UI/UX suggestions for Addon Installer

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kkremitzki
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Re: Soft UI/UX suggestions for Macro Addon Installer

Post by kkremitzki »

cox wrote:
kkremitzki wrote: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 :D
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 :D
Haha, of course. I mostly wanted to have some discussion on the topic and, chiefly, to be able to do it as a learning exercise (I'm very new to FreeCAD internals.) This issue is not the hill I want to die on :D

By the longstanding tradition do you mean having a "View > Toolbars"? Also, my "the menu is full" argument in favor is really more "prominent/important UI buttons should not be buried". But really, I don't want this to be bikeshedding about shuffling menu items around, moreso a bit of chat about what might improve usability in some far-off interface redesign.
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kkremitzki
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Re: Soft UI/UX suggestions for Macro Addon Installer

Post by kkremitzki »

agryson wrote:How's this for an icon?
Package_Addon.png
And here it is at 16px:
Package_Addon_16.png

Edit: I submitted a PR to you directly on your branch for the icon
Thanks for the PR! I merged it into my branch (available here.

It looks good although it is kinda hard to make out the details of the box, especially on a dark theme:
fc.png
fc.png (52.9 KiB) Viewed 1956 times
fc2.png
fc2.png (52.81 KiB) Viewed 1956 times
Maybe a closed package would be better?

Anyway, my branch should now (very crudely) call the addon manager script if you have saved as addon_manager.py somewhere in your FreeCAD's Python path (do import sys; print(sys.path)).

One option now involves actually using Qt Designer to make the .ui file of the window to be opened. Then perhaps individual buttons can be tied to pre-existing Python functions and we can something aesthetically pleasing with a minimum amount of rewriting Python->C++.

@agryson are you familiar with using QtDesigner at all?
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Kunda1
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Re: Soft UI/UX suggestions for Macro Addon Installer

Post by Kunda1 »

you guys are awesome :D
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triplus
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Re: Soft UI/UX suggestions for Macro Addon Installer

Post by triplus »

Looking good.

P.S. ATM it's hard to add Python based solution as the mentioned one in the menu without involving C++. If you look one entry below in the Tools menu on the picture it says Accessories and it's a menu. Adding stuff in there will likely be made easier in the future.
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agryson
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Re: Soft UI/UX suggestions for Macro Addon Installer

Post by agryson »

kkremitzki wrote:Maybe a closed package would be better?
Sure, it'll give me a few extra pixels on each side to play with. Will take care of that today.
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Re: Soft UI/UX suggestions for Macro Addon Installer

Post by agryson »

kkremitzki wrote:@agryson are you familiar with using QtDesigner at all?
Sorry, missed this until now. No, I've never used it but it doesn't look that hard to get into, what're you thinking?

Edit: PS, you have that pull request now, I'm not totally convinced, but maybe it'll look better in the interface. (building your fork now)
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kkremitzki
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Re: Soft UI/UX suggestions for Macro Addon Installer

Post by kkremitzki »

Yeah, it's very straightforward. It's nice because you can open up any of the .ui files in src/Gui and inspect them. I just threw together a basic AddonManager.ui file based on the Execute Macro window. There's even an 'export image' option to get a nice little picture of what you're building will look like. Here's the interface of QtDesigner and then the image output:
Screenshot from 2017-01-23 23-03-17.png
Screenshot from 2017-01-23 23-03-17.png (163.17 KiB) Viewed 1932 times
AddonManager.png
AddonManager.png (16.71 KiB) Viewed 1932 times
For the Install/Update button, if it's going to become activated when clicking on something, it should be straightforward to conditionally show either Install or Update as appropriate. (And to activate the Remove button if installed!) The Clean button should do some sort of check for broken symlinks in the UserAppData directory, and present a "confirm removal yes/no" window to the user.

I'm not sure if it'd be better to move that group of 4 buttons up or down to make a small preview box.
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kkremitzki
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Re: Soft UI/UX suggestions for Macro Addon Installer

Post by kkremitzki »

agryson wrote:
kkremitzki wrote:@agryson are you familiar with using QtDesigner at all?
Sorry, missed this until now. No, I've never used it but it doesn't look that hard to get into, what're you thinking?

Edit: PS, you have that pull request now, I'm not totally convinced, but maybe it'll look better in the interface. (building your fork now)
It does look better:
p.png
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agryson
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Re: Soft UI/UX suggestions for Macro Addon Installer

Post by agryson »

kkremitzki wrote:Yeah, it's very straightforward. It's nice because you can open up any of the .ui files in src/Gui and inspect them ... I'm not sure if it'd be better to move that group of 4 buttons up or down to make a small preview box.
OK, I'll start playing around soon (currently still knee deep in Sketcher workbench icons, about half-way there!)

For the preview, you could maybe try moving those 4 buttons to a bottom row (thus keeping "destructive" buttons like "close" on the left while the others are to the right to reduce error). This allows the progress bar to go full width and the preview panel could take up 2/3 screen on right while the addon list takes up 1/3 on the left.
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kkremitzki
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Re: Soft UI/UX suggestions for Macro Addon Installer

Post by kkremitzki »

The 2/3rds, 1/3rds split looked a little extreme. I went with half and half for this redesign:
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AddonManager.png
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