@Gijs
The floating panel container does not stick to the dock, when placing it back to the interface.
| Model Name: | Mac mini |
|---|---|
| Model Identifier: | Macmini8,1 |
| Processor Name: | 6-Core Intel Core i7 |
| Processor Speed: | 3,2 GHz |
| Number of Processors: | 1 |
| Total Number of Cores: | 6 |
| L2 Cache (per Core): | 256 KB |
| L3 Cache: | 12 MB |
| Hyper-Threading Technology: | Enabled |
| Memory: | 32 GB |
you should drag it until you see the blue rectangles, then drag your mouse cursor on top of the rectangle, so that area expands, then release. Does that help?
ahhh… ok, when you know it its easy :))
Thanks !
Where do i find manuals and documentation on how to customize the User interface , details like this and similar ?
I am also interested in changing the font of the text and the size of text and icons in these panels. Is that possible ? Could that be implemented ?
If so, i guess it would be a tremendous help to a lot of Mac OS users who find the new RH8 style too much “Windows / PC”
no, that’s not possible
Roger that. I hadn’t even played with R8 beta at all as just had too much production work to do and didn’t have the bandwidth to mess with it.
Yet it was released and bought the upgrade immediately simply because there’s a single feature in R8 that (clone a block under a different name) that would solve a huge workflow issue (need counts of blocks on specific layers to go into a text field on a layout which is unavailable, so the new make a clone of block with new name and being able to get the count of that block’s unique name would serve as a workaround.
The UI was SO different, that I literally couldn’t do ANY work.
The vast majority of my Rhino work is architectural. For a couple years now I’ve used the layouts panel, the properties panel, the layers panel, and the layout layers panel in conjunction with each other (they’re always simultaneously up on the right panels).
I open V8 and everything is so different, I can’t find my way around.
Apparently someone decided there’s no need to have more than one panel visible at the same time and that clicking back and forth between them at the top (which quickly becomes utterly indiscernible when you have a bunch of panels checked for inclusion, which quickly runs off the end of the top icon list.
The legibility of those icons in dark mode is non existent. You can’t tell what is what and on a 4K display they’re so damn small you can’t make them out (particularly in dark mode).
I can’t find a reliable means of accessing my layouts list and if I inadvertently click in the wrong place they sort utterly wrecking my page order organization. I cant’ find a way to unsort them.
For some reason Grid Snap / Ortho / and the other options that used to be up top are now relegated to the bottom in a tiny assed little row that’s indecipherable in dark mode jammed in between a bunch of other stuff I can’t read either.
I spend 80% of my day going between model space and layouts, 90% of the model space time is in top view. If I open a layout there’s no simple way to get back to the top view (it used to be one click each back and forth) and now there’s this unfathomable dropdown menu and a group of Icons I’ve never seen in my life with no tooltip hover to explain what the hell they do.
The in app help is useless as it shows V7 screenshots and dialogs that no longer even exist.
You’d have thought with this massive of a UI change there’d be some tutorials or something for mac users that showed or even attempted to explain “the stuff you used to find here is now there” or something to at least give us a semblance of a way to navigate this gynormous change to everything I’ve known for years, but no joy.
All I can find is an oblique reference to “there’s a video somewhere that sorta demonstrates how to get more than one panel up on the right”.
That’s not helpful at all.
The unified layers panel? Sounded great in theory until you encounter it in use.
I have to drag the right panels (ERR PANEL, AS YOU CAN’T HAVE MORE THAN ONE) thing out so far into drawing space just to see all the myriads of tiny little columns you can’t identify to save your soul, and the KEY things I need are overall (global) visibility, screen and print colors, line weights and lock, THIS LAYOUT visibility and all the rest of those columns I’ll seldom use need to get the hell out of the way to get my drawing space back. Can’t figure out for the life of me how to reorder or hide show the columsn.
Changing the panels view to icon + text is an unmitigated disaster as the you get this list that pops up taking the entire vertical space of the screen (including the top system menu bar and the dock) that’s unscrollable, and you cant’ select anything in it or even make it go away without a force quit.
I’ve been with Rhino since mac V5 Alpha and have never seen this drastic of a change that is so utterly undocumented (you can find little tiny descriptions in what’s new but that’s essentially it, no “here’s how this works” whatsoever).
I’ll look around again today but woah, guys, this one (massive UI change impacting mostly mac folks, the majority of us who have never even SEEN the windows UI and no supporting “transition” documentation I can find in app, or in forum searches.
If you’re going to make such huge changes, you can’t assume we’ll know to go down to the 3rd sub basement behind the wall of filing cabinets and find the notice that the house is gonna be bulldozed on a crumpled up sticky note in the trash can hidden behind a stack of boxes.
