Hi Jonathan,

> At the moment there appears to be a lot of fragmentation of available resources for
> customisation of the MoI user experience & toolset.

Yup, this is because streamlining the process of customization has not been a high priority for MoI yet. Customization just in general is something that I consider to be in the specialized "power user" type area of usage and not really part of the core basic functionality.

The main resources though are previous messages here on the forum and also Petr's page which you've already found.

I have to admit, I sometimes wonder about the wisdom of having the various kinds of customization and scripting available in MoI at all.. It can be somewhat discouraging for me to help people do individual types of customization but then end up with criticism about it not being all documented and categorized or whatnot at the same time as well...

At any rate, I do definitely want to improve the customization experience in the future, there are just other more basic and more widely applicable things that still need attention as a higher priority.


> A prime example from my own usage patterns this week is that I was looking for a way
> to have the object snaps permanently open (as I like to change these on the fly as I work)
> and it took a number of searches on the forum for me to find the script/html file I was looking
> for. I would consider this feature to be core to MoI and not a 'power user' feature and the sort
> of thing that should be easily accessible.

It's a kind of odd example - MoI is really designed so that it works well to just leave all object snap types left on all the time. Things that caused problems in Rhino like with how Center object activates all the time are set up differently in MoI.

It's intended that other than for some specialized purpose you should just leave all object snap types enabled all the time and only turn on or off object snapping as a whole (by clicking on the bottom toolbar button for it) if they are getting in your way for a particular situation.

That's how I use it, and from what I can tell from the overall low amount of discussion about this particular thing I'm pretty certain that the vast majority of users do that as well...


I guess maybe it's possible in your case that you feel you need to have this particular UI set up because you do need it in Rhino? But you need it in Rhino because of how some of Rhino's object snaps work where some of them kind of hog attention and so can't be just left on all the time.... The same issue has been designed out of MoI's snaps specifically so you don't need to constantly enable/disable individual snap types in MoI.

- Michael

""""""""""(seeing as both Petr's script resource and the Wiki are over a year behind current developments. """"""""""""""

Those resources pages are also more geared towards "a release" which was a year ago or so for the released V2.

The beta process moves fast and many things change, even core stuff.

The resource you are looking for is right here! There are many people that follow along and understand some of the changes that are happening and can help give you info you are looking for, and Michael responds every day.

So instead of digging in the wiki, just ask here, and you'll get 5 or 6 responses within minutes.

> I guess maybe it's possible in your case that you feel you need to have this particular UI set up because you do need it in Rhino? But you need it in Rhino because of how >some of Rhino's object snaps work where some of them kind of hog attention and so can't be just left on all the time.... The same issue has been designed out of MoI's >snaps specifically so you don't need to constantly enable/disable individual snap types in MoI.

And you've succeeded magnificently well in this department. As I mentioned I my first post the overall construction lines/object snapping workflow is the thing that has impressed me most about MoI. It's just a personal preference that probably has more to do with how I use snapping in my polygonal software suites - C4D & Modo, both of which have vastly inferior snapping to MoI hence my reliance on Sketchup for polygonal prototyping (which also has excellent snapping via it's inference workflows). It's nothing specifically to do with MoI or Rhino, I just at times (especially on detailed models) I like to turn down the 'visual clutter' of having every snapping indicator flash in my viewport.

Apologies if I appeared in any way over-critical, I hoped I was being constructive about my own personal experience with MoI. An experience which in the main has been nothing but pleasurable.

jm

Hi Jonathan, no problem - and certainly your feedback is valid too!

It would be better if there was more information in the wiki. But I sort of don't really like messing with it that much so it tends to get neglected. I just prefer to focus my energy here on the forum and in improving the software itself.

And certainly a better overall organization of scripts and customization resources would be helpful. I do want to have that in the future. In a certain sense I don't want to spend a lot of energy on the wiki for this purpose since I think that a kind of built in library browser would be better in the long run. The trick is finding enough time to work on that, it will probably still be a while since there are just other more fundamental areas to cover first.

For UI customization a tricky problem is how to allow UI customization while at the same time incorporating changes to the UI that come from new feature additions as well.

The things you are asking about will come eventually I think, it kind of takes a long time to do a good job in these particular areas though.

- Michael

Also is copy/paste back and forth between MoI and Rhino working ok for you now?

- Michael

I noticed that they released a new beta of Rhino this week so I'll download that in the morning and let you know - it's 2am here in the UK - burning the midnight oil once again so must get to bed!!! :)

Downloaded and tested and it works perfectly on OS X as it does on Windows. Must have been a glitch in the beta build of Rhino I was running. :)

Thanks again

jm