2025-03-11 User Interface Meeting

Meetings
,
1

User Interface Module Meeting 2025-03-11T16:00:00Z

Regular User Interface module meeting for planning and coordination. Last regular meeting was February 25th, next meeting on March 25th

Attendees

  • Julian Eisel
  • Pablo Vazquez
  • Hans Goudey
  • Nika Kutsniashvili
  • John Kiril Swenson
  • Jean-Silas Moor
  • J Andrew “Drew” Medina
  • Harley Acheson

Merged to 4.4 Since Last Meeting

Merged to 4.5 Since Last Meeting

High Severity Bugs

  • None

Review

Pen Tablet Related PRs

Design & Discussion

Lots of discussion of pen tablet and touch interaction. How to design and plan overall project and also treating individual parts as subprojects. Concerns about lack of initial designs, scope, requirements, goals, targets, etc. We probably want to arrange specific meetings with a larger number of participants. Similar for tabbed areas.

Discussion of gestures and the complications that are per-device and per-platform. It seems like the only path could be a multitouch engine within Blender. Devices and platforms supplying us with touch coordinates, movements, etc and we having to interpret as gestures. Needs investigation, but could be a lot of work. Mention of ProCreate’s open sourcing of their Undo gesture process, but this is only for iOS/Mac. GitHub - procreate/UndoGesture: This is an example of Procreate's Undo and Redo gestures.

Lots of discussion of Pablo’s proposal for data-block template changes. This is something we definitely want to move forward with.

We also talked again about WIP: UI: Icons in ID Search List (Alt) #127086, which had stalled. Harley will update and then talk to Julian on how we can do this better.

Pablo mentioned that NLA does not hide the horizontal scrollbars in restricted space like timeline and some other editors do. Harley will make a PR.

Some talk of how editors are closer together than they appear and then have a ring drawn around each that occludes portions. This results in differences in apparent padding between the editor edges and content in headers. Would be nice to finally address this.

Some talk about how we have autocomplete in some areas but that it is largely unknown and hard to discover.

We should probably make the “Region Toggle” pie menu option not be tied to “Developer Extras”

Harley will continue his current slight focus on pen tablet issues, mostly bug fixing in this area. Pablo and Hans both have pen tablets for testing.

Harley will update UI: Allow Icon_overlay for layout.label #122394. The earlier concern was that allowing this on operators made a huge mess. Will check again.

Discussion of the order of path and name in search results. Arguments on both sides, but would take some convincing to reverse it.

John talked about tools in VSE, working on a “Blade” cursor, and about adding new tools.

Discussion of large enum lists like mentioned here: Right-Click Select — Blender Community. Harley could find more vertical space at times, currently using half window height as bounds. Pablo said we should probably look at adding search.

It would be nice to have a repository of sample blend files that allow testing of situations at extremes like the above. Lots of enum items, lots of objects, etc. Having a sample VSE project with data would be nice. Jean-Silas could do so for USD projects.

There could be appetite for option to toggle “infinite grid” off.

Meeting Process Change

We want to move toward more formal meetings. Agenda (also containing changes) edited in a live HackMD document. Post of notes to devtalk after the meeting.

7 Likes