Hi yannada,

> My only concern is if MoI @ V1 has two Tab styles and
> about half a dozen different Button styles/color schemes.
> How is gonna look @ V4?

Well, if they do different functions, like a child section vs parent tab, it's not particularly a bad thing for them to look a little different.

It can actually tend to cause problems when 2 things that do somewhat different functions have a completely identical look. That's what seems to be the case in the version that you were showing - from my perspective that is bad to put such a high emphasis on uniform style that it makes a negative impact on usability. In general I'm much more concerned with usability as an overall higher priority.

Also the look is really pretty similar, I'm not sure why that should be such a big issue to be worried about.

At any rate, the next tune-up with a divider line should help to improve the appearance some more.

- Michael

Hi Rainer,

> Is it intentional that the 'Points' are not included in the Types Selection?

Well, at first I had forgotten to do it. Then at one point I noticed that but then I hesitated a bit to add it because I worried a bit about possible confusion between "edit points" like when you turn on points on a curve, versus "point objects" like the ones you draw with Draw curve / More / Point.

Also Point objects tend to not be frequently used so I wasn't quite sure about how useful it would be to have them in there. It is kind of nice if lists of things can be kept shorter when possible...

So anyway, that's kind of why I did not just rush to add it in yet.

But maybe it should be added.

Do you think it would be useful to have an entry for Points under Types that would be for targeting Point objects?

- Michael

Hi Thomas,

> I'm still not sure if the leg is needed at all or if the line
> would be enough to divide the areas when only the upper
> corner of the tab would be rounded, but that may just be me ;-)

Yeah I think I will give it a try without the leg - with the dividing line that lets there be some more indentation on either side, that will probably help to differentiate it from the palette headers pretty well.

I should be able to give this a try in the next couple of days and post a screenshot.


> I tried the adjacent browser on my 30" with 2560x1600 and if
> enough objects are present, it extends just fine to the bottom.

You wrote "adjacent" here, but do you mean that you tried the "inside" mode on your large monitor?


> I think I will have all tabs expanded all the time and the browser
> visible all the time for greatest flexibility. Great system!

Great! Yeah with a high resolution screen the "inside" mode should help to make much better use of what was previously a bunch of empty space over there.


re: Automatic assigned object names - the main reason why I did not go in that direction was to kind of avoid flooding the list with a ton of items that may not have a lot of relevance to your current task... The general idea is that only showing named ones may help to make it easier to navigate the list since it will only contain the things that you have specifically labeled to be able to reference frequently...

Anyway, that's the reasoning behind it, it's probably worth having it out there for a while first before really making a decision on whether that is going to be good or bad.

But often times too large of a list of things can be kind of bad, taking extra time to sort through things to find the one you are looking for. It is kind of a general principle to try and avoid that, that is one of the kind of ingredients that sort of helps make MoI easy to use.

Let me know if it still seems strange after you get a chance to use it some more.

- Michael

Hi Marc,

> Maybe this have been reported; when hiding one style,
> the eye disappear.
> Would it be more logic for the eye of the hidden style
> to be grayed out?

I had thought of that, but my concern is that the grayed out eye might look kind of like it was a disabled control, rather than an "off" state.

The other thing is that a blank slot seems to stick out even more visually in a line of eyes rather than only a color shift, and it is good to have a high degree of differentiation here.

Also it seems to be quite common for programs that do this to make the eye disappear, for example if you turn off a layer in Photoshop by clicking on the eye for it, the eye disappears there instead of turning gray.

So those are some of the reasons why it is set up like that currently.


> It realize it's a bit premature at this stage, but it would be
> nice if vector (illustrator) export could keep the color information
> of objects in the destination file.

It should not be too difficult to get simple colors to go through to AI export, but I'm not quite sure about preserving the name associated with the color though. I will need to dig through the AI spec a bit more to see if there is a provision in there for doing that part.

- Michael

>>>>The other thing is that a blank slot seems to stick out even more visually in a line of eyes rather than only a color shift, and it is good to have a high degree of differentiation here.
>>>>

Should there be some kind of indication that there is something there that is hidden?

If I sent you a file with a few things hidden, you would have to hunt a bit and investigate to find whats there and layed out, versus a visual indicator that there is something hidden in the "red style".


>>>>>Also it seems to be quite common for programs that do this to make the eye disappear, for example if you turn off a layer in Photoshop by clicking on the eye for it, the eye disappears there instead of turning gray.
>>>>>

But there is an indication left that the layer exists.

In the styles, the equivelent would be that nothing is listed there unless it is in use. Then this would be readable as it is in Photoshop. With all the styles listed by default, you wouldnt know what has data or not.

What is your take here?

hi Michael,
I have been working a bit with the new beta.

It would be nice if the styles menu would not be so modal.
Right now if I want to change a style color I have to:
-pick an object with that style
-in the attributes tab, go on the style,
-choose to modify the style
-go to edit
-change the color.

I think it would be better if you could double click on the style name to change its name, or on the colour to change its colour.
Also, it would be better if you could move styles up and down in their hierarchy without having to go in the pop-up menu.

Another approach would be to right-click on a style and get a menu for it, including:
-delete style
-edit style
-move up
-move down.
This would be even better if we could multi select several styles at once.

Hi Burr,

> <...>
> versus a visual indicator that there is something hidden in the "red style".

Actually there is something for that built in already - if there are no objects of a given slot (for example no objects with style=red), then the text for that style will be displayed in gray.

So if you see one that does not have gray text, and also does not have an eye, that combination indicates that there are hidden items of that style.

