2020-10-28 - User Interface

Meetings
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1

Present: Campbell Barton, Hans Goudey, Julian Eisel, Nathan Craddock, Pablo Vazquez

Organization

  • Reminder: We try to organize ourselves better and focus on fewer things.
  • Proposed priorities for now:
    • Projects: Nodes, Asset Browser, Tools
    • General maintenance (patch review, bug tracker, code quality)
    • Human Interface Guidelines
    • UI team professionalization
  • Pending GSoC UI Projects
    • Generally we have to ask the students to come forward if they are available to go through the process of merging.
    • Again, these are not part of our main priorities, so we should be careful about how much time we spend on them.
    • Julian will talk to the students personally to let them know about that.
  • Nathan is looking at a few further Outliner tasks, nothing user-visible though.
  • For when he wants to be more actively involved, there should be a number of tasks from the Asset Browser, Tools and Brush workflow projects that he could work on.
  • Human Interface Guidelines
    • We’ll try to do weekly sessions where we meet to work on the guidelines. Similar to the patch review sessions.
    • First one tomorrow with Hans, Julian and Nathan.

2.92 Release

  • Outliner:
    • Properties Editor syncing and changes to creating collections can go into master pretty much immediately.
    • The object sorting still has to be kept on hold, it needs a better internal design that allows usage for non-object types as well.

General Design Review and Tasks

  • Cursor design: Still a bit of an open topic, but can wait for now.
  • Discussion about factors vs. percentages (see D9344):
    • Percentage should be default in Preferences.
    • Generally factors should be displayed as percentage by default.
    • Normalized ranges should remain in the 0-1 range, not percentages.
    • Check with animators/riggers on that change (users may need to be aware of it for drivers),
    • Should be added to HIG
  • D9074 (Add Non Linear Sliders): Nice, but should not have an affect with no continuous-drag, buttons are already non-linear then.
  • D7310 (Outliner: Add “Unselectable” filter): There should be a selectable filter instead, and a general option to invert the results.

Next Meeting: 2020-11-04 (next Wednesday), same time.

12 Likes
2

Advanced softwares usually work with normalized factors (float 0 to 1), I would put factors as default.
Also better for scripting.

6 Likes
3

I don’t think it’s a good idea, especially for nodes. Factor represents the actual value and if it is meant to be manipulated in any way (mutiplied, added to) and connected to other nodes, it only makes sense in terms of a number.

5 Likes
4

When the percentage preference was added, I only accepted it on the condition that it would not be enabled by default. For nodes, shading, drivers it adds confusion to have the actual value different than what is displayed. See discussion in:
https://developer.blender.org/D4462

7 Likes