A complete UI overhaul of Rhino would be a much welcomed move

The first step to UI success is hiring a team of graphic developers.
Everyone has their own job and specialty.
Thanks.

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Hi @bobmcneel
What do you think about this topic?

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Thats what I said….

For your information the Blender 2.5 UI rewrite took a group of devs over two years to complete. And that was just the codebase. The visual design took also several years. That was about 8 whole people working pretty much fulltime.

If you then take into account all the effort that went into 2.5-2.8, and now into 3.0 you talk about a huge project.

I have seen the war on icons. I have seen the war on themes. I have seen the war on GUI layout.

Since the visual part is always in the face, and everybody has their own opinions and preferences, people easily get distracted in how things are said, and get worked up because opinions differ. That clearly happens here as well.

Anyway.

Doing a good redesign is not a simple matter one can do in a couple of months with just two designers.

It is a long process.

It is a painful process.

And at the end still not everybody is satisfied.

Yes, there is room for improvement, and we will continue to do so.

But I doubt a complete revamp any time soon is not going to happen. It will take a long time.

P.s. I was part of the team rewriting the GUI for 2.5, and have been a long-time dev (although not so much for the past year or so).

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Let’s not forget the effect this has on documentation, training materials and long time users.

The input being provided here is useful in helping us make decisions. It does look like it would be worthwhile to spend time reviewing our icon sets and seeing if improvements could be made in specific locations. We may be able to make subtle improvements (ex. improving on an icon for saving a file is not the same as completely reworking the entire suite of icons).

Beyond icons, we are working on large changes to user interface that I’m hoping we can start showing off in the near future in V8. We are already detecting “dark theme” color settings on Windows Rhino and using alternate icons in that condition. They obviously aren’t pixel perfect yet, but we are working on it.

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hi Steve,

I hope you can put some effort in some of the friction I outlined here:

@JohnM provided some answers eventually, but they were not encouraging that your team is looking into solving these problems, he rather explained to me why all these limitations exist.

Not surprised here, that’s John’s style: he always explains why things can’t change. Just like he did 2 years earlier when Rhino’s RUI files wherenot working well with Dropbox: Help: Saving toolbar on dropbox causes error message - #8 by gustojunk

(I do keep tabs of you all, John included!)

…Another major problem of workspaces IMO is the poor support or multiple monitors, and more importantly, changing monitor situations (sometimes you are in a laptop standalone, sometimes you have an external monitor, sometimes you have 2 external monitors…)

Yet another major problem is shared toolbars/workspaces among users in a team. I want to be able to assign certain toolbars to be owned/managed by a single user and others should be able to see it updating in their worspaces. This is basically our in-company version of the same problem we have when you update toolbars in a new WIP build. We need to see those changes live, not having to run the super destructive Toolbar reset.

And tabs visibility and order should also be saved in someone’s workspace file/properties. So often I go to look for my NamedViews tab, or my BoxEdit tab and it’s not there anymore.

Thanks for listening!

Gustavo

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Yes guys, UI takes time and effort. It is due.

Putting up excuses and postponing is what led us here. That is why Blender’s UI looks and works like a modern software and Rhino like a Windows 1 software.

Better get started…

This is all part of the “we are working on large changes” that I eluded to above.

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This is difficult because you guys want to. The information is there, each .rui (I’m not sure if it is this extension) contains old tables that relate command names with icons and text, so you can automate the conversion of the tool content. And there is no need to replace one interface with another, they can be different Rhino products, sharing dependencies but different SKU, preserving compatibility and allowing innovation. I would love to pay for a better Rhino UI/UX, maybe even from Kickstarter!? :exploding_head: Or try it at a Hackathon? If there are any restrictions because of how Rhino was set up, there is probably a solution and I’m sure you can find it (and you’d better do it before the first generation of your developers retires).

