069 UI feedback

not sure if this is the place to give feedback on the new touch
initial thoughts.

interface :

if you have TOP displayed on the background, it disappears when you move an OP - bit distracting
i understannd the new way to enter the OP interactive mode (where you can navigate the OP’s display image) but it would be nice to have a little red thing in the corner of the OP image to tell you when you’re in manipulation mode or not like it used to be with the double space way. Mainly because i dont know if i’m in move inside OP mode or move OP itself mode
a pointer from felix - the bookmarks default to vertical columns. With the generally horizontal layout of Touch now perhaps horizontal columns might be a better default
like the new grid
with the mouse navigation where you can ‘zoom’ into a COMP, it would be great if when it did that it ‘came out’ on the otherside at a lower magnification and centered over the network as it seems to arbitarily plonk you in somewhere and it takes some time to reorient yourself
i preferred the zoom independent Text so that even if you zoom out you could read the text names
i think the render flag circle and all the flags in general could be a little bigger (maybe just a bigger circle or make it the full square) and brighter (particularly render flag)
would it be possible to have user customisable colour scheme? like the adobe thing where you can ‘scale’ how dark it is?
the bookmarks come out ‘on top’ of any other menu’s. i think it should be the other way around ie if you have bookmarks open and you go to dialogs, booksmarks is displayed on top of dialogs
i prefered the giant red cross of the previous versions bypass - great that the colour coding of nodes is back, but the ‘fill red’ of the current bypass doesn’t stand out as much when you have a redish colour coded on the node
opset -a off needs to be much more obvious - same reason as above, if the OP has been colour coded you can barely see the cross - maybe it can go dark, or a large black cross which covers the entire OP.
minimise doesn’t work on the command and expression help

Some feedback for the nifty new UI.

Colors:
The almost black pane background is too dark, I’d prefer 20% gray. And there are several contrast issues (text + icons that are hard to read) and too many (distracting) light gray lines/borders present. I think these dark Houdini color schemes could be a good reference (color and contrast wise)
[url]http://www.sidefx.com/exchange/imgDownload.php?fileid=449[/url]
[url]http://www.sidefx.com/exchange/imgDownload.php?fileid=454[/url]

Spreadsheet values currently not readable and spreadsheet background still light gray

Panes
Flags (display, render, …) in list view look a little bulky

Node design:
Nodes with parenting connectors could/should have the parenting connector moved below the nodename field (or the wire connection drawn behind )

The left border icons (viewer, lock, …) could be moved to an (additional) top row. This could increase readability. Also the left to right data flow is currently “visually interrupted” by these icons. And it would make the node’s more symetric. Here’s a quick mockup.
tile2.jpg
The location where the icons are now could be duplicated on the right side, and should be stowable. Then these areas could be used for enabling stuff like point display, point number, … while not distracting if not needed.

The “custom text” entry would be controlled via a container’s string parameter (or the comment?). Useful for stuff like per node status messages.

Long node names should be trimmed at the name field’s border and the node name font size could be a little smaller

I’ll open another topic for this one, but as a start, should a node be a panel component as well, i.e. defined via various panels and therefore be totally customizable?

Order of flags. I’d prefer the most used (display) flags to be move to the right end
(CONTAINER: origin, pickable, render ,display; SOP: template, render, display; CHOPS: export, display; …)

opcolor: The applied opcolor seems not to exactly match the chosen color in the color selector. Also, when the tileviewer is off, the icon’s bg could use the opcolor as well

Zooming behavior: When zoomed out of the network it becomes “difficult” to read, i.e. the node’s “admin area” takes too much space. For example the inner border (the one which gets a darker shade of opcolor) gets bigger when zooming out. The above mentioned relocation of the left icons should help here as well.

Dialogs:
Great that the entire UI will be implemented in components of panels. Currently the Alias and Macros panel’s suffer from the non-existing scrolling (arrow key navigation) support for fields, i.e. you can’t handle long strings easily. Also alt + e support would be nice.

