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My main concern with this is discoverability - menus are helpful in that they convey a very precise listing of the app's possible actions (when designed well),
by andrewgodwin 15y ago
My main concern with this is discoverability - menus are helpful in that they convey a very precise listing of the app's possible actions (when designed well), something that's hard to otherwise come by.
Blender is perhaps the extreme example of this - it has an incredible amount of features, so they can't be placed into menus, and you spend some time learning where (in the hundreds of panels) or which of the thousands of keyboard shortcuts to use.
That said, I find keyboard-driven user interfaces very powerful, so I'm curious to try this out. Fortunately, there's been a way to turn off Crazy Ubuntu Features in most releases if you know how, at least so far.
- ConstantineXVI 15y agoMark says that's their concern as well: > For a start, we haven’t addressed the secondary aspect of the menu, as a visible map of the functionality in an app. That discoverability is of course entirely absent from the HUD; the old menu is still there for now, but we’d like to replace it altogether not just supplement it.
- jamesgeck0 15y agoBlender actually has a HUD-like feature already. You can just hit space to bring up a searchable list of every command in the program. As a new user, I found it a lot easier to find things with the HUD than with the enormous menu and panel system.
- teraflop 15y agoFunnily enough, my experience was the opposite. I spent a while playing with Blender 2.49, and although its UI wasn't the most intuitive, at least I could use the menus to get a feel for what functionality was available. This new unified drop-down has the effect of grouping commands by textual similarity instead of conceptual similarity, which is much less useful. Even if you know what action you want to take, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to do it unless you know exactly how Blender spells it.