Not the status bar. It’s actually a good thing to have a visual indicator which mode/chain step you are in. I ment the tools themselves. Those ugly things on the left side. To cram those proposed characters in there will make it even less readable and doesn’t even help with actually learning the shortcuts.
Anyhow this is a vast topic for another thread.
I mean that there is maybe an reasonable explanation that I don’t have.
I don"t mean that current situation is satisfying. I don’t defend that.
I mean that Blender is so big that is difficult to know what to do when.
And after a production like cosmos laundromat episode 2, that would probably be easier.
Yes, It tested it. There is the advantage to avoid visual distraction of a toolbar popup.
You are force to press 2 keys because pressing just one means working like in 2.79 without active tools.
I don’t think they can avoid that easily without a big refactor of keymap preferences.
I don’t think you understand what I’m saying here. The whole purpose of that “feature”, as advertised (i.e. as stated in the description), is to simplify access to tools while retaining visual feedback. Does it do that? No, it does not. The former is unchanged at all (two keystrokes either way), the latter is not achieved at all (having user shift their attention is the exact opposite making things “more obvious”). Yet time and effort is being spent on this.
What exactly do you mean by “Blender is under pressure…”?
Edit: Sorry for uncovering your censored opinion 
Shift space is a combo that need 2 fingers.
And only thing that changes visually is status bar. So, you don’t overlap what you are looking at in Viewport with toolbar popup.
The note about making discovery of Alt Tapping more “obvious” is just above a mockup showing a colored Alt in status bar.
So, that can correspond to a colored word in Viewport like AutoKeyin On message or a colored border like Camera is locked to view. That does not necessarily imply to be as disturbing as popping up something in your face.
I don’t even… What are you even arguing? Apples to apples please. You can bind the tools menu to any key, just as you would supposedly be able to bind the “leader” to any key. Blender straight up offers you space for tools menu as default. It’s two keystrokes either way.
Yes, the note is about making it obvious that you pressed the “leader” key, and no, it’s not just a mockup. Neither status bar, nor toolbar are obvious, you have to actually look at them, i.e. already know beforehand that you pressed the leader. Or to make sure that you didn’t. So it effectively becomes user’s responsibility to ensure they have indeed pressed the leader, instead of application informing them of that fact, like the tools menu already does. You get an obscure horizontal list down below in the status bar, which terminates even before showing you all the available keys.
It’s a feature that doesn’t solve any problems, and creates new ones, in usability and in maintenance.
I don’t consider that an option if you don’t know the shortcuts. But it is interesting if you already do.
I agree that nothing helps to discover it and status bar is too short to display all shortcuts in edit mode.
But status bar displaying shortcuts is not an obscure behavior. It is its role for any tool in any editor.
You open blender. It displays mouse buttons operations.
You launch an operator, it displays its modal keymap.
There is no reason to be surprised that leader key could use status bar.
Shift space displays a popup that is exactly like toolbar with tools hidden into a group. You may have to click on item to access and discover another one. In term of discoverability, it is more powerful but not ideal, too.
I don’t really understand the problems in terms of usability. It could force you to redo your keymap config.
But in terms of usability, it does not seem to break anything.
What is the problem of looking at your selection and displaying a gizmo over it without being disturbed by a popup in between ? I feel active tools more comfortable as is. It does not seem to hurt.
Shift Space is still available.
You said it had zero impact. So, why being so passionate about that ?
The fact that there are more urgent problems to solve does not make this alternative to shift space an aberration.
It had to be pushed more to handle other modes and status bar scrolling.
That does not mean that will be done immediately. It is currently in master.
It could be absent of 2.82 if developers prefer to work on something else in upcoming months.
Okay, you’re definitely arguing something else entirely… No, I didn’t say it had zero impact. Are you trolling me?..
Once again:
- Simplify access to tools. Fail: literally the same. Zero. Difference. With. Existing. Behavior. That’s what I said.
- Visual feedback when accessing tools. Fail: the information is removed from attention, not moved into it.
What problem? There is no problem. It’s made up. You know a key combo - you press it, no disturbance. Menu or no menu is not going to affect how fast you press those keys. You’re not doing anything else while pressing the combo, not with your selection, not with your gizmo, not with anything else. You don’t know a key combo - you’d like a hint. Menu shows it to you exactly where your eyes already are. This leader thing does not. You press it by accident - menu is in your face, as it should be. This leader thing isn’t, which is 100% the opposite of what it wants to achieve: “We want to make it obvious that a leader key has been entered, so that users know that the following key stroke will differ from normal.”
