Measuring, analyzing

 From:  Michael Gibson
3013.16 In reply to 3013.11 
Hi 3dcnc,

quote:
I am not a programmer, but is it that difficult to just add a button.

It's not difficult technically to add a button, but it is very difficult UI design wise to add in new features that impact the UI in a major way like new buttons.

If I just add in a bunch of buttons all over the place in MoI, it will not take long before the UI is heavily overloaded with a zillion buttons all over the place and at that point it loses the streamlined and easy to use nature that is one of its major benefits currently.

In order to keep MoI having a friendly interface and maintaining the "ease of use" factor, I tend to be very conservative about adding in new buttons - I don't add them in just willy-nilly but only after carefully considering where they can be well organized for a long time.

With this function for instance, I'd like to eventually have it in some kind of "Analyze" or possibly "Dimension" palette on the side pane, but it takes a lot of thinking and design time to figure out exactly how to arrange big portions of the UI like that.

So it is actually a pretty major and complex issue, not something that I treat lightly at all.

I do expect to have a set of tools for things in this general area worked in for MoI v3.

But sorry, it takes a lot of design time to do a high quality UI, and one of the easiest ways to ruin it is to just stick in a whole bunch of stuff without careful planning.

- Michael