I had a crying time making that archaeological work of getting tables from the installed .rui xml files (I did an ugly visualization graph with them btw), but you guys could make a better converter to clean up that toolset data in new GH objects or as raw data stored in the rhino doc, and make it easy for developers to create host applications that run over Rhino in new ways. So you let developers and users do define their own GUI and problem solved. :cowboy_hat_face:

Why not to use GH2 (as a nodal editor for calling command/buttons with the mouse and edit toolset layouts) with just a 3d model viewport and a command bar in a new skeleton, as I suggested in my previous reply. So that each user can set the workbench/toolset by their own modelling experience, in a more semantic experience. It should be doable a MVP in less than three months by the right team (if there are no serious technical impossibilities), and see if users are interested enough to develop it further in that case as a parallel Rhino product. Wouldn’t it be possible for you in a few months that developers can open Rhino with just a 4-viewport and a document and a command bar, docking anywhere (.ETO or Electron or Wpf or WinForms)?

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One problem with completely changing framework is that it’d break most of the plug-ins, at least the older ones. At the moment we choose to not break plug-ins and the entire ecosystem.

Doing an entire new app with a chosen architecture is not hard if you have nothing to worry about. Now take into account history.

This is not the easy and clear-cut issue as people appear to believe. But that is ok, you can’t know how the codebase looks like, all the things that need to be taken into account. The moment you do know you understand the situation.

We will continue to improve things, as @stevebaer has mentioned many times, with for v8 a host of bigger changes with regard to the GUI.

Like with plug-in development users can do what they want, there is no need to wait for a green light or anything.

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Again, you can create and sell another software product, no need to brake anything, just put it another name. And let the market speak to you.

Dude I live in software development and I am faced daily with everything taking two or three times longer than expected and how things can get so complex and I understand that there is old code that restricts a lot of things. But what I don’t understand is that you guys settle for that burden, as if there were no other options. Of course there are, the real question is how to make them viable.

So can’t you really, in 3 months or so, with one or two devs, create an MVP (minimum viable product) of a library like Rhino.Inside but with document and viewport and command line? I don’t see what else is needed for developers to create an interface from scratch on top of that, and it seems to me a reasonable time inversion for all the good things that can come afterwards.

Rhino is not open source Nathan. And it’s not about hacking Rhino either. Nor for a third-party developer to form solo paths and isolate himself, it is about you have to create certain plugs. Let me know, if I can do whatever I want, how can I open rhino without all the current interface but with a document, a viewport and acommand line, using C#, to build my own GUI with this? or how can I open multiple documents in the same session? or how can I edit the command line or at least use its command searcher, to make my own modern command bar version? And I could continue but that is not my point. Rhino has a lot of limitations, mainly in the interface, and what takes a long time is to patch up that old interface that sooner or later you will discard. :upside_down_face:

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Remembering the state of the toolbars from previous session is something that should be fixed. No doubt about that.
Other than some weird looking icons that could be improved in the future, in general Rhino’s UI is working wonderfully. I’m more concerned about the modeling and drafting functionality of Rhino and the tools that are actually used in the workflow. The UI is just a way to run those tools.

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That’s the path I was referring to, yes, but you know how far these examples are from being ready for production. The viewport is raw and doesn’t feel like the same interaction as in Rhino for many reasons. It only allows navigation and everything else has to be rewritten, basic things like the 4-viewport control or the viewport tabs and so many things have to be redone in order to make it feel like a familiar product.

Just ask and we’ll see what we can do. I would rather improve our SDK to allow people to build customized apps on top of Rhino’s core than allocate resources to building and selling a new app from McNeel. Building and selling an app would take away resources not only for development, but for tech support, documentation, and billing. I want to keep resources focused on improving Rhino for our existing users (including developers).

Part of the sample I linked off to had code to support sub-object selection which was something requested from the developer community.

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What tech support? (discourse) :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

We have a pretty darn hard working tech support team that help users via discourse, email, chat, and phone. I give them a lot of credit for the success of Rhino.

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I know @stevebaer , I’m sorry, I was kidding, since Discourse seems like the “frontman” to individual (non company) users.

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Can you name any company, in any industry, selling a product or service at any price point that has better tech support than McNeel? It’s a serious question.

That might be your personal interpretation, but not reflective of reality AFAIK. Many people I see here reaching out for support work for companies, including my own team. Also anyone can contact them by email, phone without having to be part of a company.

G

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omg, why do you all have to turn every comment into an off-topic pointless discussion. I was making a joke. This and other threads on this forum have long “overstayed their welcome”

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