On the other hand, Bill Gates became a gazillionaire by messing with the UI for DOS. What is Windows but a fancy UI layered on top of a bunch of buggy device drivers?
The interface of a software program is like the face of a friend - if it changes, however, we may be afraid. I’m working in software business and I’ve alway seen people who were afraid to change something on the interface of “their” program even if the improvement of usability was so obvious.
To me the current interface of blender has many chances to be improved. But there are some improvements currently discussed in the community I never would appreciate… so this is a very subjective topic…
- There’s always people who are going to take unreasonable stances.
- I think that if there’s an increase, it’s more a sign that people are getting tired of the discussions. Tired people=more unreasonable. The majority of the threads are turning out not to be about actual constructive UI improvement, but rather about the performance of Blender, people saying ‘I wish there was feature x’ and then someone else telling them ‘but it’s there’ and then the first going ‘but that implementation doesn’t make sense’ and then the latter going ‘but it makes perfect sense(in a technical manner)’, oh and let’s not forget the people that go “The developers are not paying attention to feature x”. Calculate in the general high inflamation level amonst BA users and that UI threads actually always end in disarray, because UI design is hard and the people in these threads are only out on what makes intuitively sense to them, and you have a recipe for disaster.
(No seriously. I play Dwarf Fortress. Look up a screenshot of Dwarf Fortress. Now realise that it has a worse UI than Blender. Then realise there’s a forum for that game. Now let me tell you, all the UI threads on there are content-wise pretty much the same, only there there’s people fighting with each other over the limited ascii set and micromanagement instead of right-click select and weirdly implemented features, the rest is pretty much the same)
Minor changes are needed, and all the time THEY ARE introduced slowly but wisely. This is not a problem.
But the statement about need to completely redesign the interface polarized the community.
I’d prefer not to change anything, than to spoil my favorite interface.
Thank Andrew. He started the “blender is broken” war intentionally to gain more attention.
I don’t think anyone (apart from Endi of course) is against change in principle.
There are some basic factors that makes people like me resist most of the proposed changes and they are that:
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Blender is not broken in any way. It is a seriously good piece of software, and I use it every day for around 8 to 10 hours and make my living using it. If something were broken, I would probably notice. It is the finest interface I have used since programming Basic on a ZX81 way back when. The reason why Endi (abc123) moans the way he does is because he is fed up with people dressing up their ignorance in Blender’s perceived shortcomings.
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UI changes are being made by people who are struggling to learn Blender. That’s their problem, not Blenders. No-one would propose having a manual option for a chainsaw so it becomes easier to learn how to use. Blender - like all 3D programs - is wildly complicated. There are no short-cuts to learn how to use it. Maya, 3DS Max et al are not fundamentally easier to learn beyond the first click.
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There is little point in trying to attract new users by dumbing down Blender. You simply attract dumber users. You have to have people who are prepared to sweat it out in order to expect to see them contributing to the community. If you attract 100,000 users who do not get beyond the simplest level of modelling, who because of that fail to participate in a meaningful way in the whole experience, what have you gained? Noise, that’s all. Thousands of posts full of drivel.
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Providing centralised documentation of all the really good tutorials available on the web and concentrating on improving the documentation will attract higher calibre noobs who will put the hundreds of hours in, that Blender - like every 3D program - requires. They will in turn enrich the community by contributing in a quality way. It will attract potential migrators from other 3D packages who will Blender a serious go, knowing that there will find a tutorial that addresses their specific need. Pro users = pro contributions, either in money, code or support.
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Only one or two points Andrew Price raised are actually an issue, and not one of them a show-stopper. I learned to live with them. So does everyone else who spends more than an hour or two using Blender. The rest of his arguments are based on one book which is aimed at addressing issues that affect ordinary users. Anyone using Blender at a serious level (pro-hobby or pro-work) is in a completely different category, of which most of the arguments raised are irrelevant. That’s why they are ignored by developers creating software for pro users, because the pro user would rather have bug-fixes and new features than psychology, and manage quite well thank you with all the problems raised.
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That last bit is worth repeating. The pro (hobby or work) user would rather have bug-fixes and new features than psychology, and manage quite well thank you with all the problems raised.
Interesting comment 
Some good points being rasied…I find it interesting to see peoples different views and opinions.
Thats why I started this…I wanted to basically see what others thought in regards to the development of blender etc…I didn’t want this to be a UI discussion…but more of a Blender as a whole.
I should say that when I said there’s not really anyone carrying on in the way you mentioned I meant in this forum. I have seen some comments in other forums but I was not convinced it was not someone just stirring things up. So when someone told me I should go hang out on some other forum to see how people are acting I have to say, this is the forum for Blender users, and I feel it’s fair to assess the general attitudes of Blender users from this forum’s comments.
I didn’t see a huge backlash when the UI was updated to its current format. Most of the changes proposed in the UI discussions are relatively small tweaks or additions to the current UI - not a complete redesign as happened before. Making the UI more user friendly will, almost by definition, make re-learning the changes relatively easy for an experienced blender user.
Yes some are aimed at making it more accessible to the novice - but we were all novices once (some of us still are). Todays novice could be tomorrows film maker. Making Blender more accessible and increasing its user base can only benefit Blender in the long term.
… but we were all novices once …
I have never been complaining novice.
Better question is why do some people think any and every change to Blender will improve it.?
Why does some 20 year old “industry standard” automatically == better?
