mandaboo opened this issue on Feb 03, 2005 ยท 31 posts
Phantast posted Sat, 05 February 2005 at 5:48 AM
Aha, thank you for that! I will experiment with it. Meanwhile, let me give you another example. A common task: change the aspect ratio of the scene. How to do it - open the Render Options window, and you can pick what aspect, size you like, etc. So far so good. Now you have made your changes. The window has two options at the side: "OK" and "X". Now, anyone with any experience of Windows software will immediately have an expectation of what will happen when one of these options is chosen. "OK" should mean "accept the changes and close this window", and "X" should mean "cancel the changes and close this window". This is the behaviour you would expect in any other program. But Vue confounds your expectation. "OK" confirms the changes you have made - but it also starts rendering! Who asked it to do that? It's silly, because after changing the aspect ratio the camera framing will almost certainly need to be adjusted, so you can guarantee that the render is not wanted. So you have to interrupt the render, possibly confirm the interrupt (see other thread) and close the render window - completely unecessary tasks. What happens if you select the "X"? Vue closes the window and cancels the changes you made, EXCEPT to the aspect ratio. So if you only want to change the aspect ratio, you can actually select cancel to make the change without starting an unwanted render - but you lose any other changes you made. However, if you genuinely changed your mind and really did want to cancel the whole operation, you would be justifiably puzzled as to why Vue has implemented your aspect ratio change even when you told it to cancel. Now, things like this don't cripple the program, you can work round them. But they give the user a bad taste that one is fighting against the interface rather than having the interface assisting you. It also gives one the strong impression that the programmer didn't understand principles of good software design. If something looks like a cancel button, it should behave like a cancel button, that's practically software design beginner's rule #1.