Meeting Notes: 18 November 2020

Meetings
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1

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

Organization

  • Julian is focusing on the Asset Browser currently and only does minimal module work (so less review, release preparations, etc.)

2.91 Release

  • No tasks or bugs left on the release ToDo.
  • Release notes seem mostly fine, just a screenshot to be updated (Nathan will do).

2.92 Release

  • Asset Browser Milestone 1:
    • Plan is to merge the current state soon, in some shape or form it should be available in the 2.92 release.
    • There are plenty of things to do still, not all may be finished in time. In this case it may either:
      • Be merged as experimental feature and finished for 2.93, or
      • be enabled by default but clearly communicated as not feature-complete.
  • Line Art review:
    • There’s discussion on the core design approach (modifier/depsgraph integration vs. render engine integration), but that’s not responsibility of the UI team.
    • For us there’s nothing to do right now, Hans will keep an eye on it.
  • Outliner/Properties Sync:
    • Always syncing attached Properties editors is annoying to users according to feedback.
    • Two options:
      • Add a toggle for it or,
      • only do it when clicking the icon, not the name.
    • Meeting decided to do the latter.

General Design Review and Tasks

  • For exporters, only export selected data by default?
    • A commonly requested change and a real papercut, worth looking at.
    • Was discussed in the past, Campbell remembers reasons why it is the way it is:
      • Changing would break compatibility for existing scripts.
      • If nothing is selected, exports don’t do anything, which is weird.
      • Saving .blend files also doesn’t only act on selection, so it would be inconsistent.
    • All things considered, the team agrees it’s still better to do the change.
    • The setting is exposed differently for different exporters, should be made consistent.
    • Hans will handle it, but check with Brecht and Dalai first regarding the compatibility breakage.
  • Human Interface Guidelines:
    • Tooltip guidelines
      • Mostly confirmed already.
      • Some guidelines were moved to the general Writing Style page.
      • The team agrees on the following new guideline for the tooltip description:
        “It is recommended to start descriptions with verbs. Using the imperative conjugation generally works best.”
  • A recent commit removed the period after names in tooltips (88e6341ce848).
    • This was not communicated with the UI team as it should have been.
    • However, it is a change the team wanted to do anyway and is in line with the upcoming Human Interface Guidelines.
    • There are corner cases where we still may want to have a period, we can address them if they appear problematic.
    • Julian will talk to Aaron about the commit, but it will not be reverted.
  • Active vs. Selected discussion (T82359):
    • There was no time left to discuss this, will be done next week.
    • A big design change, not something to do lightly.
    • May be a 3.0 target even.
  • Campbell wants to work on support for populating search menus from Python.

Next Meeting: 2020-11-25 (next Wednesday), same time.

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