UI/UX suggestions for Addon Installer

[kkremitzki]

Any thoughts so far on an icon?

[agryson]

As a generic icon for addons I was thinking simply sticking to what I personally know from Linux, but strikes me as understandable cross platform: a brown box to represent a package.

[kkremitzki]

I know it's putting the cart before the horse, but I wanted to see how the menus and UI items were created for when this Python script gets integrated into the application:

wb.png (65.08 KiB) Viewed 1885 times

I also wanted to move Workbench and Toolbars to Tools because a) I didn't like having to go to the bottom of View, which is pretty full, compared to Tools, which is empty and b) Workbench is basically "the set of active tools" and "toolbars" is "UI item toggle specific to the set of tools I have active", so both should imo go in Tools. Not sure on the ordering but I wanted to see how it looked

Anyway, I used DEF_STD_CMD to make a StdCmdAddonManager class in src/Gui/CommandStd.cpp and created the corresponding AddonManager.cpp, .h, .ui files and updated src/Gui/CMakeLists.txt.

Could someone more familiar with the project tell me if that was the correct approach, and from here, what's the best way to a) place the addon script into the source code and b) call it from within the StdCmdAddonManager::activated function? I saw there was for example the QProcess class but wasn't sure...

doCommand?

[agryson]

How's this for an icon?

Package_Addon.png (4.44 KiB) Viewed 1869 times

And here it is at 16px:

Package_Addon_16.png (774 Bytes) Viewed 1869 times

Edit: I submitted a PR to you directly on your branch for the icon

[DeepSOIC]

Put a rocket into the box

[agryson]

Put a rocket into the box

Lol, nice idea, but makes things confusing below 24px. Here's a 3 minute attempt at something:

Rocket.png (5.59 KiB) Viewed 1846 times

[yorik]

I prefer without the rocket. And I liked that the brown color is visually unique in freecad, could be used for everything that is plugin-related...

[yorik]

Could someone more familiar with the project tell me if that was the correct approach, and from here, what's the best way to a) place the addon script into the source code and b) call it from within the StdCmdAddonManager::activated function? I saw there was for example the QProcess class but wasn't sure...
doCommand?

Yes, the way I see it, we would just install the python file of the macro manager somewhere, then add a new command as you did, but that just prints/executes one or two lines of python code with doCommand. Maybe we should put the functionality of the installer into a function so it can be imported without executing.

[agryson]

I prefer without the rocket. And I liked that the brown color is visually unique in freecad, could be used for everything that is plugin-related...

Yeah, me too. As for the brown, true, and it's part of the Tango palette.

[cox]

I also wanted to move Workbench and Toolbars to Tools because a) I didn't like having to go to the bottom of View, which is pretty full, compared to Tools, which is empty and b) Workbench is basically "the set of active tools" and "toolbars" is "UI item toggle specific to the set of tools I have active", so both should imo go in Tools. Not sure on the ordering but I wanted to see how it looked

Please consider that this move breaks with long standing UX tradition in huge number of software FreeCAD, Gimp Firefox, inkscape and others.

In my opinion such a move away from established traditions should have better arguments than the view menu is full.

Is it possible to reorganise/restructure/optimise the view menu?

This is 2 cents of mine