Why does “20 year old commercial software does it” automatically == better
Why does “10 year old people are used to it” automatically == better
Why is anyone who like the way Blender does anything instantly a “fanboy unwilling to accept change”?
This mentality is a hindrance to real proposals and ideas about Blender, they get lost or turned off by the noise of those designing some fantasy software screenshot that is not one bit Blender and not one bit realistic to implement in 10 years.
Personally, I didn’t believe that Blender NEEDS to change.
But if there are people with good ideas, like Adrew Price showing this terrific new UI, well, F*** YEAH!!!
Only, don’t do it like 2.49-2.50 and then we need 10 versions for lost functionallity to return…
The start button was incredibly user friendly - most windows functions in one convenient place. It’s loss made windows less user friendly IMO.
Blender doesn’t have to make the mistake microsoft did in thinking they knew better than their users. In fact - by gathering consensus of the blender user base (via the forums, the conferences, polls etc) - blender’s UI will end up exactly what the users (or at least the majority of them) want.
Did microsoft gather the consensus of its users before forging ahead with their metro interface - I suspect not.
And the change from Blender’s old UI to its current one is an example of a drastic change - but a good/necessary one.
I dont think plucking random examples out of a hat really adds anything to the discussion.
Polling the user base to make decisions is a TERRIBLE decision, and anyone in design knows this. How does the saying go? A camel is just a horse designed by a committee? Polling the community just ends up with a dataset made up of whoever felt like answering. It could be 1000 people who used Blender for 5 minutes and never even tried the right mouse button, 50 people who have used it for a month, and 3 people who actually make money using it. Is that the cross section of users you’d want making decisions? Even with the option to say “How long have you been using Blender?” It’s likely that those 53 users who have any idea of what’s ACTUALLY wrong with Blender will all use different parts of it and have different opinions, in which case you’ve wasted a lot of time and ended up exactly where you started.
Aye, fair point. Plus, there’s also the aspect that the poll is reduced to only those who are already using the thing, not those who could be using it but aren’t (possibly becuase of the subject matter, even ^^ ).
The fear is even senseless to me. It’s also selfish. It’s like in a restaurant. They don’t care about other customers. They don’t even care about the owner whether the business grows or not as long as their stomach is taken care of; that’s all they care about. Well, they think they do, ie, defending the food because it might hurt the owner’s feelings. In reality, the more the customers come, the fresher the food, the more the possibility of better service, etc.
And in reality, adapting to software changes is really not that hard. I’ve started with all kinds of programs when DOS is the only available operating system. Word Perfect, Lotus 123, Dbase, you name it. (How hard would that be to current computer users?) AutoCAD’s DOS earlier versions didn’t even have pointing device capability. (Well, mice were still not available at that time.) You point your cursor via arrow keys. It evolved gradually into a fully developed GUI app. And the not-so-surprising thing is that the workflow is still the same. A user who used earlier versions will not be entirely lost using the later versions. It’s the same thing with other apps.
That was not a random example out of a hat.
Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars researching that interface, which was spent on focus groups, user groups, psychologists and what not. Hundreds of millions of dollars, and they still got it wrong. That’s the point. Making changes means that one can make really bad ones quite easily.
This is quite dissimilar to the 2.49/2.5 changeover. That was a genuine leap forward; the whole interface was upgraded from wood and stone to carbon fibre. Lighter, faster, cooler-looking with bling. In all seriousness, the new interface brought Blender into the professional realm in and of itself.
Of course I now realise that the people who first whine that “Blender isn’t professional” then whine “Blender is too professional”. I simply despair.
They must have tried millions of different UI layouts and finally came up with the most efficient one, which they call “ribbon”. And big companies like Autodesk followed suit. First time I saw it was with AutoCAD’s 2010. It was still a WIP back then. I didn’t like it at first, but it finally made sense. There’s no other way to organize a huge program like a 3D app other than what Andrew Price demonstrated in his video.
And why can’t some of the ribbon concepts become additions to the vertical layout of the properties panel (perhaps without the oversized icons). One of the concerns people have is that in order to maximize the no-scrolling design, you have to remove the ability to split windows and instead have each window become a different ‘mode’.
Want to UVmap an object, you have to switch over the UV mode and have the UV editor take up the whole screen, need to adjust actions, switch over to the full-screen animation mode, need to unwrap more of your objects now, flip back over to the creation mode and then flip back to the UV mode, ready to make a material using the UVmap, switch over to the node mode and flip to the 3D view on occasion to see how it looks in the rendered view.
In other words, the interface becomes extremely modal, you cannot watch the results in multiple windows simultaneously because the task-based UI design is mainly designed for single-tasking (in other words forcing you to a single task at one time without being able to quickly jump through tasks if needed and see the results in different windows). We basically say to William that he didn’t know all that much about good UI design and assume that Andrew is the true expert on the subject (and considering that some replies have seemed to hint disagreement with him as blasphemy or even selfish, the idea might be to just not do any processing of his ideas and just assume he’s right and it’s the end of discussion).
The thing is, I wouldn’t assume that Andrew has the final answers on everything (despite having a lot of fans), I wouldn’t assume that William’s proposal be the end all of proposals and discussion either, everyone has their own ideas that they think will work the best but I do think a lot of people have made good points that can be utilized in UI improvement projects.
That’s an assumption based on not thinking of alternate possibilities. An alternate way to think of it is, the interface should add options that make no-scroll possible, which currently it is not. The ability to split windows isn’t contingent on never allowing the interface to overlap and restricting task-based workspaces.