I find it amusing how you “don’t understand problems in terms of usability”, and a few sentences later bring up status bar scrolling. Status bar. Scrolling. That’s just… wow. When you stuff so much junk into status bar that you need to scroll it, you’re doing something wrong. Requiring to scroll it is trying to solve a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place. Yet that’s exactly what would need to do be done to make this new “feature” usable, wouldn’t it?
Why being so passionate about it? The topic of this thread, that’s why. That “feature” is a great illustration. Adding more code, adding a “feature” that doesn’t actually help with anything, and creates new problems that shouldn’t even exist.
That’s adding code. That’s generating feedback and remarks. That requires developer work.
But is it completely useless ? I don’t think, so.
I think that artist who suggested that, did express a respectable preference.
The same way like people expressed their preferences about default keymap or default workspaces or icons.
A controversy on the least exciting thing may happen ; that does not mean that rest of Blender is not progressing during those discussions.
OK ! I misquoted you. You said zero difference.
But that means there is not really an overcomplication in terms of UX, here.
That is a complication in terms of UI.
I am not sensible about the argument around status bar. When it changes, I notice it, now.
That’s where many messages and progress bars are popping. I get used to it.
Scrolling status bar could be one key press like pressing a button in toolbar popup to access an hidden active tool.
That could solve a problem only present in edit mode. It could be present in paint and sculpt modes, too.
You are talking like a developer would be omniscient.
They created Status Bar because they removed message to Topbar where workspaces became tabs.
When they created it, they did not know what they should put in.
They did not know in advance what move users would accept.
They had no idea what tools would be in toolbar. They changed that a lot.
Latest changes to toolbar are Pablo’s brushes.
If you fix things too much into early design, you are risking to not be able to incorporate new stuff.
A developer can not be aware of every change, the others are doing.
There is nothing like a “first place”.
That is a process to propose an idea, collecting a feedback and bringing solutions.
If you don’t code initial idea to see if it inspires a solution to someone, you are stuck with your theories.
Because we are involved in a review process for anything does not mean that we are overcomplicating everything.
We are just passing time to debate about the best approach. That is a democratic way to improve a free open software.
It is true that devs could go faster and avoid to listen and satisfy us. We would end up with a software that would not be satisfying.
So, there is no good way to know what are top priorities when people are debating features in depth.
They can look at bugtracker, devtalk, right click select and ask people their priorities in conference and blog’s articles. No clear organization of priorities will automatically popup from that process.
But I repeat there is no reason to panic and think that 2.8 will not take a good shape.
BI devs will talk to BI artists in a more direct way.
And what those artists will say will make echo to what devs have already read.
That will take time. About their methodology, I would have prefer to have community effervescence digested by them after codequest before the launch of any open movie.
But saying that devs don’t care about UX/UI or are incompetent or will never end to accumulate tasks, that is unfruitful negativity. You are not improving their skills that way.
You can browse thousands of tasks present on d.b.o, order them and share your list of priorities if you want. Coordinators would probably take a look.
Ever heard of design by commetee? I’d be a little wary of it. It’s one thing to have DevTalk and RCS as places to make suggestions and give input to developers, but it’s another to start dictating what they can and should do.
This is not to say however that the UI team couldn’t be bolstered with more users heavily using specific parts of blender giving more concentrated input in those areas for an example.
Just my 2 € cents.
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Useless? No, it’s not useless. It’s just not that useful either. Experimenting with new ideas is great. When they’re new. That thing is not new. It literally doesn’t change anything for the better, and arguably changes something for the worse.
Scrolling status bar should not exist. Not in edit mode, not in sculpt mode, not in any other mode. No matter how many keypresses it is. Like I said, dumping so much info into it that it doesn’t fit means only one thing: too much info. The solution is to not dump that info in there, find a better way to represent it, or better yet, a way to not even have to represent it at all, not invent more things for the user to press, scroll, click or otherwise manipulate. How do you not see it is beyond me.
Omniscient? No, they’re not omniscient, nor they have to be. Common sense didn’t go anywhere though.
Anyway, the point is that the sporadic changes remain, and that’s not for the best.
In my opinion, the developers should have the flexibility to connect with whichever user group they believe makes most sense. There are cases where DevTalk and RCS are a suitable place. When the features are larger or if it is about more significant UI/UX changes, I believe it would be better to initially connect with experts directly which would preferably be in the corresponding module or the ui module team. There is a lot of potential in those module teams and I sincerely hope they are going to be used more actively in the future.
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Dictating comes from dictatorship. I’d like to see a democratic voting system, allowing Blender users to enter and vote for features and changes, in the true spirit of open source development.
