As part of my personal preferences, I’ve been working on modifying Rhino’s icons, and now this project is at a stage of completion. Along with the icon updates, I’ve also organized some of my earlier thoughts on UI design, which I’m sharing here for discussion. I see this as a way to wrap up the project.
My approach has been focused on refining and improving the current design, addressing existing issues and figuring out how they can be improved. Of course, if we were to take a more radical approach, there’s definitely room for bigger changes—like how commands could be better utilized. But I’ll leave that kind of thinking to UI/UX designers…
For the Command section, most useful information is often condensed into one line. Then we can add some shortcut buttons on the right, like command history or save icons?
Regarding Layers, I feel it could be simplified. Perhaps because I’m a product designer, I find that I rarely use most of the content, so I think we could organize the information this way for better readability.
Yeah, but like the concept of becoming “certified” in using a particular CAD’s GUI version, that only lasts as long as the version of that period, then it’s obsolete.
So, unless your approach is infinitely compatible with the versions of the future, you’ll have to continue repeating certain steps to chase the GUI. imo
The V8 buttons are much different from v5,6, etc. And V8 seems under development along with V9. Who knows what the buttons will do in V10 – you might have to redo everything again at that point.
No idea if there’s some better way to do this with ‘open nurbs’ and just transform the interface completely, then you might consider private labeling licenses or something. idk.
Ah, I’m not thinking about how to implement these interfaces; it’s just a discussion. I don’t know any coding, and changing the icons is something I feel I have to do because I’ve spent so much time working with Rhino. You could say I have a bit of OCD about it.
Thank you for your efforts, yes, your work is wonderful and simplified, and there are creative and professional touches. We hope that developers will pay attention to these ideas and turn them into reality. As @bobmcneel said, users are also developers.
Well, dialog box design issues aside, your implementation of low-contrast gray-on-dark gray for all text items is a disaster in terms of readability across the board. It’s hard to imagine that that will improve the usability of the software.
As far as specifics:
No. That has always been one of the main shortcomings of the Mac Rhino interface. The command line often has info on several lines (I keep three visible) and I would not want to have to open some other dialog to see what I want. However, this functionality is already built into Rhino, just pull the command line down to one line and use it as you like.
Yes, this is a nice reorganization - except for the type color as mentioned above, the readability of the items is virtually null.
I think most architects would not be happy with this. Again, you can currently hide any columns that you do not want to see directly in the layer dialog.
I personally don’t find your implementation any more readable than the current one.
I agree that the menu is very long. Some of the items might go elsewhere, but then I’m sure people will complain about having to go to multiple places for all the view-related options. As far as your “simplified” display mode icons go, what happens if people like @Rhino_Bulgaria have several dozen custom display modes? There, names are the only logical way to distinguish between the different variations.
I didn’t put much thought into the color scheme, and I agree that it could create readability issues. But this isn’t really up for discussion because it’s just a set of mockups for now.
Regarding the command line, I don’t see much value in having extra lines displayed all the time. For example, the only time I find it useful is when I’m measuring lengths and need to scroll back up to see the result.
Let’s skip the contrast issue for now.
As for Layers, my thinking is that if you’re an architect and you need those extra options, you can always bring them out and have them displayed externally.
For the OSnap panel, I just wanted to pull it out from the panel framework because I’m not a fan of dialog boxes.
I’m curious why anyone would need dozens of display modes. Of course, the icons here are just for the system’s built-in modes. If you still need more, then using text to display them makes sense—what’s the problem with that? Haha.
That’s an incredibly useful thing! It’s half the point of it. The other half is that it’s the only actual way to remotely efficiently access the hundreds of tools in Rhino and it’s easy to make add-ons–Rhino is possibly not even primarily a CAD tool, but a development platform. All these sorts of ‘make the UI “better”’ discussions ignore that, which is one reason why they are always fruitless.
I may have sounded too absolute in my previous comment about the command line. What I actually had in mind was keeping the command window as a single line but adding a panel on the right to display the command history. I even had ChatGPT try to generate a synchronized history window for me, but that didn’t work out.
But hey, can we agree that having these discussions isn’t a bad thing? Talking about how to improve the UI is better than no discussion at all, right? For example, aligning elements or making the software look cleaner doesn’t seem like an unnecessary change to me—it’s about improving the experience.
I think what you did is fantastic, and I believe most people would agree that Rhino could really benefit from a UI revamp. Some users are quite attached to the retro UI since they’ve been using it for many years, and those voices tend to be more active in the forums.
You’ve done an amazing job, and it’s great to spark a conversation around this topic, especially with your positive approach. I know some folks can be overly critical and hesitant to embrace changes, but your perspective is completely valid. To me, the Rhino UI feels a bit outdated for 2008 standards (and I genuinely love Rhino—my business revolves around automating tasks for shipyards and studios!).
I’m really curious to hear what others think as well.
I think these discussions are great and what you are doing is great, it’s just unfortunate that McNeel seems to neither have the interest or at least not the capacity to do anything about it.
@farouk.serragedine well, I don’t have time to link all others discussions about this now but first I don’t think they’ve tried (at all) and second, Mac Rhino users have previously enjoyed a more polished experience than what everyone ended up with in V8.
I think this is a good UI design.
Rhino is a tool for making elegant things, its appearance should be elegant either.
One reason I assigned aliases and keyboard shortcuts to most of the functions and memorized all of them is because I don’t like to see the icons. The icons and arrangement of them are not modern. I hide them as much as possible.
See this region, how many colors are there? Do they have harmony? Do the shapes of the icons share any inner/common logic? R8 is much better than R7, but still doesn’t feel good.
I also use Blender, Fusion and Plasticity. It’s my personal opinion, Rhino’s UI especially the icons need an overhaul, too ugly.
If you ask new users about Rhino UI and icons, you will get a real answer, the icons and UI just don’t look like modern things, much like from 90s or even 80s.
If you want to make the commandline more pretty, you could do it like AutoCAD. A single line to enter commands and display options, and a few lines above that, that slowly fade out, to display information.
Maybe I’m the old-fashioned user here—I was just wondering how everyone quotes things piece by piece and replies. The point you mentioned is spot on, it’s exactly what I wanted to say.
hint hint.
