, I kind of have to be careful with my priorities. Areas that require a lot of time-consuming work to finish and don't typically impact a large number of people just need to have a lower priority over things that are more widely used.

Anyway, that's why it hasn't been a high priority yet to work on the scripting documention.

But I do want to work on some scripting documentation at some point in the future though!


A few people have learned it just by studying the existing examples, if you want to dig into that, there is a link to the moi.idl file here: http://moi3d.com/wiki/Scripting and there are several examples of scripts and custom commands that some others have created here: http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/



> It might be useful to be able to hide some of the tabs as in
> sketchup (styles or types or objects - especially styles for me))
> as they will eat up space if I use inline mode

Actually it already works to collapse those entries down, for example clicking on "Styles" will either expand or collapse that entire section. When collapsed each of those sections becomes compact, only taking up a single line.

Or do you mean some way to hide that entry entirely rather than collapsing it? That's quite a bit more tricky because of course then there also needs to be some way to show it again..


> I'd stick with orange - same as office and Max (although I
> know I can tweak it myself, hopefully).

Those "orange" ones and the palette tabs are actually different controls - the "Grid Snap", "Straight Snap", and "Object Snap" control a setting for snaps being on or off but do not directly make other UI appear or disappear. The tab controls have a much different action - they do not control an "invisible" setting and instead directly control the visibility of a section of the UI.

Since these controls do some different things, it is actually good for them to have a somewhat different appearance between them.

This is really pretty standard actually... For example you mentioned Office. If you check out Word 2007, you should see that the tab control for the Ribbon which controls visibility of chunks of UI is not the same color as a state button such as the Bold button. There the Bold button is orange when "on" but the active tab is not orange.


> Other interface improvement I'd suggest is making clear
> which numbers stand for X, Y, Z coord. as they are in the
> same box.. (I know it was designed to serve as a command
> line as well - so maybe just sort of a prefix for a number?

That would look fairly strange, it would kind of have an effect of cluttering things up since there would be numbers and labels all within the same input box.

I'm not really sure there would really be anything to gain - I mean the way it works is very simple - the first number is the X value, the second one is Y and the last one is Z... XYZ is such a traditional ordering for Cartesian coordinates that a label really isn't necessary here.

To have labels like you are talking about would pretty much require 3 separate controls to look normal (with a label followed by an input field), but that would eliminate quite a lot of functionality for instance being able to type in polar coordinates, relative coordinates, 2D coordinates without having to type in z, using 0 for a shortcut for 0,0,0 ... by having XYZ in one field it enables quite a lot of input functionality.

Another pretty big issue for this control is space - coordinates can sometimes have quite a few digits, and there isn't much room to hold them all there. Putting in additional labels would exacerbate this problem and result in fewer digits being able to be shown. It's also not particularly easy to just increase the size of the control to compensate because it nearly takes up all available space on a 1024x768 display already.


> types (types are modeling aids
> like those in max if understood correctly?)

Types are used for working on all entities of a certain object type, like "all curves", or "all solids". It's not unusual in NURBS modeling to end up with a bunch of construction curves hanging around after you've built a few things. So it can be handy to have a quick way to say "I want to hide all curves but leave all solids". This part probably doesn't apply so much to poly modeling.


> but what I would first have implemented is just two
> tabs - objects (as in sketchup - show grouped items
> and components),

That would leave out a couple of major areas that have been frequently requested.

One is to be able to assign materials to objects so that when you do a mesh export, you don't have to worry about material set-up later.

The other is to have an optional organization method that is compatible with layers for export to other CAD systems.

That's why there is a Styles section which is kind of a hybrid of these 2 areas.

If I left that section out, then the object organization tools would be missing some major sections of stuff that people have requested that it should be able to do...


I hope that explains some of the reasoning for the current designs, thanks for the feedback!

- Michael
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 From:  rhodesy
2570.178 
I'd agree with Michaels direction - when you get used to the browser system it really is a powerful way of organising your file and once it's finished and we also have instances im sure it will be one of the best systems out there. I use the 'types' filter all the time, it's great for letting you very quickly isolate elements. Also the right click feature on a style instantly isolates that style without having to manually switch everything else off - very handy and quick.

