Hello,

Enzo, I believe a component of "professionalism" entails being a person of your word. Your quote:

"Annoying the visitors of this forum is the opposite of my intention so I will not reply further."

It is apparent by your post you are neither professional or a person of your word. I have a suggestion, why don't you and oilo go back under the bridge and talk among yourselves about how everyone here doesn't "get it", since you have absolutely no constructive input on the matter of interface, usability or aesthetics, other than some lame duck "hire a professional" line. It is showing that you have zero experience dealing with anyone on a professional level. You might want to work on that.

If you are so convinced that a design overhaul is going to skyrocket sales of MoI get your checkbook out and pay for it. See if TSS will be open to that investment of at least six figures to make it worthwhile, and then be held to either hitting a sales figure directly attributable to the design changes or lose your investment entirely. Since you are speaking with such confidence you should have no trouble ponying up the funds and signing the contracts, since it would turn out to be a nice investment for you.

You're not going to do that, because you don't really believe in what you're trying to "sell" to everyone else. If you want to see what professionalism looks like take a look at Mr. Gibsons posts. He is responding in a measured and civil manner to your rants.

Hi Michael,

Well even if these icons are done by a professional designer, that does not make it good automatically! I guess not every Software engineer can make Moi as nicely as you, even though he is a professional software engineer.

And in general everyone should avoid any prepackaged icon libraries, no real professional designer uses these, these are intended most of the time for the average office worker to make their .docx files more pretty.

About that scalability factor that is very nice, but even if you scale the gui up or down you still have the exactly same problem of layout, elements need to line up.

That being said I agree, 90% of Moi is FANTASTIC, even 99%... I am just one of those picky bastards who screams when I see e.g. the font Comic Sans used anywhere.

I have gotten the impression you are all about the details too michael, a perfectionist, that is why I am voicing my concern over silly graphical errors, that should be easily avoided or fixed. I agree this is not something I would look at and disregard the software for, but I honestly don't see these errors from adobe, autodesk...now I know these are huge corporations with probably tens of GUI designers.

Again this is nitpicking, I saw a list earlier listing out more important things, that put this at number 10. probably where I would put it too, but even at number 10 it should be done right.

Hi Enzo, I should have pegged you as a Studio Tools user - that culture just has so much of that pretentious "we are soooo extra more special and professional" than you vibe saturating through it.

We ran into that a lot when I was developing Rhino - at that point Rhino actually used the exact same NURBS library as in Alias Studio, and I saw all kinds of comments from Alias users about how much better their surface quality was when they were actually running the exact same code!

It seems to come from some kind of special "designer name brand" type worship, where the attitude is that obviously something that costs $20,000 is so high class and better than something that costs $1000. I mean how could you miserable unwashed masses even think that you are approaching our lofty perfection?

Needless to say, I am not a particularly big fan of that attitude, I find it distasteful and borderline offensive. Your last post is just dripping with it, with loads of absolutely ridiculous statements.


The bottom line is that it is far more important to focus on things that actually matter, like a smooth and fluid workflow, rather than miniscule pixel tweaks.

Putting such a hysterical emphasis on visuals like you seem to want is just not the right focus for a tool.

I have actually spent quite a bit more effort in improving the visuals of MoI as compared to what I did in Rhino, specifically because I know that there are people out there that have a kind of shallow "judge it by its looks" type outlook. You seem to have one of the most severe cases of that kind of an outlook that I have ever encountered.


It's obvious that MoI is not the right software for you, and that's ok with me, I don't expect for it to be the right fit for every kind of person.


- Michael

Now I really recent that OSTexo.

I really don't comment here often, but this is not very encouraging to continue.

Why are you suggesting I should go with Enzo under a bridge and talk among ourself. I have no relation with Enzo, I tried to point out some minor flaws aesthetically with a picture that was requested.

You say "It is showing that you have zero experience dealing with anyone on a professional level", do you mean every time I don't agree with someone, or someone has a lame argument, I should tell him to go under a bridge?

Sorry Michael I missed it,

I would put the browser button on the left of 'options' or in that row. Now it sneaks in on the right column, so it is like it's part of that right column, like an icon that is supposed to be there with the tools.
Maybe it would be better to make a icon for the browser similar to the 'option' icon, so they would fit nicely in a row together.

thanks mate.

Hi olio,

> About that scalability factor that is very nice, but even if
> you scale the gui up or down you still have the exactly
> same problem of layout, elements need to line up.

Technically it is very difficult to make a system that allows text to scale arbitrarily and to maintain exact lining up of some separate objects.

By making things able to be scaled in size, it just naturally goes along with giving up a bit of "down to the pixel" type spacing.

That's a good example of one of the many kinds of trade-offs that I encounter when designing software - in this case I have judged that being able to scale the UI provides more overall value to more people than having pixel-level control over the kinds of alignments that you were mentioning.


Sometimes it is not possible to solve every single problem all at the same time, you have to prioritize. That can mean that some smaller problems persist because they are a side effect of something else with a greater value.


> I agree this is not something I would look at and disregard
> the software for, but I honestly don't see these errors from
> adobe, autodesk...now I know these are huge corporations
> with probably tens of GUI designers.

They actually don't have the kind of arbitrarily scalable UI that MoI has, and as a consequence they can be difficult to use in many situations, like on a laptop that has a small screen but with a high DPI their buttons are extremely tiny and hard to interact with.


> that is why I am voicing my concern over silly graphical errors

Well, some of the ones you mentioned I agree with, I just have not yet had time to tweak the undo/redo buttons and the min/restore buttons. At some point I'll get to those.

The overall priority of those things has been rather low compared to actually making modeling commands or fixing bugs.

- Michael

Hi olio,

> I would put the browser button on the left of 'options' or in that row.

On a 1024x768 screen there is not enough room to the left of 'options' to contain the browser button.

That's another GUI problem that pixel-oriented graphic artists often fail to deal with, that users are not all running on the exact same screen that the graphic designer happens to have in front of them.

It's another area where I tend to have to make sacrifices in the UI design.

The payoff is that MoI actually runs for example on a little netbook computer instead of only working on a high resolution desktop machine.


Doing what you suggest here would cause a scroll bar to appear and force the user to scroll the bottom toolbar left and right.


Believe me, it would be hugely easier for me to make a UI design that did not have to run on lower resolution screens, it would change a variety of different things.


This is a pretty good example of how it is easy for someone to not really have an understanding of the various kinds of constraints and tradeoffs that come into play with UI design, it is not the exact same thing as graphic design although they are frequently mistaken for one another by graphic designers.


- Michael

I'm going to lock this thread now since it is getting rather ridiculous.

- Michael

All good points Michael,

i hope I didn't contribute to the ridiculousness, I tried to be constructive!