The spreadsheet is missing resizeable columns. Should this use the DAT engine or be converted to a component?

Parameter panes still do not update when selecting new ops (as does the spreadsheet pane)

More to come :wink:

thank you for all the feedback so far, as you all know, our new UI is a work in progress, so
we will consider all your suggestions. I’ll answer some of the concerns here:

from:girBringerOfDoom

one way to tell right now is that the border around the viewer gets brighter. box select a bunch of nodes,

their viewers will not be activated yet so you can click drag to move them around. now click on them, and
you’ll notice the border around the viewer turning brighter. I’m also working on changing the cursor so you
know when you can interact with the viewer.

we are still working on the colours etc of the flags for maximum visibility.

right now, it is possible to customized most of the colours via the uicolor command. eg. to customize the worksheet background to a mid grey background with dark lines, you can run the following in the textport
or a start script:

uicolors -c worksheet.bg 0.5 0.5 0.5 uicolors -c worksheet.grid 0.3 0.3 0.3 uicolors -c worksheet.gridxy 0.2 0.2 0.2
see the help for uicolors if you need to make adjustments. however, we do suggest you try out
the current color scheme for a few days to see if you like it more once it has become more familiar.

would making the bypass red solid help?

these sounds like bugs and we’ll try to squash them asap!

from:Achim

see my note earlier in the post about using uicolors to change the worksheet background if you need.
please bear with us as we adjust the colours to make things more readable.

the spreadsheet and the list view had not had their overhaul yet. we’ll try to get to it as soon as possible.

interesting ideas, and thanks for the visuals. we’ll discuss some of these at our next meeting

node name font size is adjustable in Preferences->Tiles. the default is 13.

maybe in a future version. probably when we get closer to programming Touch with Touch :wink:

that’s makes good sense to me. we’ll let you know if we make the change.

no, they don’t match precisely. we’ll have a new color selector sometime that gives a subdued range of colours. we would like to minimize visual noise. just out of curiousity, how many different groups of opcolors do you tend to use in a network?

one of the ideas in the new design is that of unity zoom, where the size of a node corresponds to the size of
a pixel. currently, when you hit ‘h’, your network will be centered and zoomed to 1 (visible in upper left corner).
‘H’ will center your network and fit it to the best zoom level. the administration portion of a node only shrinks when the zoom level is less than one. the reason we have a unity zoom is to give a point of references and make it easier for users to keep their node sizes within a range. I’m guessing your nodes are on the small
size (<100 units in width or height?). I’ll be making it easier to resize a group of nodes together asap.

the arrow keys are currently working, however, the text field is not moving with typing. I’ll look into this and get it fixed as soon as possible.

we will be revamping the spreadsheet soon.

sounds like bugs that needs squashing.

thank you all for your feedback and looking forward to more once you’ve played with the new ui more.
we’ll post changes as we continue to work on this.

Selina

tried it once, but it’s hard to handle, i.e. there’s a ton of stuff I couldn’t find out how to change … generally it seemed hard to get a pleasing result.

Sure, no complains from my side. The ~20% gray was a suggestion for a default value. The light gray lines is one of the settings I couldn’t really change via opcolors, i.e. whatever I did, it resulted in something else becoming unreadable and/or it wasn’t possible to change

Thanks, much better. Still prefer the name will be trimmed to the field and not overlap the flags (or even the whole node)

Using 6-8 different opcolors currently, mainly to give some feedback about the state of a component (synced, edited, locked, missing, outofdate,…). Hence the suggestion for a custom text field (with textcolor support), which could display such status without the need for opcolor. If you wanna reduce visual noise, a good thing would be not to have two different shades of the opcolor (as is now)

I think my comment about the inner border getting bigger wasn’t actually true. Seems fine on a closer look. But, for example, with a fresh and non-resized constant CHOP, when zoomlevel == 3 most of a tile area is devoted to the viewer, which is fine. If I home to zoomlevel == 1, the viewer occupies only half of the nodes area. What I’m saying is, it would be nice the tileviewer would get more node space when zoomed out.

