Hi Val,
> honestly, the only thing I want to see different from the
> current user interface is the ability to pull out tabs, <...>
You mean like drag on a tab to kind of "undock" it and then drop it somewhere else?
Unfortunately accomplishing that it a really big area of work. I think it would be great to have it, but it is hard to schedule the time to do it very soon since it is so time consuming. Right now I am doubtful that it will fit into the v2 schedule.
There was an older discussion here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=844.1
about editing the UI just to separate out those toolboxes, I think there is another alternate UI in that thread that has that set up.
But for future scalability it is pretty important to have a system where it doesn't have every single toolbox displayed all at once by default. In the future I will be adding a bunch of additional tabs over there, and if it was just all single expanded toolboxes all the time, it would run out of space pretty quickly and not really scale up to have many more toolboxes.
So that's one big reason for the current system - it is much more "future proof".
However, I have made an attempt to try and put some different kinds of tabs on each row to try and minimize the amount of switching that is necessary. That's why for example Draw curve and edit are not on the same row.
Are there a few specific tools that you find yourself needing to switch between more frequently than anything else? If so, please let me know about that, there are other things that I can do to help out in certain circumstances. Like for example I do want to add a kind of quick editing frame to handle scaling and rotation right inside the viewport without needing to go to the transform tab all the time for that. If I knew about other frequent "switchers", it would help me to think about other possibilities to bring some of their functionality out in other ways as well.
I also want to have a method that lets you drag out a particular command that you might use frequently and place that on the bottom toolbar in a kind of custom toolbar area (between Object Snap and Options). This is probably something that will happen before a full blown palette drag/drop, but I'm still not sure exactly when.
It is possible to edit the UI files to place a particular button in that area right now, let me know if you would like more information on how to do that.
- Michael