What's coming up next and when?

It will probably be about another week.

The big items that I'm shooting for are an alignment tool for lining up points or objects vertically or horizontally, image backgrounds, and I'm also hoping to overhaul some of the infrastructure of fillets, booleans, and shelling to increase stability in these areas.

- Michael

Hi Michael. Are you planning to add an "hourglass" while Moi is calculating on operation. Or maybe a feedback line to let us know why an operation failed? Sometimes, i think Moi is working on a fillet so i just stare at the screen for a while like a zombie :) Then a moment later i realize the operation failed due to unusable input :( Maybe this is a side-effect of being a rhino user, that i am expecting feedback to confirm the operation succeeded or failed. but i think it would be nice for users to understand why an operation fails...

jonah

>> Sometimes, i think Moi is working on a fillet so i just stare at the screen for a while like a zombie :)

Hehe, been there, done that... ;-)

i quite enjoy those little mental vacations, really... ;)

I'm definitely planning on an hour-glass. I want to add this to some select functions (booleans, fillets, shell) hopefully for the next beta, also including the possibility to cancel out.

Eventually I want to figure out some type of feedback area where I could print a couple of lines of text for error and information messages. That's definitely one benefit of a command-line interface that it gives a natural place to print out that type of information. But it will take some fussing and experimenting to figure out how to integrate this nicely into the MoI UI, I don't think that I will be ready to do this part for a while.

- Michael

i have an idea. Do you remember the TV show Family Feud? How about when the operation fails a giant red "X" appears on the screen with that really annoying "WONK!!!!!!" sound ?

jonah :)

Does that mean you'd get 3 chances and if you get to the triple "X" the program exits? :)

Oooooh that could be frustrating...... :)

Why not up in the Command Options area..? That seems to be where MoI does most of it's communicating already. :)

> Why not up in the Command Options area..? That seems to be where
> MoI does most of it's communicating already.

It certainly would be good from a "central area to focus on" type of perspective.

But a couple of problems - there isn't really room for very much text there, it's pretty hard to even fit some prompt text in there sometimes. I could imagine that some error or feedback messages would be even harder to fit in there.

Another problem is that it would then increase the size of the command options area - one nice thing about the command options area is that many commands fit all their UI inside of the given space, which is good because it prevents the side pane from being pushed down too often. Adding more stuff in there would make it a bit more likely that it would get pushed down for more commands.

One thing I have thought of is to run the bottom toolbar all the way to the right edge of the window, and then that area could contain a couple of lines of text that were wider than the side pane. That would shorten up the side pane a bit because currently it runs all the way to the bottom edge. The other problem is it would then make another different area of the screen that had information about the currently running command...

- Michael

Hi Michael. How about displaying the feedback line smack in the middle of the current viewport (a simple white text in black frame should be visible against any viewport color scheme). Then when you click the cursor into an input field (or in current viewport), the feedback line will disappear...

jonah

You mentioned you were going to collapse all the snapping options into a single menu, yes? There'd be all the more space then.

Or, a message bar along the top the views there.. it'd be long enough to flash a pretty verbose error, me thinks. It could also double as a progress bar.

> Hi Michael. How about displaying the feedback line smack in
> the middle of the current viewport (a simple white text in black
> frame should be visible against any viewport color scheme).
> Then when you click the cursor into an input field (or in current
> viewport), the feedback line will disappear...

Well, the thing is that it would be nice to use some text feedback not just for error messages, but also for some general information. Like when you do a window select if there was a feedback area I could print out the number of objects that were selected by that action.

Text in the middle of the viewport would probably get annoying if it was displayed too frequently.

That's not a bad idea for only error messages though.

- Michael

> You mentioned you were going to collapse all the snapping options
> into a single menu, yes? There'd be all the more space then.

Yeah, but I was only talking about the little pop-up menus and different options dialogs. If you move your mouse to the "Grid Snap", "Straight Snap", or "Object Snap" buttons, there is a little menu that pops out above them, each of which has their own option dialog.

So that options consolidation won't change anything that is currently visible at the top level. It should just make it easier to get at all the options which are currently scattered around a bit.

- Michael

Understood, yeah, I use the object snap pop-up a lot.

Oh, and best of luck getting Fillet & everything worked out.

> Understood, yeah, I use the object snap pop-up a lot.

Hmmm, I suppose it might be a good idea for me to leave that one in place in addition to having it available on the full settings dialog.

- Michael