EDIT: Although it would be nice to add a new style from scratch rather than having to draw something then select it and then create a new style ;-)

EDITED: 7 May 2009 by RHODESY

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 From:  igor
2570.179 In reply to 2570.177 
Michael,

Thank you very much for your answers.. I start to feel a bit worried that I'm taking too much time off your work
Gonna try beta very soon though..

The only little point is the ms ribbon is very arguable interface for reference (some people refer to it as fundamentally wrong) and many people on ms & autodesk forums feel very sad about it... others don't upgrade at all.. (unlike 3ds people- who are relatively happy)

Here we have sort of a ribbon type as well but.. absolutely different in implementation - times and times better than that of MS and I really liked your point that core tools' icons mustn't move around (in some previous post).

From psychological part of the color theory - orange (yellow) and light blue & are opposite in their impact as a highlight. That's why white seems to be a highlighted state - not the light blue..

Love to hear you have instances here too..! need to check help on those (as they are what makes SketchUp so powerful..!!)

Regards
I
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 From:  Michael Gibson
2570.180 In reply to 2570.179 
Hi Igor,

> Love to hear you have instances here too..! need to check
> help on those (as they are what makes SketchUp so
> powerful..!!)

Actually MoI does not have instances currently, that is something that I want to add in the future at some point, sorry for the confusion!


> The only little point is the ms ribbon is very arguable
> interface for reference

In this case I was just referring to it because you previously wrote:
quote:
I'd stick with orange - same as office and Max

That's the part I was confused about - how can I be orange like office when office's tabs are not orange?


A discussion about the ribbon is certainly a whole different can of worms! :)

But there is certainly no doubt that the main concepts behind the ribbon are sound ideas, I mean the fundamental one is that unless your program is trivial you just can't have all the program's UI showing simultaneously, there has to be some way to switch chunks of it on or off.

MoI's UI is designed with much of the same fundamental ideas but with some different implementation. Early on I had tried doing just one big tabbed horizontal container, but it creates a rather excessive modality. That may not be bad if your workflow tends to spend a lot of time in one particular mode but if you need to bounce back and forth a bit between a couple of things it is good to have the possibility of having multiple tabs open simultaneously in smaller groups, which is what MoI's implementation does.

There is certainly a lot of "force everything into the ribbon" type stuff going on out there right now in the development world, sometimes with some bad side effects...

- Michael
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 From:  Michael Gibson
2570.181 In reply to 2570.179 
Hi Igor, one other note - if you'd like to change the way the tabs look, that is possible to do on your local copy by editing some PNG files that are in the \ui subfolder underneath MoI's main installation folder.

The images for those tabs are the ones named TabButtonBackground*.png .

There are a couple of different ones, for active/inactive left/center/right.

- Michael
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 From:  Marc (TELLIER)
2570.182 
Ribbon Ul uses vertical space when working space (monitors) tends to get more horizontal.

Marc
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 From:  -ash-
2570.183 In reply to 2570.182 
>> But there is certainly no doubt that the main concepts behind the ribbon are sound ideas, I mean the fundamental
>> one is that unless your program is trivial you just can't have all the program's UI showing simultaneously, there has
>> to be some way to switch chunks of it on or off.

That's what customizing toolbars was for. Didn't need a new fatter, less configurable thingy taking up more screen space.

>> Ribbon Ul uses vertical space when working space (monitors) tends to get more horizontal

Totally agree. MS seem to be loosing the plot with usability these days, IMHO. I feel a rant coming on so I'm quitting now.

Anyway even Bill isn't happy :-)

http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/25/2003-bill-gates-email-reveals-frustrations-with-windows-xp/

Regards
Tony

(aka HamSoles)

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 From:  Michael Gibson
2570.184 In reply to 2570.183 
Hi Tony,

> That's what customizing toolbars was for. Didn't need a new
> fatter, less configurable thingy <...>

They actually gathered the numbers on this - out of all Office sessions that they recorded, only fewer than 2% had any customization in the toolbars.

Then of those 2%, 85% of those only had customization of four or fewer commands. (http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/06/27/648269.aspx).

So the vast vast majority of their user base did not use toolbar customization like that at all.


