Hi all,

I am attempting to use the Ash alternative interface. I have it installed and everything is working...EXCEPT...the picture that Ash published shows all of the various menus open at the same time. I can't get that to happen. Opening one will cause another to close. I would like to have as many open at once as I can. This was the reason that I decided to try this UI. Can someone tell what I did wrong? What do I have to change to make them all to stay open as long as there is enough space?

This UI looks very nice, but as long as I'm looking, are there other UI's that people have done and posted for use?

Thanks,
Mark

Hi Mark,

> Opening one will cause another to close.

That should only happen if it thinks that there is not enough space to have both open, where having both open would make a scroll bar appear.

If you're seeing that when you do have enough space maybe there is some kind of height set on the element containing those panes, or something like that.

Can you post an attachment of your current UI, maybe post just your current SidePane.htm so I can see what might be going on in there.

- Michael

You could also set the resolution down to 9 or something to see if that was why they all stayed open...

Michael,
Here is a screen grab of my current UI (NOT the Ash UI) in PDF format. I'm also including a copy of the sidepane.htm file. Are these what you need, or do you need these things with the Ash interface installed?
Mark

Michael,
Is it possible that the Ash interface wasn't written for v2? The one command that I tried didn't work the same. It didn't seem to work right. It was the "extrude" command. I selected one of the shapes that you see in the screen grab. I then clicked on the "extrude" icon, and tried to type in a distance. I typed in "1/8" and then hit return but nothing happened. That would certainly work with my current v2 UI.

Hi Mark, yeah I meant the SidePane.htm with the Ash UI installed, so I could see if there was any problems in it.

But looking at your PDF screenshot, you do not seem to have a lot of empty space available on your screen.

It doesn't appear to me that a large number of pallettes will physically fit in that space when they are all open. That's probably why you cannot open them all at once - when you open one if it would cause the UI to become larger than the available space, it will close a different palette. It could be possible to modify that, but that will then result in having a scroll bar appear and having some sections actually scrolled completely off screen, meaning that you would have to scroll up or down before you could access them at all.

It isn't physically possible to show like 1500 pixels worth of stuff on a 1200 pixel screen all at the same time, that's like trying to carry 20 gallons of water in a 10 gallon bucket... ;)

You could try shrinking the size of the UI like Burr was mentioning - to do that go to Options > General, and adjust the UI Size slider to the left a ways.

- Michael

Hi Mark,

> is it possible that the Ash interface wasn't written for v2?

Yes, I think that's correct - it was written for v1 and not for v2, it would need to be modified to work for v2 and have all the new commands for v2 in it.

I was thinking that you may have been working on modifying it, that's why I wanted to see your SidePane.htm file to see if you had made some changes that had some unexpected side effect of limiting the side pane's size...

But no, it won't work to just take that UI based on v1 and just pop it into v2 - right now if you want to use that alternative UI you would have to use it on v1.

- Michael

I'll reinstall the Ash interface tomorrow and get you the files. Meanwhile, my screen resolution is 1680x1050. I guess the it's just not big enough. And here, I thought it was a pretty good monitor...8^(

Are there any alternate UI's that are based on v2? I would just like to have more of the commands available all of the time, although, I'll have to admit, some of those augmented commands looked pretty useful.
Mark

Hi Mark,

> I'll reinstall the Ash interface tomorrow and get you the files.

Actually you can skip that part - I'd say that the problem is that with 1050 vertical resolution you just don't have enough space available to show a whole bunch of palettes all once...

When you don't have enough space to fit all the open pallettes, it is normal that other ones will close - that helps keep everything displayed on the same screen so that you can activate a different palette with one click instead of potentially having it completely off screen and needing to use a scroll bar to access it.


> And here, I thought it was a pretty good monitor...8^(

Well, there's nothing really wrong with it - MoI's regular UI structure is set up to work well with things of that resolution. But with that amount of space there is not a whole lot of room to display a whole lot of stuff all at the same time...

That's why MoI's default UI is not set up in that way of trying to have a whole lot of stuff all simultaneously on the screen, because that only works well with higher resolution screens.


> Are there any alternate UI's that are based on v2?

A couple of people have posted that they were working on some, but I don't think that any complete final ones have been posted.

- Michael

So what vertical resolution do you recommend? I see monitors with ver. res. of 1080. Will that show that much more, or do you have to go to a ver. res. of 1200 which seems to be the next step up after 1080?

Hi Mark,

Michael is correct. I did this for V1 so it won't work correctly for V2.

I did start to change it for V2 but I couldn't keep up with the betas :-)


As for screen size:

I have dual 1600 x 1200 monitors, which is the size I designed to. These days I would go for at least a 24in 1900 x 1200 monitor.

Personally I really miss the extra vertical pixels. If I had the money I would probably go for a 30" 2560 x 1600 resolution.

Hi Mark,

> So what vertical resolution do you recommend?

Well, it is kind of a matter of taste - it's not necessarily true that the hugest possible monitor is automatically better. It depends on your desk size, distance you are sitting from the monitor, the dot pitch size of the monitor (how dense the pixels are), etc...

There is nothing really wrong with your current monitor...

But if you want to fit more stuff on the screen all at the same time you would want to have a higher vertical resolution.


> I see monitors with ver. res. of 1080. Will that show that much more,

Well, your current vertical resolution is 1050, right? So 1080 is only 30 more pixels higher, which is not very much, something like 2 more lines of text.


> or do you have to go to a ver. res. of 1200 which seems to be the
> next step up after 1080?

Yes, that would give you more vertical space.


But MoI is already designed to work well with your current monitor already...

- Michael