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Home ? General Discussion ? Blender Conference - UI discussion

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25/10/2013 17:35:47

urbanlamb
urbanlamb
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Posts: 1786
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25/10/2013 19:53:58

ziggy72Muvizu mogulExperimental user
ziggy72
Posts: 1988 		Dear God, does it really take an hour to come to the conclusion that the interface sucks? We already know this, and no amount of powerpoint presentations or Q&A sessions are going to help! It's been 11 years in development, and only now do they decide to address the elephant in the room?! Imagine if Muvizu did that... Brick Wall

Still, at least they can't make the UI any worse
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25/10/2013 20:11:04

urbanlamb
urbanlamb
(Account inactive)
Posts: 1786 		This is an opensourced community therefore its run like a democracy however his arguments and research is sound. He is proposing a system in between the users and the company to do usability studies to an opensourced community. Where everyone votes and stuff so yes its going to be like this.

He is presenting his case to a pile of geeks and developers. I personally think he did a good job and in a very hard situation. The lead developer at the end got rather emotional but at the end of the day he is doing exactly what devs do lol. Then another user got all emotional because he felt dumbing down the ui was not right either. In the end they need to find a middle ground. A Ui that doesn't scare away new users but wont hide everything from regular users.

Muvizu suffers from a couple of issues and could stand to listen to his presentation too
1) its deciding things for seasoned users causing frustration when the software makes up our mind for us
2) it hides things and shuts things off from the new users causing questions of "it just disappeared"

I thought it was a very good presentation. Its also human nature not to fix something that a pile of users are used to because you dont want to make them angry. I was quite amused by the head dev however and his comments about the irc chatroom and other stuff. I personally wont go near chat rooms lol I hate message boards but have made my peace with them but only the ones that are light coloured I can't stand dark forums lol.

Anyhow i enjoyed his speech and the fact that he stood up to a bunch of hard core blender users where its human nature to not want to change something your used to lol. People hate change.
edited by urbanlamb on 25/10/2013
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25/10/2013 20:43:02

ziggy72Muvizu mogulExperimental user
ziggy72
Posts: 1988 		...but you also can't just be a slave to your user base, and allow them to restrict you into a little niche, like the one where blender currently resides. Blender is already respected as a very capable platform, but if the devs want to be popular (or just make some money) they have to change - all I'm saying is that they're asking the wrong people. Ask someone who's relatively new to 3D modelling, get them to tell you what makes sense from the UI as it stands, not the die-hard "nothing must be touched!!" crowd. Just sayin'
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25/10/2013 21:08:56

urbanlamb
urbanlamb
(Account inactive)
Posts: 1786 		He asked the world actually he posted to cg forums made of 3dsmax users, zbrush users, casual everything users and not on blender forums. and he asked the right question "why wont you use blender" and got the answer he expected "we dont like the interface" (of course blender users found the thread and threatened to have him offed) at the end of the day he spoke sense its now up to the devs of the community to swallow it. We shall see what they do. They want more donations and to have jobs as well myself i am probably one of the more flexible people in the world but there are not a lot like that around people get used to their toys and dont want it changed. Anyhow I am pretty sure they will move forward with some sort of UI change. They have no choice the screen work area has gotten smaller and smaller over the years yet for anyone who has spent anytime using it and learning it (inspite of the interface) they realize that its actually better at a lot of things then their 3k counterpart is.

He isn't asking though he is presenting to the core developer team and some very hardcore users and supporters who basically pay for its development. He has presented his findings in a very good way now the company (which is pretty much the people in that room) have to decide whether they want to listen. They probably will but UI discussions have plagued blender for a very long time. I tend to switch among things very easily and its very hard to get me to run away from something so i dont care either way but I can recognize their need for change. Its up to that room of people to decide and so that is why he was there lol.

and he was very honest about it as well. I am confident that these intelligent people will make the right choice its time they did they can't go much farther. What he is saying though is to set up an unbiased team of people and not listen to any users input they should design something from the ground up that will serve all users not just new users or old users. He is right

Now lets see if they will listen. Usually these conversations happen behind the scenes where no one can see it. I bet muvizu has had a few of them too we just dont get to see the youtube videos of it all lol.

