Yep. Only AutoCAD PGP-based console shortcut system can solve this.
Whilst thinking about Window, Stairs, Frame ... another idea (to extreme?) is 'Profile Generator'.
What about the blender 2.8 ribbon? don't forget most of us here on Freecad have some decent level of familiarity with Blender a swell so in that regard I can kindly disagree with you that their new ribbon take is completely bad. As for the blender 2.79 their T-panel ribbon is great for the different Workbenches if they are meant to be exposed and cycled through out a project pretty seamlessly while the main icons used every stay consistent and don't flip switch on your face every time you change from one workbench to another.1D_Inc wrote: ↑Tue Feb 05, 2019 10:25 pmWell, Ribbon is nice example of bad design. Mostly it is useless GUI, that annoingly holds 1/5 of screen for nothing.
Blender's 2.79 UI has got the best realization of ribbon at the moment - they made it vertical and called T panel.
It allows to have hundreds well described tools and addons in T panel, and also allows to use them on demand by showing/hiding it, that brings awesome fullscreen.
Great work, I love it, this looks very similar to the monochromatic mode in the new blender, its all looking good. However i'll stress that we should keep Freecad Classic in the loop a swell and provide for the ability to change the theme for anyone who wishes a different theme. Because not everyone was a fan of those new blender Icons, and wished they had stayed consistent with the coloured icons which are "more easier to identify visually given their small sizes pixel ration they've decided to roll with. I wonder what your reorganisation of Freecad Classic can look like.
Yeah I think as far as BIM, mostly those heavily involved in the AEC industries will understand exactly it's necessity to be a certain way. So I completely concur with you here.yorik wrote: ↑Wed Feb 06, 2019 1:46 pmTriplus is right about hundreds of tools. And FreeCAD is only in its infancy. There will be much more. And the way we do it in FreeCAD (separating in workbenches) is I believe totally right. However, the idea of the BIM workbench is exactly to be a "meta" workbench. That is, not to have any tools on its own (they should all be part of their respective workbenches, drafts in draft, archs in arch, etc), but to try to make things more friendly and intuitive for the user.
Indeed, many questions to be answered still. I think there are positives we can acquire from blender 2.8 and it evolved from 2.7. I'm not such a great fan of everything they did, but overall the general intention is great. Blender was becoming too clumsy a swell and they gradually refined it again from it's previous 2.4 to 2.5. It's only when they created 2.5 that i was able to jump on blender. So I think UI is a "big thing" a swell.yorik wrote: ↑Wed Feb 06, 2019 1:46 pmThis is of course contradictory with the many tools available, hence the interest of this discussion. How do we go about that. Do we keep all the tools (but "hidden" somehow), do we keep only a selected VIP tools, do we try a clumsy "intelligent" ribbon that "predicts" what the user wants, etc. I definitely need a better look at Blender 2.8, didn't have much time for it recently...
Yeah in my mind generally Arch and BIM are synonymous for the industry so for me the Workbench should have been consolidated into one and renamed Arch/BIM, but i'll leave the conversation evolve so we can all inclusively determine what is the best approach, as well as how to seamlessly integrate it with the other workbenches. I also think creating a Workbench / custom workbench should be easier so that those who want to experiment with what ever combination is free to do so without it screwing the default setup that will be generally agreed upon. I find it quite useful instead of going into the code to add a workbench from there.
Yeah solid point here. That's basically been my scare. But hopefully we have a few good brains to keep an eye on the big picture and others on the small picture. So let's experiment and we can determine in the end. In retrospect to "moult" ideas, it brings back the question of, (what was it called again?) Direct modelling like in Revit or sketchup and the kind of tree modelling. It appears to me that Freecad does both already, it just depends how we provide the tools each task and organise them.yorik wrote: ↑Wed Feb 06, 2019 1:46 pmOn the other hand I agree with @Moult's ideas too, that we have here an opportunity to separate things semantically in a very interesting way, and that can also be very educational, and transparently inform people on how things work in IFC. But 1) we need to think this carefully, otherwise we embark once again in the complexity vs. simplicity come-and-go, and 2) IFC is only one vision/aspect over BIM, and we have in FreeCAD a much larger application. Molding everything over the IFC structure is something that IMHO will limit or hinder us pretty soon.
Yeah speaking of that, Freecad needs a clever way of handling it's normal's, like in blender there is a necessity to be able to manipulate those extrusions according to their normal's as well, "Global, Local, Normal, Gimbals, and View". I've run into so many situations where it couldn't handle complete angles of modelling etc even with the best profile extrusions. I believe this is a good base a swell to look into. as it will give us great flexibility.
Yeah you are deadly spot on, The question of Generators has been on my mind aswell. A seperate Icon style? for these? for example, i've been playing with qgis, and there is a need to create Contours maps that can either be used in Freecad directly, or exported as DXF and imported into Revit and other programs, so definitely at someone point when we'll have the ability to look into this more closely we'll call it Contour Generators?
How do I check it out? Please include some pics aswell for those of us visual oriented, it makes life 50% more appreciativetriplus wrote: ↑Tue Feb 05, 2019 9:42 pmI couldn't resist too, and did have created some tabs:
https://github.com/triplus/TabBar
This is why good UI design matters.
Good UI reduces learning curve exponentially, I can assure you that based on my experience. The first time I came across blender 2.4 in 2005, I was so intimidated by the software, it made no sense, it's only in 2008 when I had to learn 3ds Max at school, I felt it was so discouraging to master although it is super powerful. So I set out to look for an open source version, and I landed again on blender. The great new was that the new 2.5 interface had 'just' been introduced. Al thought there was still a long learning curve as blender is no small simple soft, I was more enthusiastic about it this time. It flowed better. A similar story applies to my Freecad learning. Freecad was hard in the beginning, I mean trying to get anything and make sense of it was crazy hard. Every-time i opened it and spent more that 3hrs from reading Yorik tutorials and many others, it still never made sense. It took me an average of 3years to first sit down with a basic understanding of Freecad. Today i'm on my 7th year with Freecad just to give you an idea. But it is exactly the reason for this conversation, How to change all that stress for the betterment of Freecad.
We for now, we'll tell the new users that currently we are trying to do what we can to help them.triplus wrote: ↑Tue Feb 05, 2019 9:42 pmhere are Architectural, Sketcher, Drafting, Drawing ... capabilities. Usually sorted in groups we call workbenches. What (new) users usually complain about is on why must i use more workbenches. To get the job done. Why can't just all the tools i need be in one workbench. In my opinion this is rather unsolvable problem.
Indeed, let's keep this going, I think If we can find a way to maintain "ease" of customisation, "flexiblity" in tools managament + "functional UI". We'll hit the jackpot.triplus wrote: ↑Tue Feb 05, 2019 9:42 pmIf you have a few thousand commands and a few thousand users and more. One set up just won't do. There will always be a piece of functionality somewhere else. Not where one would expect it. Moving some of the Draft/Arch/Part tools in BIM workbench therefor in the end won't result in BIM end users not relying on Draft/Arch/Part workbenches anymore. Said that, i agree, lets move things forward, whenever and wherever that makes sense and we can do it.
Well, it's total faillure.
Thank you)
It is hard to predict user demands, so that doesnot work like this almost anywhere.
Well, I started learning Autocad for need and 3dsmax in 2002 because it was cool.
FreeCAD
