Where has the 'UI Team' gone?

About Tabs:
when you start something it would be good practice to finish it, and fulfill promises …

Thanks,
paolo

Hopefully they’re still on it, with Brecht having left Blender, they lost one of the 2 modules owners, i don’t know if it’s impacting those code review processes.

For references :
UI team page : https://developer.blender.org/project/view/12/
UI team open tasks : https://developer.blender.org/maniphest/project/12/type/Design/

edit : wrong url to the UI team page, fixed

Its also good practice to be more specific about an issue you have with a software package. How can a developer improve a product if you don’t describe in more detail what is at fault?

Exactly how are the tabs in Blender “not finished”? Do you have any constructive suggestions as to how they can be improved?

SamusDrake,
I can assure you that they know what I’m speaking about, no coincidence that I speak of promises, we speak of the period of development of version 2.70, we are now in that of 2.72.

paolo

There’s been some minor UI upgrades already for 2.72 (like better looking tooltips). Psy-Fi is also busy banging away on Pie Menus and may get the functionality needed for their generation in during this cycle (and along with that, I believe he is also a member of the UI team now).

So there is at least some work going on.

Wasn’t Ton supposed to handle the pie menus? I remember they’ve been on the list since something like 2.68.

Yes, initially he was. He got too busy. Antony Riakiotonis is working on them now. They are pretty much functionally complete - just needs some more individual menus to be made and a little polish here and there. Aiming at next release. You can play with the pie-menus branch as well if you can compile.

Riakiotonis??!!??:spin::D:no:

EDIT:
Sorry for the delay, but the Germany vs Algeria match was starting!

Pie Menus is being worked on, and, even if it has been a long wait for it, in the meantime we have the addon.

For Tabs is different: in the state in which they are, they are not useful at all, for now they have only made things worse IMHO, they should therefore be completed and improved as soon as possible. EDIT 2: (or removed altogether)

paolo

@sourvinos
One for sure, Anthonis is from Crete, they know how to cook delicious pies.

Where has the ‘UI Team’ gone?

to Brazil, I hope so.
:smiley:

Man, people really like to hate on tabs. I love them, even in their current form. It took me all of 10 minutes to learn where everything is, and having tabs for individual addons is great. I’ve changed them to fit my custom theme nicely, and I’m pretty pleased with how they’re coming along overall.

I have no doubt about Antony’s fine work, and I can see he is very busy with Pie-menus branch and others, he is not in Brazil for sure!

My concern is that Tabs, such as many other things in blender could remain unfinished.

paolo

m9105826, tell me please, when you split a new window, or you change context in the viewport, don’t you have to re-configure all tabs in the T panel for the nth time?

paolo

UI Team is still here! With Brecht leaving we’re talking on having a couple more members join the dedicated team.

I haven’t been able to do as much as I would like in the last month or two but progress is absolutely still being made. Keep in mind that UI progress is not a one week, one month, or even one year task. It is a constantly on-going task that just needs constant attention and constant progress. UI issues are not something that can be solved in such a short amount of time. They take a lot of thinking and a lot of experimenting/researching to find the right balance between improvement, change, and familiarity (to name just a few).

@JonathonW:
Good to hear mate. :slight_smile:

Would you mind letting me know (PM or here - I don’t care which) where left-click-to-select is on the agenda (or if it has been abandoned)? I’m not going to argue the merits or anything, but I know it was initially on the list and yet haven’t heard anything about it for a while. I prefer to know if/when something gets dropped, even if I disagree with the reasons for it.

Either way, thanks for your efforts mate. Some of us long-term BA folks are aware of just how much your vision improved the UI from pre-2.5 days (shudder)

@sourvinos, toolbar tabs is my work - how are they not finished?

This is a curious position to be accused of not fulfilling promises I didn’t know about :slight_smile:

@BTolputt - The design task for that is here. Not much activity as of late though.

Yeah, I know about that one. It’s how I know for a fact it was on the agenda. Given we’re two months since even a comment has been made and it’s kind of the key takeaway issue (mouse/keyboard in general - not just LMB) to have come out of the Andrew Price UI Era here on BA, I thought I’d check with the UI guy on the matter as to how things are progressing outside the public discussion.

Thanks Jonathan, I really appreciate your reassurance, as I said my main concern was that the development of Tabs would remained unfinished.

I am aware of the difficulties of creating a consistent and functional implementation, and that this takes time, I just think it might have been better achieve a greater organization before integrating them into the system.

Anyway I hope that all this happen soon.

paolo

Ideasman42,
Mine was not meant to be an accusation of not respecting promises, but rather an exhortation to do it soon.

These promises, not from you in particular, were to allow a greater customization of tabs, and with that I mean especially the ability to set up an our own default configuration, that one to get rid of tabs belonging to addons that have nothing to do with the context, and perhaps others that escape me now, and which unfortunately lie buried in several different threads of the past recent months.

They are by no means my requests, although I think they are essential, actually they have been presented, at the time, as things to do.

EDIT:
I would like to delve into the matter.
For how blender works, every time you open a new viewport you have once again to fight with tabs to get what you need, there’s no way to save your configuration once for all, what you can do is just save a startup file, but you cannot configure beforehand the new windows that you will open in the future, so you must spend a lot of time and have a lot of trouble every time.

Moreover, here I speak for my needs, now if I want in the T panel all the commands that I used to have before tabs, they take more space than before, so in general, as they are now, tabs are not good by any means for my needs.

And I find overly complicated that, in order to lock each tab, I have to pin three or four different headers, and that, in order to know which are currently open tabs I have to try them all (as each tab contains several entries with their own names).

paolo

According to this : http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Doc/Projects/UI/2.70-targets

nobody can deny than some UI targets have been postponed.

From my point of view, UI consistency would be to also have tabs for properties more than vertical tabs.

I know it is more difficult than toolbar tabs. Too long panels still need to be splitted in this column.
But it is really frustating to have no tab in properties column.

I know almost every shortcut for tools. So, I use toolbar for only 1 or 2 buttons or for paint modes.
But there is no shortcut for most of properties.
So, it should be usability priorities because it would have a speed impact on everyone’s workflow (newbies or old blenderheads).