Thanks Michael! Much appreciated.

One more question, I spend some time in my job tweaking CSS for websites, etc.. Is it possible to change the whole look and feel of the GUI via CSS? If so, is there a decent workflow for this (firebug for MoI?).

OK. I see now how to select objects in styles by clicking on a non-visible button to the right of the style. I get that it's not really PC anymore to have a bunch of 'toggle' button icons next to a list--> too much visual noise.

As a thought experiment in GUI design, I might try and put that same icon to the LEFT of the Styles where 2 other controls (visible and color) are. That way when a 'partial' selection is made, it would show up half-filled (as it does now on the right), thus helping the user to notice it as the OTHER buttons are toggles as well. Just an idea.

The contrarian argument, especially for CAD programs, is that users sooner or later get around to noticing the 'half-selection' mode and inquire. Certainly we aren't building an ATM (where everyone needs to be successful on the first interaction with the interface), and CAD programs can certainly demand more 'learning' from users.

Overall, I'm most pleased at the progressive disclosure of your GUI. Nice job. Clearly a lot of attention has been paid.

Hi Chipp,

> One more question, I spend some time in my job tweaking CSS for websites, etc.. Is
> it possible to change the whole look and feel of the GUI via CSS? If so, is there a
> decent workflow for this (firebug for MoI?).

Yup, pretty much the whole UI for controls like buttons and such is controlled by .css - most of it comes from moi.css which you can find in the \ui subdirectory. On the Mac right-click and choose "show package contents" and inside there got o drive_c/moi/ui

But there isn't any special tooling set up to do it, it just involves editing the file in a text editor.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

"But there isn't any special tooling set up to do it, it just involves editing the file in a text editor."

Based on the little bit of sleuthing I did with Max's interface, I suspect the workflow looks like:

Edit CSS / Save..
Launch MoI to view GUI
Quit MoI
Edit CSS / Save
Rinse and repeat...

I guess with the source code you can create a manual refresh mode where you don't need to quit MoI each time an edit is made to the CSS. Is there any way for us to check the CSS changes w/out relaunching?

Hi Chipp,

> I get that it's not really PC anymore to have a bunch of 'toggle' button icons
> next to a list--> too much visual noise.

Yeah I don't like it so much when there is a big grid of controls on each line. It tends to be nice for readability if there's often not much there other than the text itself.

But those invisible clickable areas (which are not always invisible, just in their "off" state like hidden has no eye showing, and unselected has no selection dot showing), could get a bit tricky to use if the were nested a couple deep, so I wanted to only put them on the left and right outside edges.


> As a thought experiment in GUI design, I might try and put that same icon
> to the LEFT of the Styles where 2 other controls (visible and color) are. That
> way when a 'partial' selection is made, it would show up half-filled (as it does
> now on the right), thus helping the user to notice it as the OTHER buttons are
> toggles as well. Just an idea.

It could probably work ok that way, the thing I would not like is when both visibility and selection were in their off states that would be a kind of an especially big blank area on the left side, and maybe targeting the inside click zone would be a little less natural than when they're all the way to one side.


> The contrarian argument, especially for CAD programs, is that users sooner or
> later get around to noticing the 'half-selection' mode and inquire. Certainly we aren't
> building an ATM (where everyone needs to be successful on the first interaction with
> the interface), and CAD programs can certainly demand more 'learning' from users.

MoI is largely based on this philosophy where I figure it's not so bad to require a certain level of learning to uncover more functionality over time...

The problem with trying to make every single function immediately obvious right off the bat is the amount of clutter that accumulates with everything trying to get a lot of simultaneous attention, that then brings about various unpleasant side effects of it taking longer for the "everyday" stuff because there's so much stuff to wade through. It's a big focus for MoI to try and keep the basic stuff have a fast and fluid streamlined feel to it.


Thanks, - Michael

Hi Chipp,

> I guess with the source code you can create a manual refresh mode where you don't need
> to quit MoI each time an edit is made to the CSS. Is there any way for us to check the
> CSS changes w/out relaunching?

There is a mode you can set in moi.ini to prevent file caching and make MoI reload files from disk each them they are called. See here for that:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=6727.2

But that mainly helps when you are developing a command where the command's UI gets reloaded and cleared out every time the command is run.

But the main UI is not really like that since it stays loaded after MoI has started up.

You might try sticking a button in the UI panel itself (like in CommandBar.htm or SidePane.htm) that has onclick="window.location.reload();" in it, I'm not entirely sure if that will work but it might.

There are also a few additions in MoI to try and make it a bit easier to build reusable controls in HTML, there's a templating system that expands a control to have additional HTML content inside of it, like for instance when the UI loader sees a <moi:CommandButton> element in the HTML, it checks for a template named CommandButton.htm and if found it fills the interior of the element with the content from that template file. That makes it easier for controls to have some interior structure of HTML to them but only need to be declared as a single element at the main document level.

- Michael