About the new select/adjust workflow

I’m not so sure I like it. First problem, the rollover/inside panel variables don’t work with non-selected nodes (as no click happened yet to activate operate mode).

Second, if you have the control panels of your components displayed in the tileviewer, you’ll often want to adjust the values for various components without having to select-nomove click first. I think the new tile design features enough space you can click to move the node and have direct tile viewer interaction without the additional select-nomove click. For example, the node name field could be changed to only allow interaction on a quick double click, therefore this whole area could be used to move the node. And additionally, a temporary space bar click could allow to move the tile wherever clicked.

Hey Achim, please bear with us on the colorscheme, it is far from a final pass. That said, your comments are welcome so we know what you do like and don’t like. Things like too many white borders and spreadsheet coloring are all things we haven’t even had a pass at yet.

Also, as you know, uicolors is difficult to use. But I’d strongly recommend that you all resist using it so that you can see our colorscheme progress with each build and give us comments on it. If you substitute your own colors at this point, you don’t get the chance to test our default colors.

We are still working out things with the select/adjust workflow. Thanks for the comment, we also feel there might be too many clicks. We are trying our improvements in iterations, so be prepared for this stuff to change slightly build to build until we get it right.

Hi Rod, could you explain what you mean by laying the bookmarks out in horizontal columns? You mean across the screen?

You second comment about bookmarks on top confuses me, it seems like the first part of your statement is the opposite of your example. Could you clarify. It should be that the bookmarks dialog is OVER the other dialogs menu right now. That is a function of how we are using panels for dialogs, and won’t be fixed (or changable) until we overhaul some internals in Touch.

thx

Hey ben, no problem. These are just comments. I’m VERY happy with the direction the development is taking and generally like the new UI!

might do! or if the cross was a little bit bigger than the node itself?
same with the opset -a off black cross

i’m still going for the zoom independent node names… maybe i just lay out my networks badly, but I really like being able to see my node names even from a fairly ‘zoomed out’ perspective. but of course happy to go with the flow.

sorry thats was my bad explaining
so in the default bookmark layout window (the popup), the default layout is vertical column based - was just thinking that it would make more sense for the default layout to be horizontal columns across the screen. just because most of the networks i make are moreso across the screen than up and down.

on the second point you are correct, the bookmark dialog is OVER the other dialogs menu. - was wondering if its a bug, but thanks fro explaining.

awesome guys!

HI all, I like it so far, although I 'm with achim about the background since my monitor’s not super bright anyway (prob tru of many laptops vs desktops).

I must’ve missed something though…

when I want to export a chop channel, I select the target field and OP, then I go back to the exporting CHOP and double-click it to expose the chop channel for dragging, but then the target OP is no longer selected and I can’t drop it there.

duh , right? what should I be doing?

Rod.

PS. Ben, ‘GirBringerOfDoom’ is the inimitable Jason, not me! :slight_smile:

My monitor was too dark as well. Increased the brightness and now it’s really fine.

Ya, thats one of the issues with the new node interaction behavior. We’re still trying to find a good solution. For now we added a new way to do this. When you left click (and release) on a CHOP channel in the viewer, you’ll notice it says ‘Copied Channel for Export’ in the status bar. You can then go to a parameter and right click on it and there is a new option called ‘Put Export’ that will export the channel.

I concur with the comments I’ve read in passing about the color scheme, which is why I was reading this post.

dark background and bright text is a recipe for losing sight (it looks cooler, but that’s secondary when you need to get 15 hours days work done using it :wink:)

in fact, I appreciate the uicolor command a lot!

I would advice to release at least another color scheme for your users soon, one that’s easy to switch to without setting the hundreds of options for every possible lil’ thing.

You don’t have to work out all the details, just make a kind of negative color scheme from what you have now.

tx
d