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UI Improvements / Dockable Palettes in OS X / Full Screen / Toggles


Owen Walz

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I know this may have been mentioned before, but I'm not seeing anything recently.

I feel like a full screen UI similar to Adobe Creative Suite software, with dockable palette areas, palette toggling, full screen modes, etc, would really improve the usability of VW. This approach has already been adopted by most pro design software, be it video editing, graphics or modeling. VW is looking really dated and cluttered by comparison, particularly on the Mac. Awkward floating palettes are constantly blocking other interface elements and require constant fussing and adjustment.

Please make this a priority. It would really compliment the nice new modeling visuals added in 2014, and make for a much clearer interface.

Edited by Owen Walz
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I haven't downloaded the trial yet as of several reasons, but what can we understand of fullscreen mode?

Its the basic Fullscreen mode offered by OS X, when you enable it the drawing area window will resize to fit the entire screen and the menu bars will retract. The palettes become a little stickier, letting you stick them to the edges of the screen or each other. (I wouldn't really call them dock-able yet though, not completely.)

Oh, it's a mac only thing then. I'm on the Windows side...

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
I'm looking forward to get a non palette one-window UI like

in Cinema or Modo some times in the future :)

Would be nice to change the width and proportion of Object Info,

Navigation and Resource Browser in one go.

Same here. Love the combined/docked palette interface in C4D. I was also excited to see that OS X 10.10 is going to include a "Dark Mode", I have always wanted a darker skin for Vectorworks and that may make it a priority.

The light BURNS!

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Hi Jim,

Maybe the fullscreen mode, needs to be a little more nuanced, especially for Mac OS Yosemite, which has a three options (I can see) for the zooming of windows (I think under the Apple Beta program NDA, I can talk about new features, but not show screen grabs). 1. The default seems to be enter fullscreen mode when clicking the maximise button. 2. But I am seeing some apps like contacts can also zoom to fill the screen without going to fullscreen mode. 3. Finally, apps like Calculator, simply zoom to from simple, to scientific layout.

1) Dockable palettes on OS X, to match Vectorworks' Windows UI.

When in this mode on Mac, this enters fullscreen Mac mode.

2) Full Screen Mode compatibility for OS X 10.7 and later.

Not go to fullscreen mode as it now does, but in traditional Mac Vectorworks mode, this zooms to fill screen (but respects palette margin settings).

3) The ability to "embed" palettes within each other, later selectable by tabs. (similar to Adobe products UI)

The final issue I can see is the currently named 'Use Fullscreen' pull-down menu command, and what it is named as. I like it, especially when I am only working on laptop, but if the windows style fullscreen mode was economical with it's use of space, maybe this wouldn't be an issue—especially if there was a possibility for the palettes to be embedded.

Can you see any holes in what I am proposing?

Thanks.

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Apart from any details I would summarize, that the current UI definitely needs a complete redesign.

The whole screen is cluttered with icons. Every upgrade brings some new features and tools that are hard to integrate seamlessly in the old interface. So it's hard to perceive which icons are for tools or for options and in which context they should be used.

As a result I found that students often only use the most basic tools and never explore the whole potential of the software.

Often the distances for the cursor are very long. You can compensate this by using keyboard shortcuts but I know that beginners like to stay with the mouse and the cursor for some time.

In my opinion the redesign of the UI should be one of the major concerns for the next upgrade.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
Apart from any details I would summarize, that the current UI definitely needs a complete redesign.

In my opinion the redesign of the UI should be one of the major concerns for the next upgrade.

What specifically would you like to see? How would you recommend a redesign without voiding the years (in some cases, decades) of experience current users have with the current UI?

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Apart from any details I would summarize, that the current UI definitely needs a complete redesign.

In my opinion the redesign of the UI should be one of the major concerns for the next upgrade.

What specifically would you like to see? How would you recommend a redesign without voiding the years (in some cases, decades) of experience current users have with the current UI?

I would like to see some separation lines between the icons.

F.e. in the Basic Palette,

To separate tools for manipulation from tools for object creation,

2D and 3D, lines and Polygons, ....

Meanwhile my Basic Plaette has been moved to the bottom of the screen

to have shorter cursor ways, in one row to make it easier to sort and

recognize icons. Also I custom rearranged icons in almost any Palette.

