2024-08-13 User Interface Meeting

Meetings
1

User Interface Module Meeting 2024-08-13T15:00:00Z

Regular User Interface module meeting for planning and coordination. Last meeting was July 30th, next meeting on August 27th.

Attendees

  • Pablo Vazquez
  • Jonas Holzman
  • Sietse Brouwer
  • Nika Kutsniashvii
  • Harley Acheson

Merged Since Last Meeting

High Priority Bugs

Module Roadmap

  • Status bar now has all features in.
    • Harley pointed out a change of using “Esc” for Mac rather than ⎋ ( U+238B - Broken Circle with Northwest Arrow), everyone is happy with that since all modern Mac keyboards label the key as “esc”
  • Icons next step is Tool icons (waiting for review)
    • Campbell is reviewing. We need to keep the old code in for any addons now using it, can remove in 5.0. Harley will try to make it so addons can use old code for custom icons, but would use new code if they use existing icons - allows us to remove the old icons from the project.
  • Docking now working okay on Mac. Next steps?
    • Pablo gave more feedback and Harley will make a PR with those changes - simplifies the feedback a lot. Do not show the “X” icon for removed areas. Only show the icon (without outline) for the editor in motion, not for remainders of other areas. Then Pablo will try to make sure Admin group is aware of it.
  • Next steps for Tabbed Area project
    • Not discussed.

Review

Design & Discussion

  • Could some icons be improved by adding limited multi-color, like a different color outline from the main color? Harley gave an example of collection colors in chat.
    • Harley will make a testing WIP PR showing the use of multicolored icons for collections for Pablo to test.
  • Light Theme Issues
    • Version text on splash screen
      • We need a way to specify contrasting color here for the version string. This can’t be baked into the image. The difficulty here is that this is in layout so there are less tools. This might require a uiBut drawflag like red_alert. Needs thought.
    • If we want to try a light inter-area gutter it might be nice to have area outlines (off by default).
      • Harley will update the area outlining PR. Pablo still likes it for active area indication and as an accessibility feature. We could add this, only enabled for light theme contrast.
    • The “icon_border” feature is problematic. Only used for light themes. Once enabled it applies to everything, works well on light items on light background but dark items just look fuzzy. It would actually work better to just do this automatically for light on light. But better would be to just select deeper icon colors for light mode. Or use multicolor icons to get a text color border.
      • We might need to do all of these. Harley will make a PR that uses icon_border only when light on light, affecting only the monochrome icons. Pablo will look at using icon colors that have sufficient punch to not require outline. Harley will investigate using multicolor icons in more places.
  • Mouse Cursors. The SVG icon system could be used to make mouse cursors. Lots of plusses (unlimited sizing, high quality), not many minuses (would need a complete set, not just our custom ones). But the big reason to go for this would be if we really want compound cursors (some pointer plus secondary icon indicating states). Mostly needs some use cases and some design.
    * This is wanted. Pablo thinks this would be worth it just for the reduced burden when adding new cursors. Harley thinks it a bit too much work unless we do (eventually) use compound cursors, then it is the only way to get there without making one icon for each combination. Design should include more than one extra status indicator simultaneously. Having a size scale in Blender multiplied over normal OS size preference could be nice for accessibility and demonstrations.
  • There was much discussion of color pickers outside of Jonas’ PR. We all like the idea of each slider being a color ramp - as Inkscape does. We also like the idea of replacing our solid color circle with a style as we see inkscape as that remains more usable as the lightness changes.
  • Harley will make an experimental PR for Pablo that changes the inter-editor gap widths. Not for a possible preference but to see if there is some wider value that works better. Would definitely improve action zone hit width, but also might give better visual separation. Possibly best considered along with editor outlining.
  • We talked a lot about Mac window placement. Harley thinks that Sietse’s PR needs to broken up into separate steps. First the placement of windows onto specified devices (since Mac does not use a combined desktop. This would allow Mac to save and restore non-temp windows on save/load. Then we can add on the saving of temp window locations and sizes to somewhere like in prefs.
  • Harley is probably going to wait until the end of Jonas’ GSOC period (to allow more conversations with him) and then add a device_index argument to window creation and the saving/restore of this in WmWindow. Specific device target is an interesting idea, even on Windows, but could just be ignored there.
  • Harley will apply and test Jonas’ client-side decoration PR to see how it would work on Windows. Note that changing titlebar color and text to specific colors is only allowed with Windows 11.
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