Right now, my 1900x1080 monitor is full, edge to edge, of little icons and etters for each component, some with very little content, but nonetheless taking up the entire display width.
I realize that all the plugins I have loaded may not all be immediately useful, and that there are different schools of thought/practice on loading plugins (esp among those who may be more agile scripters) but often I find a lot of plugins to be at the very least educational and worth discovering/investigating.
I still hope itās possible to re-deploy some sort of user-based UI that helps me use GH more effectively. Hereās three thoughts:
- Allow the user to organize the order of plugin tabs (currently they seem unpredictable or at least inconvenient);
- By storing (ādare I say itā) āworkspace profilesā or something similarāloading & unloading pre-determined sets of plugins based on those profiles;
- User-defined uberTabs that group plugins as specified by user (see gif);
I know thereās some plug-in class/tags that determine their tab indexing locations, and that the reworking of all the plugins by each developer would likely be unmanageable, so Iām curious if the uberTab (#3) could circumvent this issue?
Iāve also read here that thereās some aversion to UI-tab mixing/matching from large AEC developers wherein they may have trouble deploying in-house updates for custom components, or their in-house users may have difficulty navigating different UIās. I think workspace profiles or uberTabs could also help with this by maintaining a standard gh0-tab, while freeing up the rest of us.
GH has been an overwhelming success and has provided an open platform for countless developers and an even larger pool of users, both new and experienced, and with a myriad of backgrounds. It has allowed for a literal explosion of spatial investagatory procedures. The rapid GH-plugin developments made possible through McNeelās approach to GHāwhile extremely successfulāhas the potential to drown out the usability of all these tools. As a freelancer, I often work on very different types of projects, from 3dViz to architecture to landscape architecture, and often make use of different sets of plugins for different project types. At the moment, Iām finding myself dedicating a lot of time to plugin management.
Thoughts?
Thx,
-dt
