Hi Michael,

What do you think about having some sort of indicator in the 'Object' section in the browser when selecting/highlighting named objects on the screen, when building models with a large amount of named objects I'd like to know what has been selected by name.

A Simple example:


The highlight might be to intrusive, an asterisk maybe.

-

I was just thinking about this the other day! I agree. Would be very useful.

Good idea, doesn't seem like it would hurt anything else within MoI.

-Will

Hi Danny, I've thought some about that before.

One problem is that it is possible for there to be a "mixed" state where only some of the items for that slot are selected but not all.

For example if you have 5 spheres that have style = Default, and now you go and select 3 of those spheres with 2 still deselected, what should the Default style indicate in that case?

Also putting a big highlight like you show there does seem kind of a bit "in your face".

So those are a couple of the UI design issues which need to be resolved before this would work.

One thing I've thought about a bit is maybe having a small yellow bar on one side of an item to indicate selection, and it could have a half bar for the mixed state. I have not really fully explored that yet though, but something like this maybe:



But I'm not sure if that is distinct enough or not.


Let me know if you have any ideas about how to show the mixed selection state in a good way.

- Michael

Would using the "eye icon" with the same presentation as the hidden alert, and the color scheme for selection, interfere with the eye's normal function?

SO along with eye and half eye for hidden, could it be yellow eye and half yellow? or eyelid yellow=half and pupil included=full selection?

Hi Burr, that could be possible...

But one problem is that a yellow eye icon will probably have much less contrast on the background than the current black eye icon. That could interfere with legibility, so there is some possibility there to have some negative effect on basic hide/show functionality.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

> Let me know if you have any ideas
> about how to show the mixed selection
> state in a good way.

I was actually thinking the same thing as Burr was and yeah, the contrast wouldn't be great unless you went another colour like blue.
Here are some others that might get the juices going:






-

Hi Danny, I've thought a bit about the background underneath the eye like you show in the second example there. But it seems like it may be too subtle.

I kind of like the round dot to the right idea, that has a more distinctive look to it. Particularly if no selection would mean no dot showing at all.

Probably putting in a slightly darker mid dividing line for the mixed state would help to make the mixed state and full selected state even a bit more distinctive from one another, something like this:




Maybe one problem with the dot thing though is that it looks a lot like a separate button area to click on.


Also one other possible complication with putting something on the right side is that I think at some point (probably starting with groups) there will be a way to launch a menu that has some actions relating to that particular item, and the way for launching the menu would probably be to click in that right-side spot - when you move the mouse over the item an arrow will probably appear in that area there that looks like the arrow currently in the Styles section header. Maybe that will be fine anyway though, the selection indicator dot could just change to a menu launcher arrow when the mouse is over the item's row. Any ideas on how that sounds?

- Michael

Hi,

This would be a great help to quickly see what's going on.

Maybe it's not that important to show the "partial" state of this feature, it could be only an indicator as of where objects are located.

Just a thought: it might be interesting if you could drag that indicator (who would represent your selection in that container) to another style or group...


Marc

Hi Michael,

> Maybe that will be fine anyway though,
> the selection indicator dot could just
> change to a menu launcher arrow when
> the mouse is over the item's row.
> Any ideas on how that sounds?

Hard to say without actually seeing it in action, sounds a bit un-discoverable, it's not unusual to see multiple columns in a layer system though.

-

I was picturing a transparent overlay. So the Visibility icon is still black, but the selection yellow is a transparent indicator. THere could even be an ini option to use it or not.

Anyway, just a thought.

[EDIT] Just read Danny presented it in the post just after. Never mind [EDIT]

Hi Marc,

> Maybe it's not that important to show the "partial" state
> of this feature, it could be only an indicator as of where
> objects are located.

What would it show then if only some objects of that slot were selected, just the same as if none were selected?


> Just a thought: it might be interesting if you could drag that
> indicator (who would represent your selection in that container)
> to another style or group...

I'm not really following this part - the contents of different slots do not necessarily have any set relation to one another.

For example, say you have 1 sphere that has Style = Default selected. Now you drag that selection indicator to the Style = Red slot, which happens to have 100 lines associated with it. What is the ending selection supposed to be? Are all the lines supposed to get selected?

If you just want a way to select all things of a certain style, you can do that already by clicking on the style name...

- Michael

Hi Danny,

> Hard to say without actually seeing it in action, sounds a
> bit un-discoverable,

Well, it will help keep things a lot tidier - having every single row always showing some kind of menu launcher arrow is going to make a lot of clutter on the screen.

Any time you move your mouse over an item the arrow would show up, so that should help with discoverability, you've got to move your mouse over rows at some point to use the scene browser anyway.

I did not mind putting it on all the time for the Style header section because there are much fewer header sections than individual item rows, and some more important, more frequently used functionality is on that menu like "Add style". The per-item menu stuff will not be quite as important for basic use.


