Hi Petr,
> Except there are so many different icons. I think most
> people expect "status" icon having on/off state and not
> having eight different ones :)
Well, that's covered under the design principle that I use which is called "Don't obsess so much about the fringe cases that most people don't see"... ;)
If you are using the scene browser for the most part to manage your objects, you won't typically see many of those states you show there because you will be setting all the objects in that slot to the same state for each action.
So most people end up seeing just these 4 states for the status:
Those are really easy to understand.
All the other ones you show will happen when the objects in that slot have a mixed state, like only some of the hidden or only some of them locked, stuff like that.
If you're using the scene browser to manage your objects, when you see any mixed state at all, it is not really so important to know exactly what the mix is, the important thing is to just know that it is mixed and that you probably want to click on it to unmix it. Just Ctrl+click on it once and it will get "unmixed" for locking, any kind of lock will go away and if you want it all to be locked, Ctrl+click a second time and you're done.
Also like I mentioned for a lot of people they will never actually see any of those locks at all, since locking is not as common as hiding/showing - so the most common mixed state is actually just the half eye.
> Moreover I see no logic behind it. For example, I draw three
> lines and lock one of them. I would expect "half-lock & full
> eye icon" because all objects are visible and one of them is
> locked. But I get "full lock & eye icon".
It actually does follow a rigorous pattern - basically locked and unlocked objects are handled completely separately - if there are any locked objects there will be a lock icon put down first, with one of 3 states:
If all locked items are visible = full lock icon
If all locked items are hidden = faint full lock icon
If locked items are mixed between hidden and visible, split lock icon half faint half opaque.
Then if there are unlocked objects it will generate an eye or half-eye as an overlay on top of that. If the eye is being done as an overlay on top of a lock, it uses a slightly different and more hollow eye.
Having the lock icon change with the locked item's visibility worked out best especially for the simple case where you've got everything in the slot to be the same state, because then the "locked + hidden" state shows as a faint lock which is good.
At any rate, the main thing is if you see a mixed state with both a lock and an eye don't worry so much about the specifics of what the current state is, it's a big mixture of stuff so you need to unmix it, just Ctrl+click on it once to make it have a uniform locked state and you are then set.
> With additional column there would be no need to use
> Ctrl+click on eye/lock icon to lock/unlock the entry in
> the scene browser.
Yeah, but you are talking about just saving the Ctrl, is that it? That's not really too significant of a difference, particularly for a function that is not used as often.
It's generally a problem to try and optimize lesser used functions and bring them to the same level as higher used functions, that tends to dilute the higher level use to a certain extent. That's the deal for this case.
- Michael
