Do you want to see icons everywhere in the Deadline UI?
Yes, they help me navigate long menus with many options
No, I prefer reading text
I don’t care either way
0voters
Hi,
If you feel strongly towards ‘icons’ being visible in not just the job list in Deadline v6 in the future, but also available as they are now, in other menus such as the submission scripts menu, general scripts menu, job scripts menu, Deadline launcher menu, etc… please can you shout now!
IMHO, any minor performance hit is a small price to pay for fast, easy visual recognition for my artists who are creative NOT technical people. They see ‘graphics’ not ‘words’…In fact, I would go as far as to see higher resolution icons would be good in the future and even ones that ‘pop’ out when you hover them might be nice as well.
Thanks,
Mike
I personally feel totally uncomfortable in Deasline 6 Monitor without icons in the menus. I assumed they were just not implemented yet. Did I miss something?
Dropping the menu icons was a design decision. Yes, there is a bit of a performance hit with the script icons, which becomes very obvious when connecting to a remote repository, but the main reason to drop them was to provide a cleaner interface. Having an icon next to every menu item just isn’t that helpful if they all have them, and if only some have them, it looks “unfinished”. For example, I don’t find any of the icons in Visual Studio to be helpful at all.
In order to deal with the long menu problem, we’re trying to keep our menus short, and using sub menus where they will help. In the case of the scripts menu, we are working on an interface to allow studios to customize their layout (including submenus) and visibility.
It’s also the way a lot of applications are going these days. Icons are not used in the menus in Max, Maya, Nuke, After Effects, etc, and artists seem to use those applications just fine.
in our design decisions, we have the classic goals of ‘ease of use, approachability, performance and flexibility’ which meant reducing a lot of visual information and making old methods obsolute. 6.0 is a huge change, and I believe that through 6.1 there will be refinement. As Ryan noted, we have discussed ways for studios/users to customize elements of the UI [my wishlist request is ‘pinning’ of frequent items] which would allow your favourite elements or frequently used shortcuts to be reached easily, without introducing huge right-click menus or massive lists of submission scripts: which was a peeve of mine in earlier releases.
SO…i would suggest that you keep requesting the things you want, and we’ll put them on the wishlist and try to design ways to give you the flexibility of doing these things…hopefully, without creating a raft of icons on the ui, huge menus, lists that are longer than the screen height etc.
Right now, however - my goal to get 6.0 feature complete first and foremost. cb
Well, Nuke has a special toolbar and menu structure that supports icons, but the application menus are text-only. Just imagine if all of those node commands were in a flat list…
I personally love the streamlined look and feel of D6. However I think in the specific case of the submit menu it’s faster to find application icons rather than going through an alphabetical text menu. Especially at 4AM when you’re brain dead.
Why not leave the icons off by default and add an “enable submit icons” checkbox in the settings menu?
I can’t speak for everyone else, but not having the menu icons available is a let down.
Well it seems the obvious solution is to have a choice, icons+text/icons only/text only. I know of another developer doing this and we just went through a fairly lengthy discussion. The consensus was to have all three, making everyone happy. Whether you guys can do that well only you know.
Me I am of the icon+text group but I also like text only in places (Menu Titles) and I also like icon only in places (Toolbars).
My ideal would have an option screen like the customize columns dialog but for the applications that were relevant to me. I would have 4 apps in the ‘enabled’ list. There are already 14 apps in beta 6! The number of applications supported is tremendous, but I can’t see one user needing them all on there.
If you enable super user and go to Tools>Configure Repository Options>Script Menus>Submit you can select only the apps you want to be visible in the menu. I was told by Ryan that the feature isn’t active in beta 6 but will be in future betas. It already works as-is in 5.2.
It seems that the main issue is the length of submission menu (and potentially other script-based menus). This is the issue we’re working on solving right now, but it might not be ready for a few more beta releases. In v5, you had the ability in the repository options to configure which scripts were visible and which ones weren’t. We want to take this a step further in v6 and give you the option to rename the menu items, place them in sub menus, and control their visibility. So in oatz’s example, you will be able to just show 4 items.
The menu icons in the script-based menus also impose a performance hit. It’s not really noticeable when connecting to a local repo, but if you are connecting to a remote office, it’s very noticeable. This is because the icons need to be loaded from the repository server off disk (rather than being embedded in an application library). Two of our main goals for D6 was performance and a clean interface, and unfortunately the icons got in the way of both of these goals.
Like Chris said, we never rule anything out, and we will probably have time in the future to revisit the icon debate (especially since the majority favors having them). For the 6.0 release though, hopefully the shorter menus and the configurable script-based menus will ease the pain of the lost icons.
Just to add my voice to this discussion: please give us the icons back
As you said, there is a long-long submission list. Now without icons, its even harder to navigate: i am forced to read the text. I realize its customizable, but only a small percentage of users really ever customize their gui, most just go with the default (i admit, including me, I am too lazy).
If loading the icons off the repo is a performance problem, maybe cache the icons locally, and just check the modification date on the files.
And while on the subject of icons, introducing some color to the main toolbar icons would be great as well.
I’m mostly ambivalent about whether icons should be included in the submission menu, but I would say at most they should be an option, and should definitely not affect performance if enabled.
It will be customizable from the global level like it was in v5, so it only needs to be done once. Studios can have their admin guys set this up day 1, so artists only need to see what they will end up using. In addition, things like submenus will now be available. This stuff should be ready for beta 10.
Having icons in the submission menu will affect performance, one way or another (at least with the current system). Yes, syncing them would work, and it’s what we do for plugin icons, but currently it’s a one time sync with no checks for modified dates. The reason is that if you are connecting from the other side of the country with a vpn connection, the time to check the modified date for 40 icons is significant.
One idea we might play around with is to allow you to specify icons in the script menu customizer. That way, they’re stored in the database and can be streamed pretty quickly. We haven’t looked into it yet though.
Alright everyone, we’ve heard you loud and clear! In beta 10, there will be icons for the menu items again. They will be monochrome to continue with our interface theme, but they should be simple enough that there shouldn’t be any confusion over what they represent.
Note that this DOES NOT apply to script menus. However, as I mentioned above, we are looking at the possibility of setting icons for scripts in the script menu customizer.
