I think I may have found some mistakes, albeit minor ones, in some tooltips.
In the top toolbar as well as in the side bar, when I hover over the Zoom button, the tooltip says: “Zoom dynamic: Ctrl + RMB” This is wrong. I think it should say “Cmd + RMB”, because that is what works on my computer. For me, Command makes this work, not Control.
In the Set View tool palette the following may be wrong also. For the red car icon to set the view that shows the car from the right side the tooltip says Left view. And the tooltip for the icon with the car showing the left side says “Right view”. The same is done with the airplane icons where the tooltips are switched with what is actually shown. I.e right side view of airplane, tooltip says “Left view of CPlane” And vice versa.
Also in the Set View tool palette, the second icon on the top row: Ctrl+Shift+RMB does not rotate the view. It pans the view. And Ctrl+Alt+RMB does not rotate the camera, it does dynamic zoom (as CMD+RMB does).
Be careful here! The “left side” of a car is commonly referred to when using the driver’s left side as a reference, but in the view names “left view” is left-as-viewed-from-the-front! When viewing a building there would not be confusion as to which side was the left side of the building, as that is normally viewed from the front.
Looking at it this way the tooltips are correct.
When you put it in the context of a building left and right, “as viewed from the front”, makes perfect sense. Maybe the fact that a car and airplane were chosen by the developers as visual metaphors created the confusion. I agree with you that when you look at it that way, the tooltips are indeed correct.
The strange thing is, that there does not seem to be a correct solution to this. Obviously for architects, the way it is may makes sense, even though they are still looking at a car/airplane icon. For car, airplane, bicycle, motorcycle, shoe, etc. designers however it may probably not make sense. And if the developer switches them around then they are not going to make sense for a new set of designers.
Maybe it would be possible/helpful to give the user the ability to switch these in the program or file preferences based on what kind of item one is working on. This might be able to be handled under Preferences > Themes.
It might be informative to point out that Rhino is intended for Industrial design and product styling. When choices like this are made with respect to this frame of reference, we go with the industrial designer’s view and not the architect’s frame of reference.
@John_Brock you might want to check with the developers then John, judging from the Bug reporting this change is being processed, and hopefully it will not be just the tooltips that are being changed, but also the names of the viewports, i.e. the “Right” viewport name shall change to “Left” view, and vice versa.