Right-Click Select is a platform where this is already happening, but it’s not connected to the Blender development team, so the efforts there are relatively futile.
In my opinion, this would be great. At the same time, I can’t imagine how this could work in practise. Is this a vague idea you have in mind or do you have some more precise ideas how this could work in practise?
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Well, the problem I see with it is that we’d have too many cooks in the kitchen. And now cooks, all of who have varying experience eating dishes of varying quality, most of whom have never cooked anything in their life. Do you see the problem with that?
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haha, no worries. It’s all meant as a joke, as you have clued in I am sure.
I tell you what I mean by that statement:
Since the latest funding giants have dropped in and left quite some money behind (well I guess saying “behind” here is absolutely wrong… read on), there is a lot of expectations on the back of the “official” Blender Developers… No one pulls stunts like that if there is some sort of benefit involved for them (the funders)… and of course Blender is being put into the spotlight and needs to hold up with its previous reputation that it has gained over quite a few years now. Being in the state it currently is, there is a lot of things that are being steered away from its roots, if you know what I mean (GUI and functionality… and intents). A lot of people stopped identifying with the Software , and a lot of People moved over. I think there is a lot of hands involved trying to steer where it should go, and that ain’t the direction of the people that have faithfully supported Blender prior to the bigger drop-ins.
Now… this is just the “feeling” that I get… something here is no longer following the dream of the past… in favour of rapid innovation . You know what happens when things get pressured into something that it has yet to become.
edit: haha, reading the previous comments, I guess that my feeling is somewhat hitting the spot.
No, because a voting system for features and changes would not dilute or disturb the Blender development team, but present useful suggestions and feedback to them, with the most useful / important ones having the most votes, and the crappy input downvoted. I wouldn’t know why such a democratic process between Blender users and Blender developers would be a bad thing. It’s already working at Right-Click Select. It just needs to become (more) connected to the Blender development team.
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Yeah @Metin_Seven, you can consider in a way that development must be guided in a more principled way rather than being spontaneous or random.
As far as I watch the Blender development going on (not participating closely in it) the last 8 years or so, I might guess that things are mostly a bit spontaneous. Say for example a cool developer jumps in with a great solution and under the right cicumstances their work becomes part of the codebase.
Currently even in Blender 2.8 a feature or two were added in that kind of fashion, where surely the majority of users would not be really interested in using them. I won’t pinpoint the features out of respect for the people working in them. 
However the real important issue here is that things must be more predictable. While on the other hand respect the individual interests of developers who get cool ideas and create real working solutions.
But essentially the ideal way for the best positive outcome, are individual_interests+things_people_need.
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Just replying on the title: “Blender’s increasing development pace and the lurking danger of overcomplication”.
As some might know I am very active (for a full year now) collecting addons (Blender 2.8x) and make lists, video’s, articles etc.
The first month was easy, just a few addons were available. But now the addons come in at a speed I cannot keep up with.
There is also a side-effect of more possibilities, more features and more addons.
The side-effect is that there is more possible, but that surely doesn’t mean a user will produce faster. Because there are so many things possible, several ways in several dimensions, a user can easily get stuck in the endless possibilities.
It’s not the fault of the (addon) developers though, and not the fault of the user. But how to solve this? How can we stimulate complete productions by users rather than seeing thousands of short experiments on YouTube and forums etc.
Custom builds? Workspaces? Community groups? I don’t know what and how we can stimulate blender users to be productive, and I hope to see some suggestions here (if that is in line with the goal of the thread).
I compare it sometimes with me and and old friend of mine when we made music. I knew all kind of scales and had multiple techiniques, and my friend played in my eyes primitive let’s say. But he was able to produce songs.
Or it like this: You and your partner plan to clean the floor. Instead of cleaning the floor you keep on discussing on how to clean the floor. Makes sense a bit? It’s so tricky and addictive to learn to work with new addons, afraid you are missing the boat. But at the end you miss the boat because you went many directions and possibilities.
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I don’t see a problem at all to be honest. There are more developers than ever before and almost all of them have shown to be able to work together pretty well in the past funding campaigns. At the same time, some of them are only dedicated to management duties. This will allow a very stable and ongoing development pace like never before. My impression is that there isn’t much skepticism regarding that.
On the other hand, there seems to be more skepticism regarding the UI/UX front. Though, there are also people dedicated to that, which brings Blender into a better position than ever before. It will take longer from my point of view to become better consistently throughout Blender, but I don’t fear it would become overwhelming.
Overall, I don’t see a reason why the Blender development should be under pressure at all. They seem structurally in a very good position and they are continuously improving.
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