It is understandably frustrating and confusing UI if you haven’t followed the WIP.
you can have lots of panels opened at the same time
here with 4 panels opened [on a MacBook]
there will be a learning curve, but apart from some ugly icons we had to share with the Windows folks, the rest is a big improvement on the Mac, [and apparently a partial regression on Window]
So, where are the documentation on how to customize and navigate this new interface? I havent followed the WIP too, this time, so its a big, radical step to pay for , without documentation ?
Besides , I agree, the improved options sound awesome, and I am as usual loving Rhino…
For years I also had a Windows version on a PC with strong graphics card, but for the very reason of ugly interface, and Windows in general, i actually didnt use that PC at all, and ended up scrumbling along with my MacMini 7i Intel and external graphics card… Thats how much the Windows user interface is effecting my sense of workflow, to be honest.
I hated the windows look, but I could tell the functionality and compact efficiency was better on the PC version. So it is with mixed feelings now, to sit with RH8.
I guess I just have to suck it up and get used to it… but still… I really dont understand why we have to deal with those ugly, super tiny small Layers icons ? They are just icons, why not make nice icons for both PC and Mac ? All other icons (Tools, Grashopper etc ) are really nice, so why those really old-school HTML-style icons ?
I use a big 38" monitor, and I have scaled the tools icons, and also scaled MacOS display , so i can read text. But those layers icons cannot be scaled, and they look reeally small… im just saying.
Ugly was [part of] the price for that very large and tricky effort the Devs put into unifying the Window and Mac UI,
It’s not all ugly, but there’s a lot that could have been done to make it look good.
I’m sure R9 will be very pretty if enough pressure is applied to convince the Devs that it is important…
Is that how this WIP process has been ? Was there a debate about keeping the windows style, specifically voting against Apple-style ?
No, no public debate, otherwise we would still be bogged down endlessly in it and still be in the WIP wilderness. There was probably some sort of internal debate at McNeel weighing the pros and cons, but the unified interface for tutorials, teaching and the like, the common code base that could be used for much of the UI won out based on logic and economics.
If this had been done back in 2007 or so when the first WIP of MacRhino was released, (as some people suggested back then) we probably wouldn’t be having this discussion. But unfortunately, the tools were not available back then to do this.
Edit:
This is a term I frequently see bandied about - mainly because Rhino has been running on Windows since 1994 and on Mac only about 15 years later. So it is thought of as being a “Windows-Style” program. But it’s not. It’s mostly nothing like other Windows programs. Rhino is like… Rhino. It’s fairly unique in its interface. However, that interface is derived originally from… AutoCAD. Rhino was an AutoCAD plug-in before it was independent.
What other windows program has a command line besides Rhino and AutoCAD?
Certainly, for economic reasons Rhino for Windows used Windows “canned” dialog boxes and UI elements for certain things - as the previous Mac versions used Apple-native “canned” dialogs and UI elements. However how it works with toolbars, panels and all that stuff is 100% Rhino and neither Windows nor Mac.
There are practically as many different opinions on what a UI should look like as there are users. Nobody is going to be 100% happy. You could probably imagine that if the majority of the “Apple-style” interface that you are used to was imposed on Windows Rhino users, you would have exactly the same reaction here from them (only more of it).
This is a clash of two universes - and there are going to be some black holes created.
Well
they [window users] out number us about 3 to 1 so…
The so called Apple style for the rhino Mac, was in most part a bad early choice that created
a lot of pain.
Rhino could use a fresh clean and unified Rhino style UI look, [ R9 ].
As far as I understood… Mcneel didn’t have a dedicated UI/UX designer … “and the rumor is that they are currently searching for a talented artist for the position”
This is another thing I have often heard. In the past a few people have proposed some stuff but there was never a consensus as to “Wow, that’s it!!”.
Afterwards we need to define what is “fresh”, “clean” “modern” etc. Rhino has over one thousand tools and many of those tools have dozens of options. And Rhino (also pretty unique among programs) generally has three different ways of executing commands - Toolbars, Menus and typed Keyboard commands. So whether you are a button pusher, a menu puller an ardent typist or a combination of any/all, you can find your way. I don’t know how you manage that kind of complexity without having some degree of “clutter”. There are some people who have posted here who managed to set up their interface to work entirely in full-screen - no toolbars, no menus, no command line etc… I don’t know how that works, but what is interesting is that it is even possible with Rhino.
And of course, the last thing is that Rhino has gotten pretty mature and Titanic-esque with its large user base. Trying to make a hard left turn with the UI just won’t work. It’s going to have to be pretty gradual, and hopefully we can still avoid the iceberg.
