New Vertical Tabs Are Hard To Read

I just pulled down a 2.69.8 candidate that has the new TABs for the tool panel.

Vertical TABs are really a bad idea, you can’t read the words when in that direction. It would be better if they were horizontal across the top and dockable (as icon or text). This implementation seems like a knee-jerk reaction to community complainers and doesn’t seem have a lot of thought behind it.

“Sure we can put wings on that car, but it doesn’t mean it will fly”

This has already been discussed ad nauseam in other UI threads, already. If vertical text was unreadable, we wouldn’t stack books vertically, either. The main problem is the bad contrast.

I would like dockable tabs as well, but this is a bit different use-case. Horizontal tabs don’t work here, there’s no space for them. Blender solves the problem essentially the same as Modo. What’s your solution, then?

If some people get upset about minute changes like this already, there can never be major UI changes without having a lot of people upset. Deal with it, people.

unreadable !
if we cannot read then put some icons instead!

happy blendering

Atom, vertical tabs are NOT DONE YET. Jonathan Williamson is working on the styling as we speak so that it is more readable. Remember, until it says 2.7 as the version number, consider these features incomplete and a work in progress.

I agree that Icons make it more readable, and its been discussed that adding icons can happen at a later date, but for the sake of getting the core functionality in… its not the priority.

Tabs are NOT done or OFFICIAL yet, FFS! Do we need another useless thread about this? Furthermore, saying it´s a knee-jerk reaction is an insult to the careful and ongoing deliberations by the UI team. They´re putting a lot of work into this, and they´re NOT DONE YET!

the way vertical text is read is by tilting your head. I don’t see other disadvantages to this.

if blender was the only software that made use of vertical text I would think twice but that is not so

contrast can be tweaked via theme

Books aren’t usually stacked vertically. If you (ever) visit a library you will soon notice it indeed is hard to read the titles of books, but for practical reasons books are stacked horizontally. If they were on vertical stack it would be easier to read titles, but difficult to grab books from the stack (not to mention put them back).

Meh, i think they’re OK, and if you make them as just icons it should look better too. But holy crap, when did they officially add editable motion trails? That’s the real news if you ask me…

Pesho, thanks for pointing this out! - At this moment I am animating a camera path and these trails are really helpful to make the actual speed more predictable and easier to edit.

Tip for the others: To read the vertical menus, turn your head slightly sideways! Try it, it works! And it has the nice side effect of avoiding a stiff neck from computer work! Happy orthopedic blending.

Do you people have anything more important to complain about? Vertical texts are unreadable? Are you serious? Are you creating 3d or just looking at the UI? Don’t you have any sense of space without even reading them? This annoys the hell out of me. Here are these folks trying to fit this massive info in the best possible way, here is this guy complaining about vertical text. This is not even new. Many apps have vertical texts…

The last version of the tab is great I think, it’s readable.

Tabs are NOT done or OFFICIAL yet, FFS! Do we need another useless thread about this? Furthermore, saying it´s a knee-jerk reaction is an insult to the careful and ongoing deliberations by the UI team. They´re putting a lot of work into this, and they´re NOT DONE YET!

Why so? I noticed on some of your last posts. I much prefer to read some opinions instead.

Yeah another useless thread, I agree.
However, I will keep posting on all these useless threads:

New UI (tabs etc) is in trunk!
Meaning it shares the same preferences folders with the last official 2.69 blender.
If prefs brake the official, what then?
How to test new blender builds like this?
I see, these are experimental and on our own risk.
So, call it 2.70 right now, to avoid all these risks. We have to.
I would like to have your opinions on this serious matter.

Its ok if you dont like something, ‘hard to read vertical text’ its a valid point, there is no reason for others to ridicule the thread.
One idear by someone was to have stacked text like so.
A
d
d
https://developer.blender.org/T37601#30

I think this is a picture of latest version.

I love the new Vertictal tabs, I find the idea of Horizontal tabs very bad and one of the big reason I hated the old Blender GUI (previous to 2.5) . This is definitely a big improvement for blender I only hope more like this is coming. A big thank you to the developer/s behind these I really appreciate it.

I dont object in the idea of having Horizontal tabs if its completely optional. As long as I am not forced to use it I am fine with it. Horizontal tabs are know for taking too much GUI space in GUIs that are designed Vertically which is the case with Blender GUI. And of course I prefer Vertical GUIs.

Nope thats waste GUI space too, so I will pass.

I don’t think the thread is useless, personal opinions are not useless, software is made to make people happy not unhappy.But in the end the opinion of the majority will have to be taken into account as the one with most gravity.

It’s not so much about stylizing what is there. It is just a waste of screen space and bad design to begin with. If you want something readable in English, vertical layout is not the way to go. Maybe for Chinese characters it makes sense.

I just hope there is a way to turn off these new UI “feature” and use Blender as it was/is.

Yeah, vertical tabs are just a waste of screen space and bad design…

Which is why: Modo, 3DS MAX, Maya, and Cinema 4D, to name a few, make use of vertical tabs. Vertical tabs, horizontal tabs, they take up the same space, however with wide screen displays, there is far more vertical to give than horizontal.

Good news, there is a turn off button. Its called using the version that doesnt have them.

I hope they further compress the GUI by removing a lot of the text and replacing it with icons. Let the tooltip has most of the text. This one of the things I seriously miss from Truespace :frowning: awesome GUI. But I am very happy they took this first step at least, there is definetly hope for Blender.

If this is a taste of things to come they have my full support.

The vertical tabs can be disabled with python code, though you would have reorganize the tools the way you want them.

I’m digging the vertical tabs myself, bring 'em on! :slight_smile:

On normal condition i would agree with you, but there if you use Blender to model, Blender 2.69 have the knife, an important modelling tool, that have a very annoying bug (that affect tools like Knife Project too as it use the knife code) that have been fixed since then, but with the fix not retrofitted into the stable 2.69.

So if you want the knife without the annoying bugs, with the lack of 2.69 bugfix update, you’ll be forced into 2.70, even if you don’t like those tabs at all.