XSIBlog

Here are couple of changes we made to the layout manager in XSI 5.0 that I like..

First, we added the notion of Optional Panels. This allows you to toggle parts of the user interface on and off quickly with the Layout menu. Also, there is a script command (something that starts with ”Toggle”…) to bind this to keys.

To help with the addition of the Keying Panel, we added the ability to set individual size to the ”trays” that are put in a view stack. When you switch between “MCP” and “KP/L”, you”ll see the new splitter bar between the MCP (Main Command Panel) and the Viewports change to accomodate the larger width of the Keying Panel and Layer tray. Since it’’s a splitter bar, you can give more or less space to the Keying Panel. Even better, the layout will remember that user set position. To top it off, you can return the splitter bar to its default location by clicking with the middle mouse button on the splitter bar.

One hidden UI trick in XSI 4.x is that you can right-click on the header of the panels of the MCP to collapse them. In XSI 5.0, we now save the collapse state of these panels, along with the optional panels, in a new layout state file.

In previous versions, the area with panels on the right of the interface was called the Main Command Area in the documentation and some training material. Starting in V5 we changed that named to Main Command Panel, which is the name people close to engineering always used, and which has been trickeling down in various tutorials and such.

In V5 , you can now minimize all windows, including property pages, in addition to the ability to “Window Shade” them by double-clicking the caption. We”ve added a visual cue to the minimizing, to clarify where the minimized windows go. In previous release, they could easily go forgotten in the Windows menu, where they were hidden, but still took memory and sometimes performance. And of course you can now drag windows outside of the frame of XSI’’s main window, which has been often requested by dual monitor users. I”ve added some space between the close and other buttons to avoid clicking the wrong buttons.

The minimize and collapse in V5 is what I”ve always intented to do. I originally added the ability to collapse windows by double-clicking the caption. History doesn”t say if I stole this from Winamp, MacOS or something else. Some people internally, however, wanted to collapse their windows in one location and restore them in another one. So we added sortly before release of XSI V1.0 two concepts, the ”minimized” and ”restored” position. It’’s obvious that these users wanted to ”fake” minimizing to icons, but by doing this you take away from the elegance of Window Shade collapse, which is about hiding a window for a short period of time to view stuff below, often help reposition the window. If you moved the window when it’’s collapsed, however, it would restore it at the old place! So this workflow was no longer available. Also, creating your own ”icon” area is tedious, the software should be doing this for you. The compromize implemented also helped us avoid having to decide where we were to put icons on the desktop, and IMHO was less than satisfactory, but we had a lot of other stuff to do. Fast forward to V4, during which I was buzy in the fxtree, minimized windows were added, but again the decisions of where to put minimized icons was avoided - by not having any! Minimized windows simply vanished to the Windows menu. In V5, finally the icons are in there, in their most obvious implementation, and the true Window Shade mode is back.

Personnally, after doing the new tear-off menus, and ordering somebody to fix my past “minimize” mistakes, I re-did the toolbar customize dialog, which needed an update and also added the ability to embed scripts directly inside a toolbar button, without having to create a command or a script file on disk. The button itself saves the verbatim text of the script in the XML file, there is no weird external dependancy to the toolbar file.

No doubt more can be done - one things for sure, XSI is continuing to move forward in all areas.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 1st, 2005 at 12:24 am and is filed under User Interface. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.