I was still very surprised that they had the guts to switch to a much less customizable system though, because even that small percentage is a pretty large number of people since the overall user base for Office is so large.


> taking up more screen space.

Apparently not for most people. A good overview here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/577485.aspx


Anyway, it is a mixed bag, if you are in that percentage of people who liked to do heavy customziation then the new Office probably yanks away a lot of stuff that you relied on and therefore probably sucks for you. But it wasn't really feasible for them to hold the whole system "hostage" for only the needs of a small percentage. They consistently were finding that the top requested features were things that were already in there but that users could not find with the menu/toolbar system. That system was not originally designed to expand out to such a large number of things.


- Michael
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 From:  igor
2570.185 In reply to 2570.181 
Michael,

Just wanted to say thank you for being able to tweak color of the interface!!!

This openess is awsome!! Please keep it open! (this is one of the major factors why I wish to support your app in the forseeable future!!))

ps 1 and this is the color of interface (see below) I find myself much faster to orient in!

ps 2
As for the article on the ribbon - most comments followed were negative as a matter of fact..
The Ribbon marketing nowdays goes very much like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRtUv97YFco&feature=related
))

Regards
I
Image Attachments:
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 From:  Michael Gibson
2570.186 In reply to 2570.185 
Hi Igor, I'm glad that having the UI open to alteration is working well for you!


> As for the article on the ribbon - most comments followed
> were negative as a matter of fact..

I wouldn't assume too much by that - it tends to be the nature of online comments that people with negative comments are the ones who will tend to go out of their way to post the most...

When things are going well, people often don't go out of their way to make special note that things are going smoothly. That's just kind of the nature of things.

But certainly the Ribbon is not right for everybody - any kind of a change at all can easily have the possibility of being disruptive, sometimes it doesn't matter if the new thing is actually better or not, just that it has changed can cause problems and force some time to be spent learning new habits. That's why I was very surprised that they had the guts to make that substantial change to Office.

But their previous system was not really working out to continue to append more and more and more toolbars, it had pretty much grown to a critical mass overload. They had to do some kind of reset if they wanted to make the overall feature set of Office more presentable.

Otherwise if they just continued to just add more and more stuff to the old system the problem of non-expert users not being able to find the functionality they needed would continue to get worse and worse, and that was already at a very bad level in Office 2003.

- Michael
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 From:  -ash-
2570.187 In reply to 2570.186 
I am one of that 2% (as you know by my MoI tweaks :-) )

The trouble with Microsoft is they are removing the choice. You could have toolbars or not. Or as I did make one with my most used items. I absolutely hate it when they do that. They makes things too complicated in the first place then kill off the good bits trying to fix it. Ooops there goes the baby with the bath water again. Better get another baby.

The other problem is that a lot of companies then follow the way MS does things thinking it is the 'best' way. I am forced to use Office at work and we are still on 2003. Not looking forward to the time when they give me the new one.


Michael, a big thanks from me for allowing us users to tweak the MoI UI to suit our needs!

Regards
Tony

(aka HamSoles)

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 From:  Michael Gibson
2570.188 In reply to 2570.187 
Hi Tony,

> You could have toolbars or not.

Well, in _theory_ you could have toolbars or not, but in practice that adds a vast vast amount of work to have a complex system like Office with 2 completely different mechanisms to run it.

I know it is easy to assume that Microsoft has an unlimited number of resources and can do anything imaginable, but it does not really tend to work that way.

They probably just did not have enough available time or resources to have new functions in Office 2007 implemented with both an old toolbar system as well as the new ribbon system. The most likely breaking point would be just too many variables for the testing team to work with.

If they could have done it, it would certainly have solved the problem though.

- Michael
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 From:  igor
2570.189 In reply to 2570.188 
Hi Michael,

I see people like us not moving beyond 2003 ))) Me and other users have actually posted about ribbon a lot in other forums but I got a little weary. actually I could direct you to some really interesting stuff where it is accurately proved (and all the points you made earlier on re the ribbon are taken into account) that the ribbon will greatly disrupt user database in some app and speaking frankly if MoI ended up with horisontal office like ribbon i'd never consider to buy it.. but so far your UI is close to perfect! (and not only UI!) and hopefuly will not be altered much in the future, just gaining power internally.. although obj brousing is something which I tend to think could be sorted out further.. Is there any possibility for html based ui to make something similar to Visual Studio sliding in and out panels? (here for styles and objects.. ?)

