Hi, Michael,

You raise a good point - I hadn't really scaled the thing up to include a lot of items. And I agree that other programs keep things in columns, so I withdraw that suggestion :-)

However, my main concern is that there is no visual connection between the icon and the item. Photoshop, Fireworks and Hexagon have a grid type visual system to keep things together. Modo and Silo use a highlight.

The icons in your browser are kind of floating in mid air, they don't really have a visual relationship with the item. This makes it hard to quickly identify which eye to click. With even more nesting and items the distance between the eye and the item will be even greater and compound the problem. If you add further controls, such as locking could make things worse.

I like the highlighting bar best, looks neater and less cluttered (you may already have thought of this, just not in the screen shots)



As an aside, I did notice that modo doesn't use the connector lines - and I can't say that I have missed them :-)

Hi Tony, yeah I'm going to be experimenting with a few things along those lines.

At the moment I have it set up so that the text is highlighted in blue for the row that your mouse is currently over.

I also tried darkening the whole row like you show there, but it felt a bit heavy handed. I think I'm going to try a kind of outline border around the row the mouse is over.

I'll also probably experiment to see if I can do a slightly different alternating color between rows which can help with this kind of alignment recognition.


> As an aside, I did notice that modo doesn't use the connector
> lines - and I can't say that I have missed them :-)

They're just basically the vertical equivalent of the same kind of horizontal alignment stuff that you are mentioning... They just help out a bit to more immediately see which things are siblings, even if there is a gap between them with child stuff popped out.

I don't want to draw a whole bunch of attention to them, so I made those dotted so they hopefully won't be too distracting.

- Michael

Hi Michael,
I do agree with Tony, it needs some sort of visual separation.
Outline border sounds Ok, I thought you would have kept with the same theme and action that you have for the main icons, meaning the whole row highlights with that cool graduated blue and outline, even if you left the organisation tree plain and mouse down with that highlighting method, it should work. I'm just visualising this as I'm mousing over the icons so I don't really know how it would feel over a bunch of columns.

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Hi Danny, yeah the part that is a little different in this situation from a regular button is that there are many different regions within the row that do some different things.

For example, the eye is one region, the +/- box another, on Styles the swatch is also another one, then clicking on the text I plan to do a select so that's another one yet and then in the future I think there may be a drop-down arrow at the far right to open up a menu.

If the whole row highlighted like a regular single button, it would kind of make it feel a lot like the whole row was just one single big button instead of made up of different regions that do different actions.

At any rate, here is what I have right at the moment - if you mouse over the eye, you get an outline around the eye region for an indication that clicking is going to do something there, and the text for the row is highlighted in blue when you are over any region within that row.



I'll be doing some other experiments, but that already does have a mechanism there to give an indication of which row you are working on since its text color changes.

- Michael

As I suspected, you already have ideas on this ;-)

Proof of this pudding will be in the eating, as usual :-)

I look forward to testing out the beta.

Hi Tony - this is what it looks like with some slightly different background colors for alternating rows. I think this will make it easy to see which eye belongs to a nested sub-item, whether you've got your mouse over anything or not.

Then I think I'm going to keep the border outline to be only an outline around the clickable sub-region of the row that you are currently on. But I'll also keep the text of the row that the mouse is over to highlight in blue.



- Michael

What append when there are some deep branches?
is it an horizontal scrolling or only this size of view by vertical developpment?

Hi Pilou, at the moment deep branches will just be truncated. In the future I will probably look at doing a scroll bar or something for that, but that may not be a part of v2.

- Michael

truncated but possibility to go to the end?

Hi Pilou,

> truncated but possibility to go to the end?

Sorry, I'm not quite sure what you mean.... The text will be truncated but you'll be able to see the eye controls for example. I'm not worried about getting this part nailed down right now that can come a bit later if the main design is working well.

- Michael

What append in this case? (I say component but that can be anything :)

Some more refinements - now the section names (Groups, Objects, Types, Styles) have a different visual style so they don't blend in so much with the items:



- Michael

Hi Pilou,

> How see the "component" 7 in the red window?

Your content you show there is bigger than the window, so there aren't a whole lot of choices - probably the method would be either making the window wider, or having a scroll bar. That's something that may not be handled with the initial versions.


> Other thing : moving "component 7" to "component 1"
> with the mouse inside the windows is possible?

No, not initially. At first there will probably be a "group editor" dialog box that has some up/down buttons on to handle arranging things.

Direct drag and drop type re-arranging likely won't happen until the future.


- Michael

Hi Michael,

The lines make things much better, plus the visual style for section names helps to separate the different items.


I do agree with Frenchy though. There seems to be a flaw in the basic design here if it won't accommodate deep nesting. I'm not in favour of a horizontal scroll bar either. I really want to see the structure of my model not have to keep scrolling left and right - seems very anti-MoI :-)

Perhaps you will re-consider putting this in a floating window? Then the window can be re-sized to fit the browser tree as required.

Hi Tony, I'll probably be making some method to adjust the panel size.

Floating windows (other than temporary ones) are something that I have just tried in general to avoid with MoI's overall UI since they tend to hang out overlapping the main work area, making it cluttered and obscuring your view of your model data.

I'm not particularly worried about such a deep nesting to start with though, I'm more concerned with whether the basic UI works well to start with on something with just 3 or 4 levels of nesting. Then I will look at how to handle deep nesting after that.

- Michael

Thanks for the reply Michael,

As you already know, I would really like the window solution so I can put it on my second monitor.

So I may just keep mentioning it every now and then ;-)

Cheers.

Hi Tony, yeah in that situation you would avoid cluttering the workspace. But if I focused primarily on making this UI in a floating window for everybody, then people who only had a single monitor would end up with the cluttering problem.

In the future I do want to enable some methods for re-arranging the UI, for stuff like tearing chunks off and docking them in different areas or possibly on different monitors. But it is going to be a while before I am able to get to that.

- Michael

Just to clear things in my head, it seems to me Ill much prefer to work on the "Inside".and not the "Adjacent" mode...Is that how the UI gonna look in a situation like that?

Hi yannada, it will be similar to that except different with the scrolling behavior.

The inline scene browser is limited to only be a maximum of 40% of the size of the main window height (adjustable in moi.ini), so that it doesn't overwhelm the other controls in there.

When it gets to be long when in "inside" mode, the browser section gets its own vertical scroll bar, like this:



This mode will probably be good if you have a higher resolution monitor, and if you don't have a high level of nested sub-items in groups.

- Michael

Just an idea: maybe the tree could pan to the right when you hover items that are partially hidden and then return when not hovering.

Can't wait to try this browser!

Marc