per an earlier post, yes, ikari.
I am excited to see the eventual results of the event refactor. Will this modularize all major parts of blender (events, UI, mesh edit, render, scripting, render, plugin api, etc)? That seems like a logical way to structure it, at least in the source tree.
After reading this thread, I downloaded the source and looked briefly though it. Not being a C programmer or familiar with the code's folder structure, I couldn't easily see where the UI code lived. Will that change after the refactor, making it easier for a newcomer to blender (source) be able to easily see what code is responsible for each part?
Designing UI mockups would probably be wasted effort now and better saved for post-refactor. However, it would be wise to plan the user experiece "philosophy" of blender. The user experience is not simply how the icons look or where the buttons are located but how the user should interact with blender; but that's a whole other discussion.
One suggestion I would like to make regarding the overall user experience is implementing the two following features:
- 1) Multiple .blend files open simultaneously OR multiple blender instances (if available, multiple instances doesn't work on Mac/Leopard).
2) (this depends on #1) Copy/cut & paste between open documents.
The Copy & Paste feature would affect all selected objects and include everything related to the selection (xyz position/rotation/scale, materials, parent/child relationship [if parent or child is selected], layer, etc).
I am aware of the Link/Append function but that's not enough. It's much faster to copy/paste an asset between open files than digging through a file tree looking for the right object. Even then, it's deposited where the 3d cursor is, not the object's world location in the scene. If there are copy & paste functions available, they are not immediately noticeable. This should be a global function under the Edit menu.
I needed this feature recently when trying to compare two files and exchange assets between them. Needless to say, I couldn't do it. This relegates me to open doc1>render>save render>close... open doc2>render>save render>close over and over.
What a waste of time and my client's money.
These are the kinds of interface consistencies that blender lacks when compared to "standard" interfaces and UI guidlelines across computing platforms. I hope the refactor allows us to realign blender with more generally accepted UI rules, not because blender should look like every other app, but instead to greatly lessen the learning curve of newbies or those immigrating to blender for it's incredible feature set, speed and, ha ha, price.