Michael,

this is just a suggestion, say I have an object named "test" that's selected or not and say I wanted to name a couple more objects this same name, the easiest way I can think of would be to just click on the name in the browser, in this case "test" and magically all of then would have the same name.

Thanks,
Felix

Hi Felix,

> this is just a suggestion, say I have an object named "test"
> that's selected or not and say I wanted to name a couple
> more objects this same name, the easiest way I can think
> of would be to just click on the name in the browser, in this
> case "test" and magically all of then would have the same name.

The problem is that I will eventually want to have some more additional functions available to act on a scene browser item, so I'm probably going to make a menu pop up when you click on the name.

That menu will have an item on it that will let you assign that name to the current selection, and then it can also have all sorts of other functions like "rename" , "remove name", etc...

It could be possible to then add in some kind of shortcut method for the assignment, like maybe right-click or ctrl+click on the name could do that.

But being able to access a variety of additional actions would give a lot of functionality and that's why I want to reserve the regular click for giving access to a pop up menu.

- Michael

That is good but I insist, grouping objects with others that already have a name assigned to them is a very frequent task and i think it should have a on-clic-away button that groups them like the color swatch in the styles section. I suggest a simple dot.

Hi Ed - the difficulty is that the dot does not particularly suggest any particular function and little bits of UI that don't suggest any purpose to them can lead to some confusion.

A + sign would be more like "add to this group", but unfortunately that will lead to a lot of other confusion when hierarchical group structures are displayed in there which will use a + symbol as the place to click on to expand the group to see the child items.

- Michael

I think that like the color swatch, first you don't imagine that it is used to put objects inside that style, but then you read or somebody tells you that it function is that if you have something selected and you clic on it the selected objects became that style. The same will occur with the Dot next to the eyeball, you easily make the analogy between the color swatch and the dot, better yet it can be a square like the color swatch, the analogy will be easier to recognize.

Hi ed, the problem is that styles have a color, so a color swatch is a natural part of the style UI.

Object names do not naturally have a "dot" associated with them, so having a dot next to the object name is not really a natural part of it's UI.

That's why it would look kind of weird to have that.

I'm very conservative about putting in weird-seeming UI into MoI, I really like to try other approaches first and only do a weird thing if it's the last resort.

- Michael

I see.