Well done for working on the UI. There does seem to be quite a way to go so I’m hoping that issues I raise here are nothing more than matters arising from code that is still being written. But just in case they are not, please give them due consideration, McNeelies.
On my 32" monitor, in Rhino 7 I have my workspace laid out like this:
I’ve tried to replicate this in the WIP but there are some things that are not working out for me:
Number 1: My Boxedit panel now has a tab with its name on the left side, so I’ve lost that tab width from my usable real estate.
There is a nice space that is reserved for the container handle where the panel name could go instead, just like it does in R7:
Incidentally, I was surprised to see the single tab appear, because I have made this selection in Options:
Number 2: In R7 my Named Selections/Views/Cplanes stack had three tabs across the top, just wide enough to distinguish the meanings before the ellipsis cut in:
In the WIP the tabs are arranged on the left. But there is only room for two. The third need a click on a tiny, crowded icon and then a selection, so it’s slower to access. In the meantime the panel name in the tab is repeated in the container handle space, perhaps because the chosen colour scheme (one shade of grey for everything) lowers the affordance of the tab - particularly as the tab icon looks like another icon in the panel contents, blurring the visual cues:
Number 3: Cannot have a minimalist stack of icons. In R7 I’ve stacked up three third party menus, no labels, every icon quickly accessible. In the WIP I cannot find a way to stack these in a single container - it insists on three panels with tabs so I have to select a tab before selecting an icon. Once again, it’s slower. And there’s another chunk of my screen real estate lost to unwanted tabs.
I thought containers were intended to help you arrange menus and panels in whatever arrangement you want. But if you cannot stack menus vertically in a container the container adds no value to this use case - I can only do what I did in R7 and stack separate containers for each menu.
Number 4: The Rhinoceros container has the side tabs and no option for tabs at the top as per R7, so I lose another chunk of screen real estate.
In R7 I’ve placed the Properties panel below the rest. In the WIP I cannot have this arrangement in a single container, so I’m stacking containers like I used to stack the the panel set and panel. Which kind of begs the question: if containers don’t do anything new that you couldn’t do in R7, why introduce them?