I deactivated Class and Layer dropdowns on top as they are redundant

with Navigation Palette.

(Since I learned that double clicking in Navigations brings the Organisation too)

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Apart from any details I would summarize, that the current UI definitely needs a complete redesign.

In my opinion the redesign of the UI should be one of the major concerns for the next upgrade.

What specifically would you like to see? How would you recommend a redesign without voiding the years (in some cases, decades) of experience current users have with the current UI?

Don't know about a redesign but a bunch of streamlining wouldn't hurt.

https://techboard.vectorworks.net/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Main=39609&Number=196514#Post196514

https://techboard.vectorworks.net/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Main=34755&Number=201379#Post201379

Well for starters how about a floating mode bar, not too large a change in UI but a great time/mousing/keyboard-shortcut saver........

https://techboard.vectorworks.net/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Main=38338&Number=189535#Post189535

Then concentrate on making a lot more onscreen hands-on editing capabilities (like we see in the new curtain wall tool).

Then move as much as possible to the OIP as opposed to dialog boxes.

Edited by Vincent C
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What specifically would you like to see? How would you recommend a redesign without voiding the years (in some cases, decades) of experience current users have with the current UI?

It's difficult to describe, because I am not a native english speaker and my user interface is not english but I try to translate:

The 'standard tool palette' contains both tools to create an tools to manipulate objects. I think it would be more compelling to distinguish between the two kinds.

When you select a tool some options appear on the top left of the screen. These options do not differentiate grafically from tools. They just look like a new row of tools with tiny separator lines between them. They appear under the title bar of the main window under a row of other 'elements' and it looks a little bit like 'hey, where do we have some place on the screen for these guys - yes, let's create a second row under the title bar. they are important, so why not move them to the left.'

I think it would be nice to find a more dedicated place for them and to change their graphic appearance. To minimize cursor movements it would be nice to have them as some contextual popup palette so they are always near the cursor.

In the same row under the title bar on the left there are some 'program options'. Because of their graphic appearance they also look like some tools but they are a colorful mixture of settings. Some refer to visual settings for the main screen, others are more basic settings like autosave etc.

The info and the attribute palette

In my opinion the distinction between the info and the attribute palette is strange. When I draw a line the line has several attributes like color, thickness, layer, class etc. Why are these attributes spread over two palettes?

General:

In the mac version all palettes are free and lose and it is not possible to arrange them permanently into one compact workspace without having gaps between the palettes.

The navigation in the accessory-palette is annoying and confusing. And it's difficult to move symbols from one folder to another.

For me the problem seems to be, that the GUI was made decades earlier, when there were only a fraction of tools and options and the software was much smaller. Since then every tool and option was just added somewhere as another tiny 'tool' icon without order or structure. You may say, that every user can customize the User interface but this means only that the user can rearrange the cluster of tiny litte icons.

Since the concept and power of the software wouldn't be affected by a redesign of the interface I am convinced that power users, that have been working with the software for decades (since the days of minicad) would be able to accommodate very fast. So no experience would be voided and the software would be set up properly for the future.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

This is turning into a large writeup on my end, here is a portion of it, I welcome feedback or stones being thrown at my proposal:

"The basic palette now includes a hodgepodge of various tools that have completely different purposes. It includes a "2D Modeling" set of objects, a set of selection tools and a set of modification/duplication tools. These could much more logically be broken up into:

2D Modeling:

Rectangle / Rounded Rectangle

Polygon / Double Line Polygon / Regular Polygon

Polyline

Triangle

Line

Freehand

Circle

Oval

Arc / Quarter Arc

Spiral

2D Locus

Text

Selection:

Selection Tool

Select Similar

Visibility

Eyedropper

Navigation:

Pan

Flyover

Zoom

Move Page

Modification:

Split

Trim

Move by Points

Fillet

Chamfer

Reshape

Attribute Mapping

Connect/Combine

Clip

This is a far more reasonable sorting system, they could even be tabs within the same Basic Toolset palette, handled similarly to the ToolSets palette currently, or tabs could be added to switch between them quickly."

This is only a small part of the proposals I am writing up, don't worry that this is all I got from this thread.

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