> it's not unusual to see multiple columns
> in a layer system though.

Yeah, there are actually multiple columns in MoI already - like in the style section there is 1 column for status (where the Eye or Lock goes), a swatch column and a name column.


The other possibility is that clicking on the name could actually pop out the item's menu and instead the dot all the way to the right could be clickable for selection instead of selecting by clicking on the name like it currently works...

It would be kind of good to have stuff related to selection all focused in one spot. It would be a smaller area to click on than the current method where the whole name can be clicked for selection though.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

> The other possibility is that clicking on
> the name could actually pop out the item's
> menu and instead the dot all the way to the
> right could be clickable for selection instead
> of selecting by clicking on the name like it currently works...

I was thinking about suggesting the dot being 'clickable' but then thought you probably wouldn't go for it because of it's size :) also if it was the case, would it be click=highlight, click again=unhighlight or as it is now with selection from the browser where we use the ctrl key as the modifier for unselecting.

-

Hi Danny, re: selection dot size - well there are already similar sized things to click on already like the swatch. So it would not be unreasonable, but it would be a bit of a downgrade from the current larger click area.

But one other issue with the dot is that it would chop off some room for the text name.. If the selection indicator was more of a background thing it could possibly be behind the text or behind the eye like you were showing earlier and that doesn't shorten the area for the text label any..

There's not much room there for a lot of text already, so shortening it further may be pretty bad.


> also if it was the case, would it be click=highlight, click
> again=unhighlight or as it is now with selection from the
> browser where we use the ctrl key as the modifier for
> unselecting.

I was thinking it would work same as selection does now, with Ctrl for deselect. But what you are describing sounds pretty good, with left click toggling select on or off similar to the eye.

- Michael

All sounds good Michael, I'm sure the final solution will be the right one, will this be part of V3 development ?

-

Hi Michael,

The selection methods in Moi are already very flexible, it was just a flying thought.

> What would it show then if only some objects of that slot were selected, just the same as if none were selected?

It could highlight if you select only one object of that container, being just an indicator as of where it is located in the browser.

> For example, say you have 1 sphere that has Style = Default selected. Now you drag that selection indicator to the Style = Red slot, which happens to have 100 lines associated with it. What is the ending selection supposed to be? Are all the lines supposed to get selected?

No, the lines would not be added to the selection, it would just reorganize the active selection.
If you have a handful of objects scattered in many styles, you could visually regroup them in one or in several containers.

it may be handy in complex situations.



It's a common feature in some 2d vector applications.
Here'e some examples featuring:

One orange square: layer 1
Two green squares: Layer 2
Nothing: layer 3

One green and one orange square are selected.


Expression 3.3:
A kind of "box" indicator appears over the color label of the layer of which at least one object is selected.





Illustrator 10:
Here a black square around the color label if you have everything selected in that layer.





Microsoft design:
Here only a frame for a partial selection and full square for everything selected in that layer.



In all of these examples you can drag that icon to reorganize the active selection.
It's a visual way of organizing objects in the tree.

>> It would highlight if you select only one object of that container, being just an indicator as of where it is located in the browser.

This is really all I was looking for too. I've selected something, where is it in the browser?

As in this example using a blue square, all layers have objects on them, layers 1 and 3 have selected objects on them, layer 2 has no selected objects.



I would be happy with something like the above. I don't think I need a visual display that some objects with name x are selected and some are not in the browser.

Hi Marc,

> > What would it show then if only some objects of that slot
> > were selected, just the same as if none were selected?

> It could highlight if you select only one object of that
> container, being just an indicator as of where it is located
> in the browser.

I see... But I would worry that could be misleading, say you have 1000 objects that have Style = default. If you only selected just one of them and then the indicator lit up (with only one style of lighting up), someone could easily mistake that for meaning that all 1000 of that container were selected.


> In all of these examples you can drag that icon to reorganize
> the active selection.
> It's a visual way of organizing objects in the tree.

I think I understand now - dragging that icon would be a way to assign just those particular objects to a new style instead of assigning all selected objects to a new style like you can do now by clicking on a swatch.

I was thinking it would adjust the selection somehow, but you're talking about using it to assign properties.

Kind of a subtle thing though, you could accomplish the same thing currently by just narrowing the selection instead of having a whole bunch of various stuff selected. But it is something good to think about.

- Michael

Hi Danny,

> All sounds good Michael, I'm sure the final solution will be
> the right one, will this be part of V3 development ?

Yeah, it's something that I would work on for v3.

Still some open questions though, I guess a big one is - is it ok to shrink the available size for the name label by having a selection dot as another dedicated column?

Maybe I can get away with a bit of trickery and let the name spill over there for the "no selection" case.

- Michael