Opinions wanted: make Gesture navigation the default one

[DeepSOIC]

Hi!
I have an opinion that gesture navigation style should be made the default. That is, the navigation style that new users see. The reasons follow.
* it is easy to learn by accident/guessing. CAD navigation style is very hard to guess how to rotate view.
* touchscreen support is enabled straight away, without extra digging.
Opinions?

[sgrogan]

Opinions?

You asked for it
I guess it depends where your coming from. I imagine someone from Catia thinks the present default is obvious. As a windows user I found Cad and Inventor navigation counter intuitive. I settled on Blender Navigation until you introduced Gesture Navigation.
At the risk of another feature request, what about "Choose Navigation Style" at first start-up. (Could this be done from a NSIS installer? Maybe in the future?)

[DeepSOIC]

I imagine someone from Catia thinks the present default is obvious.

Really? Does Catia have the same navigation as FreeCAD's CAD navigation style? I wonder if there's more, like... what nav style solidworks is like? One thing that seems to be common to most is the intense reliance on middle mouse button (for quite obvious reasons, actually).

I came from SketchUp, and had to RTFM to find out how to use CAD navigation, even though sketchup relies on MMB, too.

At the risk of another feature request, what about "Choose Navigation Style" at first start-up. (Could this be done from a NSIS installer? Maybe in the future?)

You know what... I thought of exact same thing! A quick start setup wizard. But I can't think of any other option to bring up.
One good place for this wizard is the start page.
(BTW, one more thing to note, one of the first places I started learning FreeCAD was the preferences dialog.)

[sgrogan]

Really? Does Catia have the same navigation as FreeCAD's CAD navigation style?

http://www.catia.com.pl/tutorial/getting_started.pdf page 9
I personally don't like 2 mouse button actions, but I'm sure this is a personal preference.

[bejant]

Hi!
I have an opinion that gesture navigation style should be made the default. That is, the navigation style that new users see. The reasons follow.

Hi DeepSOIC, here's one more reason:
It's also the only Navigation Style that has Tilting.

I had been using CAD Navigation, but when Gesture Navigation made it into the dailies I tried Gesture Navigation and found it intuitive. The problem for me was that by then I had become so accustomed to CAD Navigation, I could use it seemingly without consciously thinking about it (by habit). With touchscreens becoming more popular, I can't think of any compelling reasons not to have Gesture Navigation as the default.

[NormandC]

Really? Does Catia have the same navigation as FreeCAD's CAD navigation style?

jriegel is a CATIA fanatic. CAD navigation should be renamed CATIA navigation IMO.

When I first arrived on the forum, the first thing I did was complain about it! I agree it is insanely hard to use the LMB and press down the scroll wheel at the same time to rotate the 3D view. I had a really hard time at first, the scroll wheel was always slipping and I ended up unexpectedly zooming the view. Very frustrating! Though with enough practice (back then there were only 2 modes, CAD and Inventor and I find the latter annoying for selecting geometry!) now it has become second nature.

So I tend to agree with you DeepSOIC that another default navigation mode would be more user-friendly, but why Gesture and not another mode like Blender?

I just tried Gesture navigation. It's not bad, but what bugs me is that once the mouse pointer has gone over an object, the pointer changes to a small hand and won't go back to the standard arrow. I hate it!

[NormandC]

At the risk of another feature request, what about "Choose Navigation Style" at first start-up. (Could this be done from a NSIS installer? Maybe in the future?)

You know what... I thought of exact same thing! A quick start setup wizard. But I can't think of any other option to bring up.

Something like LibreCAD...

LibreCAD_Startup_Wizard.png (47.47 KiB) Viewed 2825 times

A few other things could be added, like default drawing template; enable/disable the DXF importer's automatic update...

BTW this kind of setup wizard is used in commercial CAD programs.

[sgrogan]

Looks like it can be done with the installer. So much to learn.

[NormandC]

Remember the other OSes guys! This thing would need to be multiplatform, Win/OSX/Linux.

[triplus]

Note that new users don't know much about navigation styles and presenting them a list with options doesn't help much here.

P.S. Complex Wizard therefore could turn out to be just another barrier for new users preventing them to start doing something in FreeCAD.