@Helvetosaur I really like the logic of rhino workflow and tools menu. Not many other software has such straight out, intuitive setup. You want to do something, and the menu has it all sorted out what elements you can build from, from curves, surfaces, SubDs, solids, etc… I agree Rhino is something special , and for my work, where i actually build with lines in real world, Rhino is just perfect ! (I make thin shell concrete sculptures, using thin 6mm rebar as “curves” (ohlers.com)
I get the history , deriving from AutoCad, and the engineering logic inherent. Why bother with fancy styling, when its basically a tool.
But since Rhino has developed itself into such a super cool 3D software , specializing in curvature and spline based objects, and now also with SubD, that makes designing in organic , fluid form even more powerfull, you have to acknowledge, the user base is attracting designers and artists, and not just dry-bone engineers. Subtle things, like “Feelings” begin to matter, when in a workflow, and those “feelings” are most vital , when you have your whole life earnings centered around one specific software, that you work professionally with every day, all year round.
So its much more than just a “like or not like”, its something that affects you a lot, if a visual platform doesnt “feel” right.
That being said - the functionality and new tools of RH8 is absolutely over the top awesome !!
I can understand the many hours and effort to make it work, also the struggle with Metal, and Apples new processors!
So no real begrudging here from me, what I talk about here is just visual finesse, thats all.
I just hope that McNeel will take this “UI design” stuff seriously, and hopefully some day we will get a really geniously awesome looking unified UI.
Fully agree here. My ambition/hops are modest.
cleaning up and redesigning [at least] the icons we can’t modify as users.
An example of a severe eye sore
redesigning and unifying all things render related, and adding a node base material editor [maybe in Gh] What we have now is so confusing, feels all over the place.
Sorta figuring it out now. It’s all about the containers. So in theory I can create containers with one (or more than one, but for this application, one panel (Layers) and then dock that to the right side and eventually once I get them created, lock that arrangement down (properties on top, layers in middle, and layouts below that, then a general container with the other panels I don’t mind having to toggle through because I don’t use them continuously.
That part is just fine, It’d have just saved a lot of time and panic if it’d been pointed out it was there.
All these things are containers and they can dock (or not) and hold one or multiple panels and toolbars. Got that bit more or less noodled out. It’s still not real clear what the correlation is between what you name a container and where it lands, and like most things Rhino, if you beat your head against it long enough the light will come on and then it makes sense, but it’d sure save a LOT of head banging if somebody at McNeel could just SHOW us what the intent is as for how stuff works.
I don’t care what the mechanic is in particular, just that there is one and I don’t have to burn a day or so just figuring something out that had somebody created just a LITTLE documentation on could have been grasped in a few minutes.
I only stumbled on the containers thing obliquely from a non linked reference in another command in the help. They took the time to denote that the UI was markedly different but never bothered to explain WHY it was and where to go look for how to utilize it.
Again, as from what I’ve read thus far in these posts, the majority of us are getting hung up on the same few items, which sorta indicates I’m not the only one who had zero clue what the changes were other than they existed, I had no idea what they actually were, nor where to go as how to find out how to use them.
We were required to take a tech publication class in engineering class in college 40 some odd years ago, and we’d have to write up documentation for various stuff. These would come back all redlined, often with YAFF in big print over the redlines.
After a couple weeks of this some brave soul asked “What’s a YAFF?” to which the prof answered “Yet Another Fucking Frambulator”, and when enquired as to what that was he explained:
Here’s a picture of a dialog. It has a Checkbox named Frambulator, a screen label named “Frambulator Enabled”, and a hover tooltip that says “enables and disables the Frambulator option”. His point was nowhere did it even explain what a frambulator was, why the hell you even needed one, and if it was so friggin spectacular why did it have an on off switch, and further it was just flat out arrogant to use the name of the thing to describe the thing and what the thing did.
Once that was explained, he further noted that if any of us did a frambulator in any of our further work that it would be an automatic course fail as we now knew better what NEVER to do.
Yes, yes and yes.
There are a number of contributing and sometimes conflicting factors that created this situation.
First there was (sorta) the assumption that the early adopters have all been following the WIP/Beta process, and at least knew that changes had been made - and hopefully how the new stuff worked. That conflicts with the more or less known fact that a lot of people don’t start using the new version until it’s in Beta (a mere few weeks from release) and that many only wait until the actual release - which is why the “soft launch”, it’s sort of an expanded beta testing period, the hope is to get far more users reporting bugs that can then be fixed before the public announcement (which hasn’t happened yet). Plus, there are those people like myself who did follow the WIP/Beta process, know what changes are there in the UI stuff, but still don’t know how to use them correctly… And I’m on a PC.
The second contributing factor is that there are two concurrent complex development problems that are happening very late the development cycle.
