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[W.Weidner]

QT 4 will replace the ancient GTK 1.2 as Cycas´ GUI widget toolkit.

First tests are very promising.



Best,
Wolfgang

[steve]

very nice clean look!

[dboque]

It´s always refreshing to see new interfaces.

A change would do Cycas good, for sure; it looks pretty good for me.

[xluis]

It looks like interesting. Hope enjoy it sofort.

[steve]

a new look may be good but it would be unfortunate if the basic structure of the cycas interface changed too much.

although the gui has been as it is for a while, i would say the design is ahead of its time.

the way that only the relevant tools are visible at any time...when you are drawing walls, only wall tools are visible. imo, it is so much better than the system where all the toolbars are there all the time, or at best you may have the option to make toolbars visible.

and the pop up windows are great too, especially if you use a wide screen or two monitors, then the layers window or the materials window, etc can be visible whenever you need them

i guess it would be nice if the gui could be customised a little. but overall i don´t think it needs much changing.

but i am also open to being surprised

[xluis]

What a would find insteresting is the ability to self configure different short orders via keyboard, i. e. "d+right button click" to delette, "c+right button click" to circle, and so... For me it would be a lot faster.

[dboque]

@ steve
totally agree  

I think one nice improvement would be the user could place toolbars, as it seems in the screensot above (don´t forget the "lock toolbars" option!)

[steve]

yes, it would be good to have more keyboard shortcuts. in blender (which has fixed shortcuts) there has always been an argument that the user should be able to customise the shortcuts. I don´t think it matters too much if they can be changed or not.

xluis, are you thinking it would be good to use right click for "OK"? Quite a few apps use that. i like it also. do you know that in cycas TAB = "OK". I use that all the time.

the shortcuts in cycas are alright, but another level of shortcuts would be good too. for example now this is possible:

W-key > LMB on "Side" > LMB start point > LMB end point > LMB (or TAB) to confirm > LMB to select side

or

E-key > LMB on "Move" > LMB select element > TAB to confirm > LMB start point > LMB end point > LMB to confirm

Which is quite efficient, but this may be better:

W-key > S-key > etc

and

E-key > M-key > etc

then the amount of work done by left hand and by right hand is more balanced.

[xluis]

Hello, steve.
Your explanations are very helpful for me and I´ll try to use them.
So the question for me is I´ve used for very long keyboard shortcuts to draw and almost no toolbar order. With my commentar I suggested something so as having a file where anybody can modify the shortcuts as needed. For example, as a lot of people, I used Autocad and I had my own acad.pgp file (at end in my email too) to be able to copy it into any pc and any release and drawing always in my way. I find it quite interesting.
Thanks in every way.

[steve]

yes, I hear what you are saying. that feature would be very good.

[luca]

I agree with steve that the basic structure is much more clean and usable than many other around, with some adjustments of course.
I love right click bringing up proprieties popup but now we are ready for changing them there too :-)
ciao
luca

[W.Weidner]

Qt offers a lot of fancy GUI tricks with toolbars, actions, menus, and so on. We will strongly look into finding a balance between customization and (maybe useless) features. Cycas´ GUI has advantages that we will keep untouched. (One example is the input methodology for points.. the extra LMB click that offers so much possibilities).

Some other stuff can be improved. Customization for keyboard shortcuts is a good thing, but we may face some problems with Qt here because we need to follow all the style guides (including those of OS X).

Did I mention that Qt leads to native Windows and OS X support ?  :-)

However, we will share the ideas around the new interface. Hopefully we can upload something more useful than a screenshot soon.

Best,
Wolfgang

[steve]

i feel quite flexible about shortcut keys. It would be good to have more but if it becomes a headache for them to be user-customisable, let them be fixed. the current shortcuts make a lot of sense (in english anyway!)

[didencool]

did you have some news on this thread?

[xluis]

Please Wolfgang, don´t forget it´s very useful importing raster images (jpg, bmp, png,...). Now I have to use QCad.