New Ribbon interface, what do you think?

Hello all, so after many years, 4 almost, I finally find that somone at Bentley has understood that forcing Ribbon was a BIG mistake. I found ribbon a deal breaker, yet if someone could find some productivity boos with that hellish ui, good for them, but the optioin to roll back should allways bene there, now finally is, with the select series sunseting soon I though this would never happen. 

https://communities.bentley.com/products/microstation/w/microstation__wiki/43148/enable-v8i-task-theme-in-microstation-connect-edition

thanks.

Hi Pablo,

it seems to me your post is driven more by emotions and it even does not reflect reality: As Daniel wrote, the ability to use V8 tasks has been available in MicroStation CE for years, implemented in some early Update. The only difference in Update 13 is that it's now available as ribbon workflow (theme) and not through configuration variable setting.

The reality is that plenty of mainstream products use ribbon now (AutoCAD, Revit, ArcGIS Pro...), "tabbed GUI" (aka ribbon) has been implemented even into Libre Office. That's the reality.

And as others commented, the ribbon is the least problem. I do not recall any from my customers in lat few years who rejected to use MicroStation because of ribbon. They have complained about ribbon speed (which is implementation issue, but not ribbon feature), time required to re-implement used customization etc. On the other hand some appreciate popup menu, I saw some very clever modifications, some also have experimented with screen menus (they can be more efficient in some situations than old tasks).

Serious problems in CE are somewhere else: speed (especially when working with 3D DWG), inconsistency with results in V8i and as was mentioned already, a huge amount of small bugs. But as far as I know Bentley work hard to make Update 14 much better with plenty of reported bugs fixed.

With regards,

  Jan

My bad i knew it was in September but after all these years i guess i convinced myself it was 2016 :P not 2015.

Indeed, why not. Put it in the New Ideas forum, where creativity goes to die. Just my opinion as a little worker bee, icons that demo the function would be like a whole different product.

Back to topic- Ribbon Sucks, but I've adjusted. I've always said if you know your software well enough to know what it does, you'll find a way to initiate the command. If it's something you use all the time, there are plenty of different ways to make it handy.

Ivo Blaauw said:

I've seen an example of a rotating cube somewhere on the web(can't find it anymore though)

See in here.

Regards

Jose's link above points to a discussion and video regarding screen menus.

That particular example file is ScreenMenus.dgnlib (at least on my system but possibly I gave it that name years ago).  I've often used it in classes to show what could be done with screen menus.  The "rotating cube" example is just an example and not a fully flushed out interface, as in each side of the cube has the same tools on it for the demo. The animation is one click to turn on or off if someone prefers not to see it animate.

Basic steps:

1. Create a model that has closed shapes with a command connected to each shape.  (Must be in a dgnlib, use Admin workflow, Interface Tab.  Note: Admin won't show unless you are in a dgnlib)

2. Create a Saved View surrounding all shapes.  (rotating cube example has a saved view for each face of the cube in a 3d model)

3. Add to a mouse button, function key, or shortcut the command to call the screen menu.

It will look something like this: 

screenmenu openpopup screenmenus.dgnlib,menu_0,menu_0

• Where "screenmenu openpopup" is the command. 
• The screenmenus.dgnlib is the file that houses the models/saved views for the screen menus.
• The first menu_0 is the model name
• The second menu_0 is the saved view name.

There is a complete section in the Help manual that explains these.  Search for "Screen Menus" and you will find it.

wow thats a lot of work

wow thats a lot of work