Hi Ed,
> For changing the color i think double clicking can works
> by clicking the color swatch twice.
You can actually already do this by holding down the Ctrl key when clicking on the color swatch, that pops up a color picker that lets you change that item's color.
Also another current shortcut for editing styles is if you right-click on the style line of the Properties Panel here:
That will pop up the "Edit style" dialog that lets you edit either the name or the color of the style.
Doing the color editing on a double-click on the swatch would have the same kind of problem I described earlier, since a single click on the swatch already performs a different action of assigning the selected objects to that style. That can be awkward when a single click and a double click do totally different things, because it's a bit too easy to get the single click action to be triggered accidentally.
Double clicks tend to work more easily when they are kind of an extension of what the single click does, like when single-click does a "list item selection", and then a double click edits that item which was just selected by the single click.
re: Dragging items
Dragging is another problem area because dragging on the eye icon area is already used for a different "swiping" action that lets you turn on or off a sequence of items with one mouse action. Currently dragging on the object name does not do anything but probably in v3 there will be a menu that will pop out with some additional actions on it and dragging will then let you work with the menu more quickly since you will be able to drag over a menu item and release the mouse rather than doing separate clicks to open the menu and pick the menu item.
So soon I expect that the dragging action will be all taken up for other purposes.
Dragging while in the "Edit styles" dialog would make sense, the only reason why I didn't do it in there is because it is a fair amount of work. Also re-ordering styles is just not something that you generally need to do very often, and it is just not a big target area for me to focus on optimizing things that you don't need to do very often.
> To rename an style you can do it by clicking, waiting
> and clicking again like when you rename a folder in windows
> or mac, thats the way the item list works in Modo too.
That kind of "click then wait and click again" method of folder renaming is actually one of the more awkward problem areas of current GUI systems, it's too easy for it to get crossed with double-click.
It's probably near the top of the list of problematic UI in folder interaction on desktop systems currently. So I'm not so sure it is a good idea to emulate it.
> The issue of the deleting mechanism doesnt apply to the add one.
Yes, adding in a + shortcut for adding styles is a possibility. In general though I've tried to avoid having buttons that only have icons on them and no text labels since those tend to lead to a cryptic UI. Having things on a menu that pops out tends to be clearer since the menu can describe each thing with text.
A + sign is probably not as cryptic as a lot of other kinds of little icons, but it would be a shortcut for something that is already pretty easy to access - you can already trigger Add style by clicking down on the menu launcher and holding down the mouse button, moving the mouse downwards by just a small distance to go over the "Add style" menu item and then releasing the mouse button.
Then another problem is that there is already a + sign within the Styles section title already which is used as an indicator for expanding and contracting its tree section. So that could be kind of weird to have 2 + symbols within the same thing that did different actions...
I do have different plans for enhancing the scene browser though, one will be a selection indicator on the right side of a scene browser item slot that shows whether that item has selected objects or not, there is some previous discussion of that here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3254.8
- Michael