Another question.. re simplifying use of MoI..
In Sketchup we operate planar faces 80% of the time (due to our specifics) and find ourselves push-pulling 85% of the time.. Is there any possibility in the future to implement Sketchup like Push-pull for nurbs planar surfaces? (honesly i dream about it!!)) it greatly simlifies interaction with objects and especially simple boolean operations. I understand that MoI is all about nurbs and curves, but in real practice we use rectangular shapes a lot and interaction with them (not in SU) is still cumbersome and not as much straightforward as possible.. hopefully

Regards,
Igor
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 From:  BurrMan
2570.190 In reply to 2570.189 
Uh Oh,
I feel the Moi vs. Sketchup timetrials coming on again! I think the last time it was:

Sketchup = 8-10 seconds
Moi= 3-4 seconds

What was that thread called?

Also Igor, you can get great benefit if you run the beta MoI. It is very stable (probably moreso than V1)
See the beginning of this thread.

fyi
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 From:  Michael Gibson
2570.191 In reply to 2570.189 
Hi Igor,

> Is there any possibility for html based ui to make
> something similar to Visual Studio sliding in and out
> panels? (here for styles and objects.. ?)

Actually, it is already HTML based, for example you can see the HTML for the browser pane by opening up the file BrowserPane.htm which is in the \ui subfolder inside of a MoI v2 installation.

But the browser is not static UI, it is populated dynamically by data that is usually unique to the currently open file. This kind of thing often tends to be harder to make customizable - static UI is much more easily customized.

If you have some specific wishes for the browser, it would be great to hear them!

So far I think the one you mentioned is to remove Styles entirely? But like I mentioned previously that one just is not feasible since it would eliminate a lot of frequently requested functions especially related to data-interop with other programs - for example having materials set up when exporting to OBJ, and having layers set up when exporting to Rhino. These are highly requested functions so eliminating them would not be good for many users.

Also there is hardly any gain for removing styles even for people who don't want to use it - it only takes up a single line in the browser when collapsed, so if you don't want to use it just keep it collapsed and it will stay out of your way.


> In Sketchup we operate planar faces 80% of the time (due
> to our specifics) and find ourselves push-pulling 85% of the
> time.. Is there any possibility in the future to implement
> Sketchup like Push-pull for nurbs planar surfaces?

There is an easily accomplished equivalent in MoI currently which is to just use Extrude followed by a boolean.

Check out this previous post for an overview video of how to do SketchUp type things in MoI: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2215.7

Some of the new functions in MoI v2 are for drawing curves directly on to existing planar faces of an object which you'll see used there in the video quite a bit, that's a pretty key new thing in v2 that should give it a lot better feel to someone who is used to SketchUp.

The speed trial that Burr is talking about is in this other previous thread:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1978.1


> interaction with them (not in SU) is still cumbersome and
> not as much straightforward as possible.. hopefully

One thing to keep in mind is that the trial version is for v1 which is more than a year old... There are a lot of new functions already implemented in v2, including quite a few new things for drawing.

- Michael

EDITED: 9 May 2009 by MICHAEL GIBSON

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 From:  Michael Gibson
2570.192 In reply to 2570.189 
Hi Igor, also check out here:
http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/doc/V2releasenotes.html

for a collection of all the release notes on what is new in v2 so far.

- Michael
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 From:  igor
2570.193 In reply to 2570.192 
Michael, Thanks!

I actually awaiting studica for two days already and they haven't even started processing my request..

So as soon as they resolve my request I'll be able to explore beta 2
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 From:  Anis
2570.194 In reply to 2570.193 
Hi Michael....

BTW, is there any info when the next beta will be release ?
Sorry, cant wait for it :)

Thanks
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 From:  Michael Gibson
2570.195 In reply to 2570.194 
Hi Anis,

> BTW, is there any info when the next beta will be release ?

I'm not sure yet, but maybe next week.

- Michael
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