Modern GUI

[aaronrumple]

Inventor's on screen display of the model is far Superior to Revit or even Viz/Max. Very easy on the eyes and real time display of materials with shadows.

When looking at a sketch, the icons for constraints are easy to see and tell you what's going on right away. Temporary dimensions are on the screen and readable. The color and icons in the browser make it faster to find things.

Revit's browser is hard on the eyes and slows down work with scrolling up and down to find things. Getting to sheets ought to be one click. The constraints are hard if not impossible to read. The array number is tragically 2000' off the screen. (The tragically was a typo, however I'll leave it since it seems more appropriate than "typically".)

3D color sucks. It can't display maps real time. Shadows are slow.

It ain't just about pretty icons..

As for the "we would rather have them do somethings else..." They should do it all. Inventor is priced right there with Revit. Autodesk had to break into a market they were falling way behind in with Inventor. they stepped up and did what turned out to be a damn fine piece of software. As for Revit - Autodesk has next to no competition in the AEC market. Therefore we should have a less than state of the art UI? Not for $4K.

[Wes Macaulay]

Gotcha Aaron. And you're right: Inventor from that perspective is excellent.

[hand471037]

I second Aaron's post. In every way.

I remember reading a study a long time ago that pretty much said that an decrease in screen refresh time for a CAD system gives tenfold the productivity in comparison to new features. Tenfold. So even a 1% increase in UI speed translates into ten times the productivity of a new feature, on average, over time (at least when this study was done). And when you think about it, a 1% speed increase, over 8 hours a day, over a year, well, it really adds up.

I was really hoping that the Inventor crew at Autodesk would have gotten their hands on Revit's UI by now and made it nice and snappy, but, sadly, they haven't... And while Revit is great, I wish it moved as fast as I can, like I get with Blender, Photoshop, etc...

[Andre Baros]

Great comments, but I would settle for a UI that just stopped moving around. I hate when you miss clicking by half a button and you get tool bar pinball. I don't care about new colors or zippy icons, but, colors and icons can be optimized for productivity... without creating overhead.

[Steve_Stafford]

...It ain't just about pretty icons...

I was worried that this is what modern GUI meant and if it did...I ain't on board. Your critique and the following ones are fine by me. Thanks for making it clearer, to me at least.

[fernando]

to me, just a wish
could personalize the left menus, because it's hard some times to open a menu only for a simple command, it would be great to put all the more used commands in a personalized menu

[Andre Baros]

Or to be able to have two tabs open at once, one above the other. Though that isn't exactly "modern".

[robmorfin]

Inventor's on screen display of the model is far Superior to Revit or even Viz/Max. Very easy on the eyes and real time display of materials with shadows.

When looking at a sketch, the icons for constraints are easy to see and tell you what's going on right away. Temporary dimensions are on the screen and readable. The color and icons in the browser make it faster to find things.

Revit's browser is hard on the eyes and slows down work with scrolling up and down to find things. Getting to sheets ought to be one click. The constraints are hard if not impossible to read. The array number is tragically 2000' off the screen. (The tragically was a typo, however I'll leave it since it seems more appropriate than "typically".)

3D color sucks. It can't display maps real time. Shadows are slow.

It ain't just about pretty icons..

As for the "we would rather have them do somethings else..." They should do it all. Inventor is priced right there with Revit. Autodesk had to break into a market they were falling way behind in with Inventor. they stepped up and did what turned out to be a damn fine piece of software. As for Revit - Autodesk has next to no competition in the AEC market. Therefore we should have a less than state of the art UI? Not for $4K.

I haven't look at Inventor's display capabilities, but the Revit team should also look at Alias Wavefront Maya's interface, shadows, maps & lights are shown & updated realtime without loosing any performance & without the need of the latest super hardware [P4 1.5 GHz CPU, 500MB RAM & any $50.00 Nvidia 3D capable video card should be enough, a total of a $500.00 or less computer + monitor (not included)]; These are not Maya's requirements.

[Andre Baros]

They can look in house for that as well, Max does the same thing. But this is actually one place where I think that Revit beats Max. Have you ever exported a full 3D model from Revit only to see it crush Max is the real time update. Revit models have a lot of baggage that Max and Maya models just don't have to deal with, so while I agree that it would be nice to see Revit catch up, I don't think it's totally fair to compare.

[hand471037]

Now, it seems to me that we are talking about two different things here.

Some of us are talking about how Revit could interact with us: i.e. real-time shadows, realtime textures, the speed of screen refresh, the smoothness of it's 3D rotation, et all. These are all things that Revit is/could be doing for us.

Some of us are talking about how we could interact with Revit: i.e. customizable UI, tabs, more/different toolbars, et all. These are things that provide new or (supposedly) more fluid workflow.

Now, personally, I'd rather have the Factory focus on the first, and not the second. For I feel that the first one benefits all, whereas the second tends to be a lot more random as to whom it benefits unless it's been very carefully thought out and designed, and even then can just be a personal preference.

Case in point: AutoCAD 2006. There's several new UI things in the second category there that I personally don't feel help me at all, and several that I've just turned off or avoided completely. Whereas the Photoshop CS series has several new things in that second category that I've found very helpful.

Other folks might think the opposite, as UI things can be increadably subjective.

And here's my very subjective view on the second category: I tend to like my UI's to either be very, very straightforward and simple (Photoshop, Revit, Sketchup) or very, very powerful and complex but constant (Blender, unix command line stuff, OO-based programing, LAMP applications). With the first 'simple' ones I like because they are pretty intuitive to use. This way if I don't use the software for a while, or don't use certain features for a while, I can still pick it up and get back up to speed very quickly. I can learn new parts of the software quickly. And I can show non-technical users (the vast majority) how to use them quickly. With the second type, the complex ones, there might be more of a learning curve there, but once I've learned something, it applys to many other things, and can work with all those other things in a way that's more than just the sum of it's parts. Also once I've learned something, it stays learned, for it's not changing or inconsistent, and I can use what I know so far to suss out new things I'm trying to learn.
For me, personally, it's when something is in-between these two extremes that I think it's really inefficient and horrible. For example, AutoCAD & 3DS Viz/Max, or programming in something like C. While powerful, they aren't constant at all, and have multiple rules and styles and systems and ideas all mixed up. Learning one part it doesn't help you at all with another. They aren't simple enough to show someone else how to get up and on their feet quickly unless they already have some kind of background in it, and even then there's a lot of 'quirks' you 'just have to know' in order to work efficiently.

So, when I hear folks wanting changes to the UI in Revit, and they are talking about changes in the second kind of way (the way we interact with the tool), well, I get nervous. For the company that now owns Revit has a long track record of making UI's that I find to be horrible, UI's that are hard for non-technical users, and UI's that run off to whatever the idea/trend of the moment is. Now, Inventor and Revit are many, many times better in terms of UI than anything Autodesk has done IMHO. But still. Designing how one interacts with a tool is an Art and Science, it's a Hard problem, and one that's more than a little subjective.

So while I'm all for new UI elements within Revit, I, personally, want more ways for Revit to interact with ME, more ways for it to save MY time and to let ME do better work; not more ways for me to interact with IT.

(sorry for the long post, been thinkin' about this one for a while)