a discussion about a delicate matter...

it's not about sex, religion, or an account id or a password ...
I want to open a discussion about an appropriate UI style in max tools development. I want say "sorry" in advance because i will show in this thread some UI solutions that I absolutely don't agree with. Does this subject sound interesting?

Sounds interesting to me.
If I remember correctly you don't like the sub-rollouts, or someone else didn't like it?

I'm also interested. Whether dotnet involved or pure mxs.

Useful post, indeed.

It's always useful to hear other scripters thought!
At least you see how they see things, at best you change for the better

From a technical POV, or a user interaction POV? Obviously the latter requires technical solutions, but it's a different discussion altogether imo.

Absolutely! Always interested in hearing the sledge-hammer of DenisT's criticism Always good to learn

perfect!
Always interested in learn to do better scripts.

I'll chime in on this -
I wrote this in another thread, which is my stance after many years of looking at these things.
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpos...25&postcount=10

good! i see an interest of the community in this subject.

I will talk about and hopefully discuss all types, styles, and manners of making UI for max users. It will not be a couple of long post... I want to see as I said some sort of deliberation about which UI helps a tool and which one works against.

Let's begin...

There are three and a half types of MAX tool UIs:
# Standard (MXS controls, max SDK(scripted plugins, utilities...))
# Windows Style .NET
# Custom .NET
and everything else (wee can see most of them in max build-in solutions: ribbons, caddies, and so on)

do you agree with this classification?

Yep. WPF goes to everything else?

Let's begin with Standard UI
The main idea of the using this style is to make UI fast, use an advantage of built-in controls integration in the system, and make a tools that look like a part of the max.
But using of standard controls can not guaranty nice UI look. There are three things those make UI looks bad, and as a consequence make a tool uncalled or ignored by user.
They are carelessness, untidiness, and tastelessness...

Ribbon is created using WPF and caddies are maded using python if I'm right?
That's is 3rd (custom .net) section in Denis classification. This is very good start

true. mostly because not many developers really can do WPF UIs, and max doesn't provide good pipeline of doing it. there is a Ribbon now. but it's a special subject to discuss. We will talk about it later

no. WPF is in 3.5 part (others). techically it might be in the third part. But as i said it's used still very rarely currently.