by opening this thread i want to discuss with the community good and bad practice of the tool UI implementation. does the subject sound interesting?
It’s hard to find elegance in the MAXScript UI implementation. Even the good is ugly
could be worse could be the callback centric sdk and windows dialog programming :argh:
I agree that it’s very difficult to get something that looks all that great. The best I’ve found so far is using sub-rolls as much as possible. I find it’s useful, from a user experience POV, to have the rollup and rolldown of those various subrolls perform functions – so, for example, I have a script which has a bunch of different tools, including sending various jobs to the render farm (backburner). I have also integrated my own render Groups system (since the backburner one is utterly busted when it comes to Maxscript). One of the jobs that can be sent is After Effects renders, though they don’t get used very often, so by default that subroll is “up”. Not all the machines in the farm have After Effects installed, so we have a special “After Effects” group which comprises those that do. When you click the subroll to make it “down”, it automatically selects the right group.
I think little things like that, which try to mitigate user error (which I find actually go up in occurrence the more automated a system is! It makes it easier to switch off the critical faculties of one’s mind, I suppose…) make a big difference in the UX.
My bad practice was creating dynamic buttons inside rollout, and good practice was using .net to creating all things that I want! I didn’t work with WPF yet, but seems WPF is easier than .net.