I had a fair idea that this was going to be controversial. A music playing application used to have vertical tabs and it caused no end of bitching from users.
On the other hand the IDE I use has them and I don’t think I have ever heard anybody complain. In fact I can’t make my self not be able to read the vertical text easily.
The number of items is a legitimate concern. if you are going the full length of a typical desktop screen you will get 8 tabs maybe 10 before you run out of room.
I think I would be happiest if there was a radial menu to switch tabs.
And with this. People need to be patient and need to stop making unnecessary opposition without suggesting alternatives accompanied with details and mockups. Most of the time so called alternatives are no better.
Vertical tabs are no longer new. Modo has them; Autodesk has added them in AutoCAD and many of their apps a long time ago. You will see them soon in many apps. Why, because it’s the only way to organize massive amounts of info on a limited space. It’s no different from a folder cabinet. And for those who worry about running out space for other tabs, there’s no reason why you can’t add another panel with a group of tabs. Again, this is nothing new. CorelDRAW had lots of these and call them dockets. You will also see them in Inkscape and many other apps. You can turn them on and off.
Again, customizability is the key here, imho. Being able to add your own tab and pick the tools you want and eliminate what you don’t need should be ideal. We just need to be patient and let the devs come up with their initial version.
Basically, I have found redesigning things will always involve sacrifices. Each and every time a solution comes out to one major problem, you will always have to take out a design attribute of some sort. If you replace a color, a color gets removed. To me, every design is imperfect because of this process.
In this case, the designers see a big problem with the UI design (excessive scrolling, organization) and their solution sacrifices something (text readability). What I see in this thread is the battle of these design issues, before the release and implementation comes official.
Me? Well, I’d rather take a look at the tabs in the next blender release once they’re officially implemented, and see how they work. I hope that it works on the minimum resolution of their support specs too. Even on a 1440x900 monitor, the scrolling and organization of items in 2.6x does seem rather annoying to me.
I think it’s important, too, to identify correctly the issues on either side. Otherwise a person might fix one thing and deem the issue solved. Readability is a problem, but you will find that the loss of working window space is a major concern too. Scrolling stores things off screen with no loss of working window space but requiring work andtime to retrieve it. Tabs store large things behind small UI elements, but the proliferation of such small elements cumulatively reduces the working window space. For people concerned about this (maybe only me!) the readability is a minor issue - I find myself reading only the first letter anyway.
Well said, I think before or in addition to the other interface work being done it would be very forward looking to fix this holdover and allow SVG. I believe eventually it will be done and then all this time spent working around this will have been wasted.
By the way Sainthaven I like your idea of the addon disposition, but I have one small issue with the subdivision modifier being put on the toolshelf. The subdivision tool belongs here, but the modifier belongs in the modifiers panel to prevent confusion.
shift+Rclick anywhere on the panel, and a menu shows up for the sections. no tabs needed, no need for mouse to travel all the way to the side or all the way up or down, not too obvious for idiots but they’ll get the hang of it
also, what if we got too many tab sections in the future, tabs for tabs?
No worries, thats why I posted this above the picture “below mockup is not an accurate representation of the F2 tools. See: Loop Tools, LDK_drawbox and object assembler addons for source” The subd modifier is part of an existing addon that I just piled into that space to show content. Even if it were to exist in the toolshelf, which it already does depending on addon, I dont think it would cause confusion. Pressing it automatically creates the modifier with the appropriate subdivision.
Its a smart design mechanic that shows how you can take existing functions and making them more user friendly by cutting down the task, what goes on behind the scenes is still the same. This is actually how Maya and even Modo do it without modifier stacks. =)
yeah, how about people just read the design document/proposal, instead of making assumptions of iluminati lizard conspiracies to dumb down blender to pave way for Autodesk dominance:spin:?
The actual toolbox panel is not very wide. Most people dont want it to be wide. It’s taller than it is wide. This is one of the reasons they are vertical.
And if you spread the buttons on another top panel (like one of the ridiculous horizontal tab proposals in this thread) - that is just strange for two reasons: http://sta.sh/0nvmu3n03m9
Its adding an extra top panel that is taking away vertical space from the 3d viewport, just because you dont like vertical tabs.
The buttons are detached from the panel they are tabs of
As stated by another user- increases the need for more mouse travel
Users who detest vertical text would prefer to have a counter-intuitive/productive design rather than be forced to read vertical text a couple of times until they get used with the button positions. Or wait for icons.
List disadvantages that you found after using it for more than 5 minutes. Just seeing a screenshot and not liking it is not enough.
So far I have not seen them run out of space. Maybe when you split the layout horizontally, they sort of do actually - but i can still sort of make out which tab is what by the first letters.
Color coding the tabs is easier for devs than icons- but i have not seen a lot of support for that solution of running out of space/readability.
Why not attack the current horizontal tabs in the properties window. What happens when you dont have enough horizontal space? Some of the buttons simply disappear and there is no “show more” button to give you a hint of that. Can you imagine how that looks to new users scratching their heads where the “physics” tab has gone?
The “show more” proposal will cure that problem as well. Yes- it makes you click one extra time- but that is a smaller price to pay for not having enough space than loosing access to those tabs altogether.
Luxology, Autodesk, Adobe, Corel, Microsoft, Apple, etc. don’t even have to consult their userbase when modifying their software. They just do it. They didn’t even have to say, “to hell with you, we’re going to do it with or without your approval.” Hehe… And they have paying customers. I never heard anyone complaining about vertical tabs!
Blender users are different. They have sense of entitlement. It’s like a person living in your house for free. He/she doesn’t follow rules, and worse, he/she sets the rules. Hehe… Amazing!
i got no beef with the tabs, since i only use the t panel for sculpt and the paint modes. who the heck adds geometry using the t panel anyways, remember shift+a?
anyways, has the suggestion placing the tabs to the right been posted?
And on the topic of resizing edges: as monitors keep getting bigger. clicking a single pixel wide edge gets more and more difficult. Might be a good idea to expand the size of the hitbox for resizing. Just a minor UI issue I’ve been noticing.