Here's an example to clarify - scan down the list of styles here. The ones that have objects on them have black text, ones with no objects have gray text:



You can see there that "Blue" has objects on it, but it does not have an eye. That means that there are hidden objects with Style=Blue, which can be displayed by clicking where the eye would go.

The other ones that are grayed out will have no effect if you click on their eye spots, because there are no objects of that type to display.


> With all the styles listed by default, you wouldnt know what has data or not.

But you do - that's what the text color is showing you...

- Michael

Thats it Michael, Thanks. Sorry, my "eye" for the detail is gone. But that is what I was asking about.

Burr

Hi okapi, yeah in the future I'm thinking of having a kind of drop-down menu on items, like maybe have an arrow that shows in the right-hand side of the text label when you move your mouse over top of that line.

Right-click won't really work because all the right-clicks are already taken on everything - right-click on an eye to do isolate, right-click on a swatch to set it as the active style, and right-click on the text to do an isolate selection.

So that's why there will probably be a drop-down arrow for that instead.

But that may take a while before I can get to that part.


Are you really changing your styles very frequently? I mean is it something that you go to mess with every few minutes?

It is generally not efficient to try and highly optimize operations that you don't need to do very frequently, in fact it can be kind of good to have those kind of non-optimized because it helps to leave the optimized spots for things that you may want to do several times a minute instead, like hide/show.

So it is not necessarily a priority to lower the number of steps for every single action.


However, having said all that, I would like to have a menu, that should work out pretty well I'm just not sure when I will be able to get it done.

Right now I think it is a higher priority to make things like styles work with mesh exports, rather than to optimize the styles editing tasks that are currently done with the modal dialog.

Although there definitely needs to be another entry point for that modal dialog, probably an "Edit" button that will show in the browser.

- Michael

Hi Burr, also one other detail - one reason why the list of styles does not get compacted to not show the "empty" ones is so that you can still use the shortcut of clicking on a style's swatch to assign selected objects to it, or right-click to set it as the active style that will be used for a newly drawn object.

If the styles list did not show styles with no objects on them, then those shortcuts would not be available to use on a style until you placed an object on it first.

However, in the future at some point I think it would make sense to have some kind of filtering mechanism that you could adjust to have some control over what was displayed there so you would have the option to only show occupied ones. But it will probably be a while before that happens.

- Michael

>>>>>I think it would be better if you could double click on the style name to change its name, or on the colour to change its colour.
>>>>

I just found that if you have a selected item and double click on a style, it will change that item to that style.

Part of what you asked I think.

[EDIT] Looks like Michael just posted that answer as well [EDIT]

Hi Burr,

> I just found that if you have a selected item and double
> click on a style, it will change that item to that style.

Yup, that is a shortcut way to assign a style to the selected objects.

You don't even have to double-click, just a single click will do it.

You can double click if you want though, it will just set it to that style twice in a row... ;)


But I think okapi was talking about something a bit different - about some quicker way to edit the style itself to have a different color than it currently has.

- Michael

>>>>You don't even have to double-click, just a single click will do it.

You can double click if you want though, it will just set it to that style twice in a row... ;)>>>>

All the time and effort you put in to keep the UI clean....And I just add clicks at will!!! Go figure.

Hi Michael,

I noticed that if you create a feature on an object, that feature takes on the current active style, e.g. if a cylinder has style=green and the active style is red and you apply a fillet to the cylinder the fillet takes on style=red, I would prefer that the fillet inherit the style of that cylinder no matter what colour is active, when working on an object I don't want to always check if I have the same colour active.

Cheers

///
From: Michael Gibson 16 Apr 7:33 (109 of 113)
....
Are you really changing your styles very frequently? I mean is it something that you go to mess with every few minutes?
It is generally not efficient to try and highly optimize operations that you don't need to do very frequently, in fact it can be kind of good to have those kind of non-optimized because it helps to leave the optimized spots for things that you may want to do several times a minute instead, like hide/show.
So it is not necessarily a priority to lower the number of steps for every single action.
.... ///


Hi Michael,
you are right, I don't think I will be changing styles very often, and I can work with the system as it is.
I think I am changing styles often now because it is a new feature and I am trying it out ! (please stop adding new features, it hurts the workflow ! just joking..)

I agree that it is much more important to get the exports etc... working properly.
However once you have a chance to improve it, it would be good to get a more streamlined way of editing styles as mentioned.
I think a drop down arrow would work well too.

Thanks for all your hard work!

""The ones that have objects on them have black text, ones with no objects have gray text""

That's the part that I didn't catch!



Marc

Hi Michael,

very good to hear that you will try the tabs without the legs - if that doesn't work, I guess the shorter version from Marcs screen would do well also.
I don't know about others, but somehow I don't see it as such a huge problem to be able to differenciate the tabs from the main browser label. Since your solution is so flexible, the heading is not so extremely important for me, each tab stands for himself in a way. I guess this is why I felt the current one to be a overly strong division - and as soon as the tabs are opened, the problem solves itself anyway, since the sub-stuff is indented much more.
Whatever you will come up with - I like it a lot.

And no, I wasn't talking about inside mode. I tried with about ~40 named objects and then in adjacent mode the browser was pretty full screen ;-)
On that large screen I can spare some space ;-) but inside is very slick for less objects.

Yeah, I also wasn't sure about automatic naming. I just realized how used to it I am from software like XSI etc.
I agree that it can be annoying at times and meaningless.

You do a perfect job of rethinking some of the so-called standards for us!

Thank you very much!

Thomas Helzle

Hi Michael,

When i copy/paste one object into rhino,
all the styles are pasted as well.

I prefer to copy only the style in which the
object belongs to.

Does it possible to "lock" something in the Browser?