Revit 2010 - New Ribbon UI

[Wes Macaulay]

My biggest fear for the ribbon is: if it's like the Office ribbon, it's going to be mean more mouse miles and clicks, and take up more screen space. It may well be more intuitive in some respects.

So if we get a ribbon -- what about all the other aspects of the UI that need more help than just the ribbon pasted on? What if there are no changes to the project browser? What if the properties dialog boxes are the same as they always have been... so that you have to click OK five times to return to the drawing?

That's the stuff where we will really appreciate any new efforts on the UI.

[schrodingerscat]

[quote=barathd;926227]

Originally Posted by dmwills

Guys, I have seen the alpha preview and y'all can relax.

No fear at all about it being anything difficult to work with - only fear - is it a significant improvement or a whole lot about nothing (sort of like the navigation tool and view cube).

Which is the point I was trying to make.....

[Jeffrey McGrew]

Originally Posted by Wes Macaulay

My biggest fear for the ribbon is: if it's like the Office ribbon, it's going to be mean more mouse miles and clicks, and take up more screen space. It may well be more intuitive in some respects.

I am 100% fine with the ribbon if it makes it such that anything on the ribbon can be triggered via keyboard commands.

I've been clicking on that 'edit' button for something like eight years or more now!

One hope I have that with the 'ribbonification' of Revit that the clunkly old Revit UI is killed off altogether. I don't mean the layout of the tools, I mean the stupidly hardcoded UI backend that doesn't understand multiple monitors, or keyboard shortcuts, or custom toolbars, or current 3D acceleration, has horrid refresh rates, etc. etc.

Maybe by redoing the UI backend using MS's newest libraries will solve a lot of these problems, and give us a Revit UI that's much more responsive and professional looking. It's always been a huge pain working live with clients when your BIM app stutters and redraws slowly and looks like something written in the mid-nineties...

[Rick Moore]

The current interface already hides commands and there's nothing I can do about it. The MS ribbon does the same thing so to me it's just more of the same, just hidden in different places. But that's hardly the most egregious thing about Revit's UI. I agree with Jeffrey about the underlying problems, and I'd add the awful dialog boxes to his list.

Funny you mentioned 'written in the mid-nineties' . I have already joked that the Revit programmers must still be using NT 3.51.

[schrodingerscat]

Originally Posted by Jeffrey McGrew

It's always been a huge pain working live with clients when your BIM app stutters and redraws slowly and looks like something written in the mid-nineties...

Late 90s actually.....

As I've said, I hope the major problems have also been looked at. Work on getting the stuff that already works to work better and quicker AFTER the stuff that doesn't work (or exist) has been looked at.

[Wes Macaulay]

Have a look at this:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archiv...he-ribbon.aspx

There's a video you can download to see how the Office UI team arrived at the ribbon. The demo of Word 2007 along with the video of how they got to the new UI (about 35:00 into the video).

Very interesting stuff.

[Jeffrey McGrew]

Originally Posted by schrodingerscat

As I've said, I hope the major problems have also been looked at. Work on getting the stuff that already works to work better and quicker AFTER the stuff that doesn't work (or exist) has been looked at.

That's my hope. That by re-writing the UI code for Revit to use the MS-standard ribbons, that they will have to had fixed a lot of problems along the way.

One thing MS has always been pretty good at is giving software developers pretty decent tools and APIs to work from (well, most of the time) and so if Autodesk is not making their own ribbons from scratch then it's likely that some of the long-standing issues will get fixed by default.

[cdsuggs]

Originally Posted by Devin_82

Why do they have to change it at all? I wasn't aware of any big problems associated with the current UI. Why spend the development hours on the UI when they could have used it on something usefull, like a better text editor for instance. Just because one product ACAD) changes, and it might even work better there, doesn't mean it is going to work with Revit.

Maybe a lack of development in other needed areas inspired the ribbon. When you put out a new version every year, it needs to look like improvements have been made, right?

Maybe the partnership between Autodesk and Microsoft runs deeper than we think.

[cdsuggs]

Originally Posted by m20roxxers

I wonder if they'll have a Revit Classic Button

AutoCAD has a 'classic' mode. Maybe Revit will too?

[rpict]

ohhh noooo
tell me that's not true.
they don't waste our subscription money for a gui nobody wants.
instead they worked hard on features improvments.
the site module was completly rewritten..
stairs, ramps and slaps behave the same way now and you can attach walls and...
as a goodie you can draw 3d model lines to use the real power of the sweep commands...
and you get the sum of the windows areas automaticly written in your room tags...
and and and .....
did i mention multiprocessor support?