Don't glorify the old UI; there's a reason we spent several years rewriting it. If the old one was so good, why go to so much trouble? Truth is, we blender developers have always disliked the old UI, we simply weren't able to fix it for a long time. Defending it as awesome beyond all reason just fans the trolls.
I just want to say: Slashdotters, WE TOLD YOU SO. We developers told you there were reasons we couldn't fix the UI, that it would take a huge refactor. Well, we've done the huge refactor. It took several years, but we've done it! Ha! Take that, trolls!
What do you mean by consistency? I mean the modeler UI is fairly consistent, though the way tools are accessed is a little convoluted (something that's being fixed as part of the event/ui refactor project).
BTW, no blender dev really advocates replacing professional software with blender, that's not really it's purpose (yet;) ).
Joe
>> First of all, I realize that this e-mail was not necessarily about the
>> interface, but I'm going to prelude these comments with a comment about them
>> anyways.
Eh, how does the interface relate to this story? I mean, that was guarenteed to start Yet Another Slashdot Blender UI Flame Fest.
And for you blender UI haters (for the thousandth time) blender's UI is designed to be fast and easy to use, not easy to learn (and it is consistent with itself, yes, just not with other apps). Back when the UI was initially designed, a hotkey-based app was one of the fastest ways to work (pie/radial/marking menus hadn't become popular yet, for that matter they arn't popular now). However it's not particularly easy to learn such an app, especially back before we had header menus so users could at least find the function in the menu and see it's associated hotkey. There's also been significant technical difficulties with the UI code (though there's a project ongoing now to fix that, and hopefully allow much UI improvement).
Maya, (as an example of an app people find easy to learn and fast to use once they learn how to configure it) uses marking menus (basically pie menus) to replace the need to memorize tons of hotkeys. Hotkeys have the advantage of settling into your muscle memory; normals menus do not, nor do icons, but pie menus work fairly well for this. So instead of having tons of hotkeys, you put things into pie menus, which makes the user interface much more discoverable (if done right) and intuitive, especially if users can build their own menus and assign them to custom hotkeys.
Other then the marking menus, I personally think maya's UI is not well designed (it's customizable in the ways as I'd like, for example). However from what I can tell, the marking menus combined with what customizability is there works really well for people. Pie menus have been investigated for use in blender in the past, and will probably be considered again as part of the 2.5 event/ui refactor project.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't glorify the old UI; there's a reason we spent several years rewriting it. If the old one was so good, why go to so much trouble? Truth is, we blender developers have always disliked the old UI, we simply weren't able to fix it for a long time. Defending it as awesome beyond all reason just fans the trolls.
I just want to say: Slashdotters, WE TOLD YOU SO. We developers told you there were reasons we couldn't fix the UI, that it would take a huge refactor. Well, we've done the huge refactor. It took several years, but we've done it! Ha! Take that, trolls!
What do you mean by consistency? I mean the modeler UI is fairly consistent, though the way tools are accessed is a little convoluted (something that's being fixed as part of the event/ui refactor project). BTW, no blender dev really advocates replacing professional software with blender, that's not really it's purpose (yet ;) ).
Joe
>> First of all, I realize that this e-mail was not necessarily about the
>> interface, but I'm going to prelude these comments with a comment about them
>> anyways.
Eh, how does the interface relate to this story? I mean, that was guarenteed to start Yet Another Slashdot Blender UI Flame Fest.
And for you blender UI haters (for the thousandth time) blender's UI is designed to be fast and easy to use, not easy to learn (and it is consistent with itself, yes, just not with other apps). Back when the UI was initially designed, a hotkey-based app was one of the fastest ways to work (pie/radial/marking menus hadn't become popular yet, for that matter they arn't popular now). However it's not particularly easy to learn such an app, especially back before we had header menus so users could at least find the function in the menu and see it's associated hotkey. There's also been significant technical difficulties with the UI code (though there's a project ongoing now to fix that, and hopefully allow much UI improvement).
Maya, (as an example of an app people find easy to learn and fast to use once they learn how to configure it) uses marking menus (basically pie menus) to replace the need to memorize tons of hotkeys. Hotkeys have the advantage of settling into your muscle memory; normals menus do not, nor do icons, but pie menus work fairly well for this. So instead of having tons of hotkeys, you put things into pie menus, which makes the user interface much more discoverable (if done right) and intuitive, especially if users can build their own menus and assign them to custom hotkeys.
Other then the marking menus, I personally think maya's UI is not well designed (it's customizable in the ways as I'd like, for example). However from what I can tell, the marking menus combined with what customizability is there works really well for people. Pie menus have been investigated for use in blender in the past, and will probably be considered again as part of the 2.5 event/ui refactor project.
Joe