Both of those are extremely complex tasks consuming large amounts of development resources, but more importantly both are perhaps suffering from not having had enough testing in the field to find all the bugs (yet) - because of the relatively small group of WIP users. So you have two more or less completely new systems that are now just starting to be discovered and used by more than a small group, and the reactions are starting to pour in.
A third factor is simply that the changes to the UI appear much more radical on the Mac side than on the Windows side (compared to the previous version). Plus the Mac people also have to deal with Metal display testing (thanks to Apple) so there is a sort of double-whammy for them.
Could any of this have been avoided? Maybe in part, yes - I do have a feeling that the workspace UI stuff was introduced too late in the development cycle and that a number of the bugs we are dealing with could have been fixed previously even with the small number of testers. Some of the more advanced users simply refused to test at all because there were too many bugs, and that’s a shame. But aside from that, with these two developments (Metal+UI) I think this release has more “breaking changes” than any other previous release has had since V3 - when the entire geometry library had to be re-written because Alias pulled AGLib out from under Rhino. So I think it’s going to be a bit chaotic for awhile until we get more release-version users testing and breaking more stuff so that it can be logged and fixed.
But back to @LewnWorx 's comments - yes, we desperately need some documentation on how the new workspace stuff actually works. There are dozens of threads here with questions on toolbars and the like, but it’s impossible to find all the information in one place, nor to know what information is correct and what isn’t. These days videos seem to be the thing, so perhaps a clear 15 minute video showing how to organize and customize the UI would be good. Being old-school, I also like written/illustrated docs.
There is some info here already -
But it’s not nearly enough to have an understanding about how the new UI system works and what the various terminology actually refer to.
I just wanted to add a small thing to @Helvetosaur excellent post.
Check out the new command WindowLayouts.
Whenever I make a UI change, I used this command to save what I did, and then I’ll probably mess up with some more experimenting and save that too
So you can always return to any of your UI configs .
Eventually when all is mature and we learn it all, that command allow us to create custom work spaces to suit different work needs.
You missed .NET 7 as well Mitch 
This makes 3 huge technology shifts. All of these developments started right away when we began working on Rhino 8. It takes a lot of time and effort to even get one part of this in front of users which may be why you think this was a “very late in the development cycle” thing. I assure you it wasn’t.
It should also be mentioned that we continue to make new builds of Rhino available every week and those new builds attempt to address issues brought up in threads like this.
Well, in the case of the Workspace/UI/Toolbar system, you are right, I have no idea when work was actually started. IIRC, it was unveiled in a WIP about midway through the cycle - i.e. about a year and a half from the beginning. It was so bad and unexplainable that pretty much anybody who tested it gave up pretty quickly. So again IIRC, much time went by - maybe 9 months or more - where there was virtually no feedback at all. Then came the wake-up call when the first “Feature-Freeze” notice was posted here sometime in April with a projected freeze date in May (which was later extended). At that point more people started yelling, doing some more testing and giving up again. Then we started approaching the projected release date in like August-September and there was some more movement and some more fixes, but not enough to get us to release without a bunch of remaining issues.
I’m setting up my standard “default” arrangements for French, English and German, and just moving a few things around feels pretty clunky. For example, pulling the Osnap container out of the left sidebar and docking it at the bottom of the screen. When you do that, it expands upward to fill half of the screen vertically. Then I have to find the line to pull it back down - which is invisible until you mouse over it and is only one pixel, so it’s hard to get hold of on a 4K laptop screen… Plus you can pull it so far down that only the tabs remain visible and no longer the checkboxes, which are now behind the status bar or something… Not ready for prime-time.
That’s why it FEELS like things are happening very late…
Thanks for that on multiple levels, principally being I’m not the only one who found all that challenging.
I have discovered the menus command, which is neat, and added menus for distribution and alignment, but every time I restart those added menus vanish. Not sure why.
My heads been buried in the apparently to be discontinued Mac Visual Studio attempting to write a plugin to get a user selected block , pull the name and layer, then select all the blocks on the same layer with the same name and do a create unique block (or whatever the api name for the same thing is) for just the blocks on that layer.
Thus far it’s getting the selection, walking the user define attributes lists and stuffing those into arrays for the keys and values. It’s selecting the blocks on the same layer with the same name fine, but what I’d like to do is have the thing present a list for the user to select one of the already walked block user key / value values to use as the basis for the new block name (actually concatenated like - ).
Challenge is finding any docs on how to create multiple selection buttons (like you see with the align commands). I’ve got the value list, just need to figure out how to present those as options in the UI before continuing.
Been a long time since I’ve touched C++ let alone C#, so had to blow the dust off that bit, and have found that changing the var declarations to explicit types helps keep track of things.
The whole point of that excise is to plop a text object with he block count on it to handle tracking install locations throughout a building for a given device type and which IDF it connects to.
This was the ENTIRE reason to upgrade to 8.