Just remember though opensourced initiatives always move slower then their commercial counterparts and really blender stagnated for many years as people ignored it. Any money going into blender is as a result of someone wanting it to do something specific that is how opensourced software works. That will never change and I dont want it to change we need stuff like this in the world as this is where all the wierd experiments often take place :/



edited by urbanlamb on 25/10/2013
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25/10/2013 23:13:13

ziggy72Muvizu mogulExperimental user
ziggy72
Posts: 1988 		urbanlamb wrote:
Just remember though opensourced initiatives always move slower then their commercial counterparts and really blender stagnated for many years as people ignored it.



Slower? Glacial more like. Stagnation is the word - I believe it was you yourself that suggested changing the buttons in Muvizu to have 'Switch to' in front of Prepare and Direct. Simple change, it makes a difference for the better, and how long did it take for that to be implemented? And the whole Timeline discussions... Muvizu has changed and evolved more this year than blender has in a decade, and it's infinitely better for it (for the most part ). The blender devs have got to embrace change or be stuck forever in a geek infested rut (no offense ). I look forward to the changes, I really do - I'd love to be able to use a 3D package that doesn't mangle anything that isn't dead straight (like Sketchup), but they've gotta stop yakkin' on about it and actually do something concrete that people can test. I can't shake the horrible feeling that this discussion will still be happening next Halloween too (complete with powerpoint presentations with arrows showing how motivated they all are). I hope I'm wrong. Urban, sort 'em out!
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25/10/2013 23:32:37

urbanlamb
urbanlamb
(Account inactive)
Posts: 1786 		lol they will change it I think dont worry. Yup i know who suggested the switch to thing. It was a suggestion made as i saw people repeatedly ask the same question though so just based on an observation I kind of just used it like that and said nothing until one day I decided to say something not for myself though but for others to get less confused Big Grin

Opensourced is more um "messy" because of how it plods along people pick it up work on it and then stop. Its actually pretty rare for an opensourced developer to earn a living from being head of development of such an enterprise but it does happen.

Muvizu could even build in the blender code if they so choose that is the beauty of open source. The down side is that it often goes in several directions at once. Blender was an obscure program that sat in a dark little filing cabinet on the internet for years. Some geeks became highly interested in it and so its grown by leaps and bounds actually. It was horribly unstable once upon a time.

I will use it anyhow I mean it cost 0.00 and I learn it in chunks and am used to it. I look at sketchup and actually find it can be just as bad as blender so i get confused by the comparison sometime when people start using addons and stuff I see screens with 50 buttons lined up on top. Surely that is just as bad. Big Grin

Anyhow dont think I have seen this discussion pick up as much steam as this time round though of course there is nothing to stop a company (any company) from pouring time and money into it and redistributing it with something else but this all costs money. This guy is at a crossroads and is from the younger blender generation he makes money off of blender and is trying to decide if he wants to keep pumping his time into it or not (and money) so he is in a very good position to push blender in the way he wants to see it go. We shall see if he is successful or not lol.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Proposals/Usability_Project

meanwhile we wait (some more)


here adding this after watching today (saw it yesterday but was too busy to stop and watch)




Here is the reality with blender its only started to come to the forefront of things in the last few years. Its improved in leaps and bounds in the last well since about 2.5 where it was given a new UI and it needs another one. Its not a trivial tool in fact its 3dsmax, after affects, zbrush, photoshop and a couple other things that I forget now all rolled into one. I am fascinated by stuff like this I want to see all it does and just am a giant sponge. I can recognize however that others just want something that does one thing. Blender is not that tool its a full featured 3d animation package at this point.


Redefining Blender Bcon2013


From Blender artists forums written by the lead dev
I tried to explain this in my talk and the discussion afterwards, but let me be a bit more concrete. We as the UI team lead are not going to do some call for general UI ideas. People are free to make mockups for whatever they like and we are of course going to keep the finger on the pulse there, but we can't respond to and discuss all of them.

What we will do is focused design work on topics that developers are already working on or are intending to work on, and some things which we consider important and realistic to get implemented in the near term (low hanging fruit). It's about facilitating developers that want to work in this area and getting the UI rolling as an active project, not establishing a full redesign when we realistically do not have the developers for that right now.

So what will happen in a few weeks is, we will have the new developer.blender.org website running, and we will have a number of design tasks there, for example:

* Review of the toolbar summer of code project design.
* Default configuration of LMB/RMB select, and what the mouse button mapping should be in general.
* Make new default screen layouts and given them good names.
* Developer: I added new feature X but can't think of a good name or description, please advise.
* ...


Then those design tasks are going to be open for anyone to contribute to, with the relevant developer and UI team lead involved to moderate things and make the final decision.

edited by urbanlamb on 27/10/2013
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