It took me a while to understand the basic 3D layout of
Blender's working area, mainly due to two things: 1) the
somewhat odd naming of the T,F, and S windows and
the default RotX 90 degrees (which affects the local axes
and orientation of object reference frames).

Item # 1

My intuition is as follows: 7 - Top View, 1 - Front View, and
3 - Side View. They correspond to 7: looking down the Z
axis to view (X,Y), 1: looking down the Y axis to view (X,Z),
and 3: looking down the X axis to get (Y,Z). The only problem
seems to be the buttons labeled "T", "F", and "3 small squares."
I find these buttons to be so counterintuitive that I no longer use
them, and instead think of my views as I stated in the first sentence.
Anyone else? This is a minor issue but perhaps the button icons
can be changed to reflect the above?

Item # 2

I also find it odd that every new object is added with a 90 degree
rotation around RotX (or, at least, many of them). Instead, I would
prefer a clean slate: zero on all fields.

Comments welcome.

For the first item if your talking about publisher2.25 they were wrong
and its already been fixed in bf-blender

For the second item the objects in general get added perpendicular
to your view. So it just depends on how your looking at things
as to where they get created. Try adding a cube from the numpad 3
view. (then hit N to look at settings) Then shift to the numpad 7
view and add another cube and look at it with (N)

yes, you right - I am using publisher 2.25. When you say, it
is fixed in 'bf-blender', is there perhaps a Windows
binary that is available for this, or can it be easily
built? To date, I have not tried any of the more exotic
binaries built by individuals since I was thinking that
the blender foundation would put new, upated,
binaries in the downloads section every once and
a while.

Thanks for pointing me to the latest binaries! I'll
definitely switch. The one I am using now is the
NaN Publisher+Key downloaded from the Downloads
area.


-paul

bf-blender is the version of the blender code that's currently in the main development. The other builds you see floating around like 'tuhopuu' etc. are more experimental and seperated from the main code tree, although most of their code will be integrated back into the main bf-blender code once it's all tested. As Ton has been mentioning, bf-blender will soon be packaged up and released as Blender v2.26. The first open source Blender Foundation release!