There is so much insane “spewage” that has appeared, I honestly dont even know where to begin. There are fallacies all over the place, and the level of spite coming from some is astounding, especially the comments about how those who dont put their work up for judgement or vindication are not the “kind” of people they want around contributing to the development. A forum is defined by dialog and discussion which this is. Everyone is free to communicate and yes even trade in ideas, not everyone will disagree…but the moment the facist minded individuals show up and start saying who should and should not contribute, who should and should not be ostracized, is the moment its gone beyond friendly and logical dialog. It needs to end at that point, it is immature and totally uncalled for.
Now that thats off my chest, some responses I havent followed up on… (Part 1)
My response to your previous post was mostly just the conveying of information. Even informing you that you have misread or overlooked the content of the posts in question. An example of this is coming to the conclusion that we are asking for pop out windows in blender (despite the fact they already exist) merely because there was a discussion about how Maya implements their UV editor.
I wasnt being sarcastic either, because you did say, and I quote “In the 3dviewport, drag with left mouse button down does not do box select. I would be happy to have it be so;” I merely helped confirm what you said you would be happy about.
I hope my post wasnt seen as attacking you or mocking you in any way, though there was a hint of frustration on my part due to you informing me about methods which I had already acknowledged in the previous post.
As for where you can follow the current direction of UI changes, made for the sake of consistency (as Cukuhnen pointed out), not necessarily conformity or mimicry of specific competing applications… you can follow it here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Doc/Projects/UI/ui-targets
As Jonathan Williamson put it “Unless there’s a very good reason, all selection tools should be made consistent across all editors.” and as you can see nearly everyone agreed with that line of thought. Those who had a strong influence on the direction of the 2.5 changes also are leaning towards the left mouse based defaults. Doing so makes it consistent across the entire UI, not back and forth depending on editor or input panel. Who wants to select using the file browser with the Right Mouse button? I dont think anyone does.
The UI team knows what they are doing, while they are given feed back, its obvious they dont cave into at all input or any at all.
No worries, in the link I provided, you can find more links to the developer.blender.org pages, and they are fully aware that its not a simple change but one that would have to be approached on a much deeper level. They are not throwing out idea’s blindly, its clear there is a plan involved and its very well thought out so far.
I do appreciate your concerns about the future, and that current users are not doing enough to support Blender and that the BF should do whatever needs to be done to attract more users. Unfortunate that it has come to that.
Blender users are behind these developments. Nothing unfortunate has happened though, its just the evolution of Blender. Its not merely about attracting more users, far from it based on what you read in the developer channels, in fact its more about perfecting Blender. I rarely see solutions posted to some of the problems Blender has, if anything, a few here in BA almost act like there are no problems and as such offer no solutions but would rather just attack those who do. , Sometimes I do think you might dig your heels into the ground when it come to some proposed fixes or changes. Not that thats a bad thing, as long as any response following that feeling is constructive.
The problem with this biased post, that is far from being accurate, is that it not only conveys a sense of elitism but far too much assumption as well. It is intellectually dishonest to call or write off people as Trolls because they type THOROUGH responses, and to say you dont have time to respond to their responses is weak. You dont need to be as thorough in responding, but its a bit silly to find excuses to write off the validity of someone else’s posts just because you want them to be trolls, or fit into some delusional idea of a UI war with some precious UI that has to be protected. It is silly.
I have been using Blender so long that I am customised to the eyeballs
and the UI changes are not that big a deal to me, but look at how much developer time it’s soaking up. That does have an effect on the progress of Blender, and although my contribution to the BF funds is minuscule in comparison to the big guns I still feel that it could have gone to better purpose…
Many of those on the UI team have been using blender for a long time as well. In fact there used to be a UI team, and that lead to the 2.5 changes, but it seemed to have fallen apart after awhile. What you see now is the bi-product of a change in direction which brought back modules with their independent teams. The UI team is just one of many, and the UI wasnt supposed to stop in development either. The further development of the UI isnt meant to hurt the current user base, but help make it better for all users, old and new.
With open source software and a community behind it, change is expected, even drastic changes from time to time. Its one of the strengths open source projects have over the commercial closed source ones which are often more locked into design choices made years ago.
Here is a video from 2008 by William Reynish, who had a huge hand in designing the 2.5 interface. You can see that the progress explained then didnt necessarily make it that far after the initial release. He’s also behind many of these changes, have some faith.
