Well Danny, iF you want to approach from a psychology aspect, one could very easily design a UI that would make your head hurt! I'd be willing to bet a bit of time has been spent on this area with regards to MoI. Not just an afternoon of browsing available pics. I know a kid at stanford who's whole colledge effort was in "Human interface design". Could you beleive?

You should all be forced to work with TrueSpace.

HEY!--it's now a free 3d app!


Brian

I really can't see what's wrong with the icons, i think they're absolutely fine and not offensive in the least. Micahel seems to be taking a bit of a slagging but i think moi's UI is better than most to be fair. Just my thoughts though - each to their own.

Hi Burr,

> I know a kid at stanford who's whole colledge effort was in "Human interface design". Could you beleive?

Interface yes, a for icons used in the interface I don't know if it would make a difference, would it!?

Cheers

I think so. I think the term interface can also include interaction, so going to a higher level in design, "Human interaction Design", a COLOR can produce different results. Aesthetics play a huge part in wether you "feel" good about using an app. The subconscious is very powerful. The branch can become very convoluted.

Yes, I actually am a master student in an HCI (Human Computer Interaction) program here in Denmark, Interface is ofcourse hugely important as we as MOI users know! I think Michael has been spot on with his decisions of GUI so far.

Thanks Olio!

> here in Denmark

Aha, I guess highly saturated colors kind of grate against the sort of Scandinavian minimalist kind of design sense?

Quite a few other parts of MoI's overall design philosophy do fit in pretty well with that though.

At any rate, if my biggest design problem is that my undo/redo icons are "too blue", then I'm in pretty good shape overall, really... :)

- Michael

Hello,

Depending on color to tell the story is not a great idea, since it is not universal in nature. I do think the icons designed by the developer of Moi do have better contrast and for the most part portray the command effectively. Given that most of the computing population is used to certain icons portraying certain commands (ex. undo/redo) there is no need to reinvent the wheel. That being said it might be good to create the rest of the icons in question to mimic the overall style of the application, since the difference in style can be seen. Another thing to keep in mind is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with using text to describe a function if an icon will not be effective. Personally I think Moi is on the right track in this regard.

On an entirely different note I am holding off purchasing Moi until the official 2.0 release. Is there any way to preorder for the full 2.0 price, and is it expected to be released this month? Thanks.

Hi OSTexo,

> Is there any way to preorder for the full 2.0 price,

Sorry, no there isn't any way that I have set up to pre-order it.


> and is it expected to be released this month?

No, I don't think it is going to be all wrapped up by the end of this month. It is hard to say exactly when it will be ready but probably by the end of next month I will pretty much be cutting things off if they are not ready by then.

- Michael

No need to hold off OSTExo. Order V1, download and use V2 beta (much better than v1), then when V2 is ready, purchase with the difference price! (no extra cost or savings by waiting). Unless your waiting to save up the funds to buy it, then disregard my comments.

Hello,

Sounds good, just ordered a copy and downloaded it. I tried it out some months ago and have been occasionally watching the forum. I'll end up using it for translation of models to technical drawings for manuals, but I'm sure I'll use it for other things as well. Thanks for the info.

Hi OSTexo, thanks very much for your order!

You can also download the current v2 beta from here: http://moi3d.com/beta.htm

There is a collection of all the notes on new stuff in v2 here:
http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/doc/V2releasenotes.html

For conversion type tasks, the most notable new things for v2 are some new file format support - Import/Export of STEP and SAT CAD formats, and also export to FBX and SketchUp formats.

Also there is a significant speed increase for saving to a mesh format in v2, it will now make use of multiple CPU cores for that task.

- Michael

I felt that some Icons did not fit MoI's ethos. So I made some to match the overall style. Also note almost all of them done with MoI, + Photoshop.
You more than welcome to use if you like...

That's more like it, nice job! and thanks

as OSTexo suggested. text Only version. I have to admit it looks more PRO.

Hi yannada, those look nice!

They are kind of emphasizing visual style at the expense of practicality though.

For example, the Save icon is much more universally represented with the kind of disk that MoI currently uses. I can understand the reasoning that you don't use floppies anymore so that is kind of a clever idea to use a hard disk instead. However, a lot of people also have never seen what a hard disk looks like also, so that is just not that practical...

It just tends to help to stick with the standard for functions that are in wide use in other software. Just one of those things that helps to keep something feel more familiar and not make it harder to use just in the name of style.

Also I would probably associate your Delete icon as possibly a "Cancel" type function instead.

But it is cool that you are able to adjust your UI to suit your own preferences like this!

- Michael

> I have to admit it looks more PRO. \

Not as far as I can tell... ;)

It certainly does seem more drab, I'm not sure why you would associate that with "Pro" ?

Icons have some benefit to them, since they tend to give more differentiation to the button than text alone.

But icons all by themselves can have other difficulties in expressing the function, text is good at that.

By having both Icons and Text where possible it tends to combine the good functions of both of them.

But the cool thing is that if you like your own particular design better, then it is possible for you set up MoI to use it, you don't have to stick with the stock design that is meant to target a wider audience.

- Michael

Your thinking Michael behind the icons and UI is very engineer like, do you have an engineering degree?:=)

>>>For example, the Save icon is much more universally represented with the kind of disk that MoI currently uses. I can understand the reasoning that you don't use floppies anymore so that is kind of a clever idea to use a hard disk instead. However, a lot of people also have never seen what a hard disk looks like also, so that is just not that practical...

Well all I can say to people that are in cad biz and haven't seen a hard drive is, There is always gardening, is never late. LOL.
You are wright about the delete icon.

>>>But it is cool that you are able to adjust your UI to suit your own preferences like this!

for sure but a bit long to do that with every beta etc. I just hope you Keep a unified style or "Michael style" on future releases. Your icon design is way better than the ones you licensed, (that is what my Icons trying to say).

Hi olio, I almost have a degree in computer science but did not quite finish it up.

I do actually generally prefer "text only" instead of "icons only" if I had to choose between only one or the other.

But I tried to set things up to not have to make that choice and to try to have both when possible.

That also kind of helps to combine functions of a "toolbar" (traditionally icons only) and a "menu" (traditionally text only) into just one mechanism.

The other part is the icons helps to make the buttons bigger than they would otherwise be with text only, and just being bigger helps make them easier to acquire.

Text alone can be made bigger by adding padding of course, but too large of an amount of padding starts to look weird.

- Michael