Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The blueprint tree is potentially quite visually noisy (depending on the application's number of space views and entities, and especially if they've been named haphazardly), and contains fundamentally different kinds of things all displayed using identical visual style, in an arbitrarily-deep hierarchy, which makes it difficult to comprehend what is even going on, especially as a newcomer.
Screenshot from dev version:
"What is this? Why are image, depth, rgb repeated twice? Where are the controls I saw previously — oh I need to click on the other thing named image.”
Describe the solution you'd like
Rerun 0.11 actually did a little better than the later version: it displayed layout containers dimmed and without icons, making that partition of the hierarchy clearly evident and deemphasizing the parts that aren't the data.
However, I think we can do even better than that. In the following mockup, each Space View has been given a box surrounding its children in the tree view (in addition to dimming the Grid label again, and making the Group icon smaller):
This addition should increase legibility and discoverability in a variety of ways:
- All UI containers are outside the boxes and all entities are inside them, thus teaching the fundamental 3 kinds of things in this list. (And note that there will never be a box nested inside another box.)
- The box hints at the fact that a Space View is also a box in the actual visualization UI.
- A cue besides icons indicates that space views are a different kind of thing than entities, despite often sharing names with them.
Further possibilities:
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(As pictured) Make the icon for Groups smaller than the icon for Space View, to make them more like the small dot for leaf entities, rather than being slightly bigger than space view icons as they are now.
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Moderate use of color might be good too; for example, if space views all had colored icons, layout containers were all gray, and entities were all white and small.
-
There could be a “view only” mode (as opposed to "editing the blueprint") where layout containers are entirely hidden.
Alternatives
Space views could be marked in some other way that's not a box.
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The blueprint tree is potentially quite visually noisy (depending on the application's number of space views and entities, and especially if they've been named haphazardly), and contains fundamentally different kinds of things all displayed using identical visual style, in an arbitrarily-deep hierarchy, which makes it difficult to comprehend what is even going on, especially as a newcomer.
Screenshot from dev version:
"What is this? Why are
image, depth, rgbrepeated twice? Where are the controls I saw previously — oh I need to click on the other thing namedimage.”Describe the solution you'd like
Rerun 0.11 actually did a little better than the later version: it displayed layout containers dimmed and without icons, making that partition of the hierarchy clearly evident and deemphasizing the parts that aren't the data.
However, I think we can do even better than that. In the following mockup, each Space View has been given a box surrounding its children in the tree view (in addition to dimming the Grid label again, and making the Group icon smaller):
This addition should increase legibility and discoverability in a variety of ways:
Further possibilities:
(As pictured) Make the icon for Groups smaller than the icon for Space View, to make them more like the small dot for leaf entities, rather than being slightly bigger than space view icons as they are now.
Moderate use of color might be good too; for example, if space views all had colored icons, layout containers were all gray, and entities were all white and small.
There could be a “view only” mode (as opposed to "editing the blueprint") where layout containers are entirely hidden.
Alternatives
Space views could be marked in some other way that's not a box.