UI Requests

[RobertH]

formZ has such great tools and power, I really love it. I like how the toolbars can be easily pulled out of the Modeling Tools palette, and that palettes can be pulled out of the Palette Dock and floated in the main design window. There is so much to like about it.

But the floating document window and floating tool docks are dreadful. They are finicky, dated and waste a lot of screen real estate. I spend so much time messing with the interface after it becomes disrupted or trying to squeeze more screen space for design work. The UI seems a little better in the videos for the Mac than on my Windows PC. My suggestions:

1. Consolidate the Menu and Windows title bar like in the Mac version.

2. If multi-document windows must be retained, allow the document window to be maximize, locking it into the main screen and its project name combined with the menu bar or windows title bar.

3. Have retractable, re-sizeable dock areas on all four sides of the screen. These docks are locked to application window, not floating. Each dock can be completely and independently collapsed using a small triangle widget. Tool bars and palettes can still be pulled out and floated like they are now. These docks must be rock solid and work with workspaces, and not be so temperamental as the current floating docks.

4. The current Modeling Tools palette, the Palette Dock and user tool bars can be parked in the left or right side dock, or next to each other on either side. If the tools or palettes within these side docks overflow the available space, a small thick scroll line is displayed. Dragging on this line or using the mouse wheel while hovered over the dock area causes it to scroll.

5. The top and bottom docks can contain the current toolbars or user toolbars. They can also be completely collapsed or resized, just like the right and left side docks.

 

6. In order to stabilze the docks and allow reordering, adding or deleting elements, consider locking them like the current Tool Manager does.


Minor request: In the Tools Manager can the Material Parameters, Display Options and Quick Keys palettes buttons be added to the Palettes category Tools (just like the current 3Dconnexion button)?


Thanks so much for your time and consideration!



formZ Pro 8.0.2
Windows 8.1, 64 bit; Intel i7-4770 @ 3.4GHz; 16GB RAM
32" monitor @ 2560 x 1440 resolution; nVida GTX 970 4GB
3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator
 

[Tech]

Hi Robert,

 

Glad you are liking formZ, and thanks for your suggestions, we will consider these for the future!

 

[RobertH]

Thanks for your reply and consideration! This is the weakest link in formZ for me, and changing it would make a big difference! Just love the program...

[RobertH]

Here is an example of an application that has floating document window that can be maximized. It's HyperSnap an application I use for screen captures. First the UI with a floating document window:

 

 

 

Now the UI with the document window maximized:

 

Wouldn't formZ benefit using this approach? It's backward compatible with the current UI, yet it stabilizes the document window while providing more work space when it is maximized.

 

[rob]

That looks pretty cool.  I wonder how hard that would be to do and still keep all the other customization options...

[RobertH]

Thanks for your reply Rob!

 

It should not affect the customization options at all. Currently, in formZ, when the document window is maximized, it fills up all available space not occupied by the floating tool docks. In the HyperSnap version the maximized document window locks into the application window frame, though it can still be floated, so it's behavior should look the same to the rest of the application.

 

As to how difficult it would be to implement this, depends greatly on the framework that formZ is built on. Modern applications have large libraries of prebuilt objects and events, that they call in order to work. So it's not like you have to build all this stuff from scratch. There are many routines for handling window operations, so it could be as easy as swapping out one type of windows call, for another with some different parameters. I'm obviously over-simplifying here, just saying it could be trivial.

 

On the other hand if the framework / libraries upon which formZ is built, do not have these particular capabilities, it would be much more work. This would be the first step. The second would be to have the current tool docks, be able to lock into the sides of the application frame, which could be done at a later date. And depending on the framework, could also be relatively straight forward.

 

In any event, I truly think it is worth the investment to bring formZ up to date. The current floating document window and floating tool docks only detract from an otherwise great program, while adding nothing. They take up unnecessary screen real estate that could be used for modeling. They impact changing workspaces, and the stability of the UI.

 

[mleblanc]

Thanks

I also agree that the way Formz is handling icon display, text and palettes is not the most efficient in regards to screen real estate and stability. The structure of information remains very good and they really made a great job with V7 for that. Although I'm not very sure of the tool docking palette concept - this is still unstable when you move out of the configured three row or decide you do not need the common tool palette because you want to free up some space. I believe you could use tab to keep the moving palette without adding a palette to receive them.

To me the most elegant interface for that remains Adobe Photoshop cc. The moving palette ( which becomes tab when joined)  seems to always snap to an invisible grid, there is limited choice of background and icon size but they are well tough of., not too many colors to distract you from you work, text and icons are handled beautifully. Huge screen real estate, simplicity of icon design.

 

Maybe v10 will have a revamp ... in the meantime , and despite the shortfalls, I decided to become a friend of the as is workspace and I reset whenever I feel the palettes when of. This is still better than many other 3d package.

 

M

[RobertH]

Boy I hope I don't come off as complaining about formZ, nothing could be further from the truth, I think it is really great and just want it to be better. If I didn't care about it, I would not take the time with requests in this forum.

 

I've actually used Photoshop for over a decade and it has docking palettes. If you look carefully at the tools palette on the top left of the screen, it has a little bar on the top of that palette. Click and drag on this bar to remove it from its docked position. Dragging it back to the left side of the screen, a blue bar appears, indicating that it can now be docked, and it will snap in place when you release the mouse button. Yeah, I also really like in Photoshop, when two or more palettes are joined together, they snap and form tabs.

 

Autodesk SketchBook Pro 7 has floating palettes, and they are fine... so I guess just a maximized document window with stable palettes and workspaces would make a huge difference.

 

Frankly, it baffles me about the workspace and unstable palettes situation. FormZ handles these incredibly complex geometries in 3D space without skipping a beat. Yet the UI elements that we are talking about here are dead simple. You have a fixed 2D plane (the application space) upon which rectangles (palette docks) are placed. Saving a workspace should be as easy as:

  1. for each palette dock

      2. what is its name/id

      3. where is its x,y position (top left) on the plane

      4. how high and wide in pixels is this dock

      5. save these elements

 

Restore is just as easy... what actually happens is a mystery. It is exactly the same situation about the contents of a palette. All of these things are not ambiguous. A position is exact, as is a size.

[Alan Cooper]

UI needs serious work. Mleblanc mentioned V10? I would hope V9 or earlier. Wide palettes which waste real estate especially need to be able to be minimised to a small icon. Maybe there is a way that the object palette could be more intuitive. It can get so long a list that it can take a long time to scroll and find a particular object.

[3dworks]

afaik, adobe is patent holder for this kind of palettes as we see them in photoshop etc. - so it is not a totally trivial task to replicate functionailty without getting in conflict with this. please correct me if i'm wrong.

 

on the other side UI functionality as it is would not be totally bad, if at least it would work as expected. i have given up to fix my custom UI layout months ago. also, the slowness of FZ7/8 UI is compensated by large by the much faster tools. nevertheless, i would expect a fix for the issues with custom layouts more sooner than later ;-)

 

cheers

 

markus

[RobertH]

Hi Markus,

 

I was just responding to mleblanc in his post about being "not very sure of the tool docking palette concept" but liking the Photoshop UI, and pointing out how Photoshop has tool bar docking, not suggesting that we should use it.

 

Yeah, I hope they fix the layout/workspace problems soon. And I think the idea of having a maximized document window that I showed earlier in this post would be a great step forward. Another benefit with this is if you go full screen, or hide the Palette Dock and/or Modeling Tools, the space below this will already be occupied by the document window so it immediately opens up additional screen space.

 

BTW: I checked out your demo reel and it's very impressive... you are very talented!