Hi Jonah,

> i hope you don't think i was knocking Moi in any way.

No, not at all. I just didn't want to leave the impression that because Rhino has more tools than MoI, that it is universally better in all areas and for all purposes except for shelling and n-gon meshing. There seem to have been some conclusions along these lines in the Rhino newsgroup, but I think that things are rather a bit more complex than that.


> Constantly scrolling through tabbed palettes drives me crazy.

I'm not a fan of scrolling through UI either. That's why part of the design of the MoI palettes is that there isn't any scrolling - if you open up a palette which wouldn't fit on the screen, other palettes will collapse so that you don't have to scroll. This way the set of currently open tools always stays visible on the screen.

But certainly, needing to switch back and forth between different palettes too frequently can be a problem. There are parts of MoI's UI that are specifically designed to reduce this problem.

One big part is the command consolidation, where one command performs multiple functions depending on the selection, for example combining the equivalent of Fillet, FilletEdge, FilletSrf, and FilletPolyline into just one fillet button. A smaller number of buttons makes it easier to have more functionality exposed on the screen simultaneously.

The other big part is not having just one big tabbed palette. Having them grouped into smaller tab chunks makes it more likely that you can have more than one type of activity open simultaneously.

Another factor is that I have tried to group items more according to their activity, to make it more likely that you will use several tools within the same palette.

These factors help to reduce the problem in the current workflow.

Once the problem is reduced to a certain level, it isn't really a big problem anymore. It's not really terrible to switch palettes every once in a while to get to other tools, it is only a major issue if you have to do it with a particularly high frequency.

Many of the tools that will be added in future versions will not be high frequency use tools, for example dimensioning or rendering tools. So I don't think that there is really a reason to worry that adding such tools will destroy the current design...

- Michael