V8 UI styling & customization thread

Rhino Rhino for Windows
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I’ll try to gather everything in one place instead…

SCROLLBAR STYLING

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ICON SCALING

Not all icons get scaled it seems.

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However, those :see_no_evil: cogwheels apparently do scale (but only after a restart)… :upside_down_face:

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EDIT: The above panel had large and small icons, whereas the below panel has large and large icons. There’s no consistency here (and seemingly no design intent or uniform theme for the icons).

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TEXT SCALING

Seems you can only scale the command line text, yet I see at least three different text sizes in the UI.

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COLOR STYLING

There’s very limited UI color styling options, for example I can’t change the 100% solid black backgrounds of text boxes as seen in the screenshot above and you can’t change the highlight color of the options along the bottom of the window.

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This separator in the main toolbar seems to use a text color, when it probably should use the general frame background color (also, no styling option for adding breathing room as I’ll mention below).

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EDIT: When a named panel background has nothing in it, it’s the content background color (which is fine), but when it’s populated it suddenly has an entirely different non styled color (and both cases has a 1 pixel outline which other panels lack).

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Oh, and the third odd one out is the Named Selections which does have a black empty list before anything has been added and no 1 pixel outline (and almost no tools in its poor toolbar either)… :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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Aaaaand the Materials panel is a fourth styling with two different highlight colors and a weird horisontal seamless realtime zoom… do we really need that here in an UI which otherwise feels already quite aged? Do people seamlessly zoom materials often or doesn’t the thumbnails context menu suffice and we could instead reduce visual clutter?

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(Plus, design theme intent nitpick… the UI has seemingly been flattened, yet those icons in the bottom right corner have a beveled look… almost Windows 3.1/95 styled.)

LAYOUT STYLING

There’s no way to style the breathing room between UI elements, and things like the active tab on the top toolbar melt together with the menu bar above, while active tabs on panel windows have a 1px breathing room.

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Meanwhile, the tabs along the bottom of the screen have a 1 pixel outline in their active and hovered states.

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Also there’s a 2 pixel gap between docked panels, but in this bottom left corner there seems to be 0 (same for the top of the screen, actually).

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Ping @Gijs and who else at McNeel is responsible for UI?

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I said it before and I say it now. User Interface need a graphic designer specialized in the Ul. The developer does not know these details.
Even in the icons there is no coordination.

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Unless you’re a unicorn like David Rutten who magically knows both and does them exceptionally well. But those people are probably literally one in a million. McNeel needs to acquire more talent like that but it’s probably very, very difficult (and costly).

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Would a Photoshop mockup of a visually cohesive Rhino 8 UI be interesting for you guys to see?

I’ve been thinking of creating some (mostly for my own fun) for light and dark modes but I’d kinda hope that it would be a hail mary shot for the McNeel team to take even some inspiration from.

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Who else can I ping here? @brian

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Have at it…

Several people have posted various redesigned schemes in the past, none has ever taken hold. You will find that there will be a few people who will like your ideas and many people who won’t.

The main problem here is that nobody can agree on what is a “good” design. It’s all a matter of personal taste. I couldn’t care less about “dark mode”, while other people will complain if any element is lighter than 50% gray.

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True, but nonetheless good design is needed. Someone with ‘good taste’ needs to have the last word on this.

Compare it to any other thing, maybe movies. Is the director unnecessary just because part of the audience might not agree on the style, the ‘handwriting’ of it?

But actually, in our case here, I see it more as a matter of consistency. There are too many different UI elements. It looks unfinished (which it is).

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Trying one last time with one more person… ping @stevebaer

But saw that at least one of my issues above is already logged.

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There’s a lot to cover here which makes it difficult to pop off a quick reply. I’ll ask internally to have someone look at this post and log bugs.

The first item about scrollbar styling is a bit more of a technical hurdle than anything. It’s obvious that these should be styled the same. This is due to some pieces of Rhino still using the older MFC/Win32 user interface toolkit instead of WPF. These are two different UI toolkits provided on Windows. We would need to rewrite some of these controls (which we have been doing in an ongoing process).

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hi @eobet thanks,

I split the topic in several posts so that it can be more easily addressed and tracked, not all have YT issues yet.

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Yes.

The style mix is the most obvious thing, even for user who don’t care about UI design.
If the UI is neatly organized, it would be easier to change the entire style in one go.

A dedicated UI master is a good idea.

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