Michael,
Any thoughts to a swype/marking menu in the future? The more I play with Fusion, the better I like it. I'm finding my hands rarely need to leave the mouse and spacepilot. It gets even faster when the menu is memorized and gestures can be used. Of course this would require altering right click behavior. Maybe adopt Alibre's double button orbit...





Cheers,
Nick

Hi Nick - those have always seemed somewhat complex to me... Just kind of in general the concept of popping up a whole lot of stuff kind of right smack in your face like that is kind of non-MoI-ish.

But in the future I would like to have some kind of an option for some pop up UI, but probably targeting something pretty simple like just a toolbox where you could put some of your most frequently used tools.

I don't doubt that what you show there can be used quite efficiently when you have memorized the tool positions, but it's likely that beginning users will actually suffer just from the unusual UI structure. So focusing on that kind of UI would probably leave behind a certain amount of beginning users and also just more casual users who may only use MoI occasionally and would not end up investing enough time to reach the good level of having all those positioned memorized.

Things that rely heavily on memorization for maximum effectiveness kind of tend to be harmful to beginning and casual users like that.

- Michael

Please Michael, I beg you. Keep Moi's interface simple. Please.

I don't want bells and whistles and useless shiny stuff. I want it to work *simply*, without becoming bloated like every-single-other-piece-of-software-out-there.

Chris

I strongly second that.
eric

I would actually chop it down to just the circle part. Put the most frequently used tools/make it context sensitive.

I understand keeping it simple that's why I would chop the secondary menu. Memorization (actually muscle memory) is not required, but will happen anyway with continual use. Why not take advantage of it?

BTW- All of the tools are still available the standard way (for Fusion it's a context sensitive ribbon), this is just a second way for input and creates less mouse travel.

Chis-I would not consider efficiency gains "useless shiny stuff" and it would hardly create "bloat" if implemented right.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c58bN6ajJ4

Of course this is all my opinion, but I am glad Michael listens and takes notes even if everything can't be done or is not the desired direction.


Edit:I can't get flash video to work, I'm sure I'm missing something...

Marking_menu_video

Hi Nick

> I understand keeping it simple that's why I would
> chop the secondary menu. Memorization (actually
> muscle memory) is not required, but will happen
> anyway with continual use. Why not take advantage of it?

Well, the difficulty is that a radial menu is not guaranteed to be 100% better - you just don't normally read text arranged in a radial pattern as often as you see text in a more rectangular block pattern.

So having just a rectangular toolbox that pops up and has text on some more regular left-to-right rows is likely to be more readable and more instantly browsable.

Text arranged in an unusual and not frequently seen pattern can just tend to make people have to stop for split second and more consciously target each individual piece with their eyes. This effect is not so good, it's kind of one of those little split second irritations that can transform a workflow from feeling seamless and fluid into feeling kind of choppy and slightly interrupted all the time.

That's the reason why I generally tend to worry about how text is placed in a UI design, and it's why I avoided things like tabs that have a vertical alignment with text rotated 90 degrees from normal, that has the same kind of "instant readability" being harmed issue.

So that's kind of a difficult choice to make with a design like you're talking about - you've got to be aware of some of the negatives of that design in addition to the positives.

Again, I don't doubt that can be very efficient once someone has spent enough time to memorize the pattern so that they don't need to actually read the buttons, but there is a price to be paid with lower instant readability until someone gets to that point.

- Michael

Hi Nick, I watched the video you linked to here:

> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c58bN6ajJ4

And yes, it is cool that the speed of the marking menu is greater, but note that the greatest speed increase shown in that video is when the menu wasn't displayed at all and just a shorthand gesture was used.

That requires a significant amount of memorization and repetition to get to that level, so that particular thing is only going to benefit a relatively smaller group of users who sort of train themselves up to that level of proficiency.

It's certainly a valid strategy to structure the UI to primarily benefit those kinds of advanced users, but it's not really the strategy that MoI is oriented on.

- Michael

Gesture type mark menus are used in Solidworks for view changes and are a great time saver. However, SW works with engineering type views and doesn't have separate viewports like MoI. For instance, in SW, if you select a front view, you can still rotate it away from the front view accidentally. Once you have learnt the mark menu, it is a great time saver, but 1) You have to learn it and 2) This type of accidental view change doesn't happen in MoI.

>...but note that the greatest speed increase shown in that video is when the menu wasn't displayed at all and just a shorthand gesture was >used.

>That requires a significant amount of memorization and repetition to get to that level...

That's the muscle memory I mentioned. Not really intentional memorization. It just happens. Especially with only an 8-slice, single tier pie.

I actually resisted this menu all during the tech preview stages for the reasons you mentioned, it seemed kind of awkward at the time, being the AutoCAD fundamentalist I am. So I continued to use the standard menu commands until recently when it was officially released. After a day or two of fiddling I am already familiar with the press/pull, undo and draw commands and I caught myself just drawing with one hand on the spacepilot and the other on the mouse, never removing either hand to type anything for several minutes. I was amazed at how fluid and natural it felt. No hunting for a command button, no typing an alias, hotkey, or shortcut. It was all at the mouse. Weird.

I was actually pretty miffed (and still am to some degree) that there are no customizable/assignable shortcut keys in Fusion, but now I kind of understand they aren't really needed (but would still be nice).

I understand what you are saying, but I would take the trade-off of initial UI confusion for ultra fast modeling (probably not how you pull in new users or the un-initiate, I suppose).

I know it would make the underlying coding more complex, but maybe make it user selectable? Pie menu or box menu. Just a thought. :-)

This is a real-life story, I'm not trying to sell the software. I was just blown away by the fluidity and experience (and I'm not even good at it yet).

Anyway... here's to the next release of MoI!

Hi Steve - re: gestures in solidworks for view stuff - having the gestures cover a more narrow area like just view changes instead of a full menu would probably help keep them more limited in number and easier to memorize.

MoI itself does actually rely on a gesture, for creating construction lines while drawing you do a "hold and drag" gesture with the mouse rather than the regular click for placing a point.

But the shape of the gesture doesn't matter, it's just the drag action that does it, and my hope is that having just 1 gesture is a lot easier to remember than having many of them.

- Michael

Hi Nick,

> I know it would make the underlying coding more complex,
> but maybe make it user selectable? Pie menu or box menu.
> Just a thought. :-)

Yup, that could be possible, but they pretty much don't have anything in common with one another, so it's not so much about making some common code more complex, that would be more about implementing a completely different feature area that could then be enabled.

Just in general it's kind of hard for me to schedule time for developing full feature areas that will end up disabled by default.

Options to control behavior for advanced users tend to be more feasible for me to implement when they are more like a modification in behavior for something, not so much when they involve implementing a completely new feature area like this would be.

- Michael

Fair enough, but I had to try. :-)