Hi Marc,

> I was thinking that if "no selection" is blank it might be a little
> hard to guess where to click to "select all" on this container.

Well, I figure that if someone is interested in using the scene browser it won't take long for them to see some selection markers over there after they use it with some selected stuff.

After they see some indicators it should help to figure out that is a clickable area.

- Michael

A little late but with the thing about having a selected object indicator in the scene browser, I think the name in the browser can be:

Black: completely unselected
Yellow: some selected
Bold Yellow: everything selected

And a question: why is there a separate window for changing the name of an object instead of changing it inside the objects properties space like resizing?

Hi Ed,

> And a question: why is there a separate window for
> changing the name of an object instead of changing
> it inside the objects properties space like resizing?

That's because I anticipate there may be other kinds of named entities in the future like named construction planes or saved named views, etc... and it would be nice to have one standard "name editor" dialog that could be re-used for each of those cases.

- Michael

I don't know how this may tie into the MoI philosophy, but might this be a good candidate for Tooltips? They're only there when you want them, so everything remains nice and clean the rest of the time.

Maybe also a simple numeric indicator like 3/160, for how many are selected out of a group?

Martin.

Hi Martin, I kind of generally try to avoid tooltips for important information (like describing what a particular control actually does), because it leads to a kind of unpleasant herky-jerky workflow where you have to do stop everything and pause over top of various bits of UI to see what they actually do.

So it's a big focus with MoI in general to try and put some description of what a button does up right on the button itself, rather than a tooltip. That way the UI becomes more sort of "browsable" where you can do just a quick visual scan over it and see what things do right away.

However, having said all that, tooltips can work well for a kind of supplemental or extended information, and that aspect could be a good fit for this case. So something like 3/160 seems like it could be a good possibility to have on a tooltip.

The selection indicator itself (some indicator showing if all nothing / everything / partial objects in a slot are selected) would probably be good though to have right on the top level because then along with giving some of the basic level feedback it would also be a natural place to click on to do selection actions as well.

- Michael

Hi Michael and Co.
Yes, MoI's simple interface is one of its great strengths and it would be a shame to spoil it.
To try and help out, here are a few more thoughts for icon styles. There could be a bar-graph, similar to the Windows wireless network signal strength one, perhaps a needle type speedometer, or if there is enough room to get it in, something like the attached pic.


Martin.

Hi Martin, those are some good potential ideas, thanks!

One other issue is this indicator needs to fit just within a small area within a single line of text, so that tends to make it more difficult to do something with very much detail in it.

- Michael