UI Proposal: Top Bar Reshuffle

-- Brecht 21:34, 20 November 2013 (CET)

The idea is to have two top bars:

The first bar is a bit more narrow and contains menus, screen layout tabs and a scene selector.
The second bar can vary depending on the screen layout (or even not be there). It consists of various sections that could be chosen per screen layout.
- Red: object mode selector
- Blue: tool settings panel, with icon + name of tool, repeat button, history button to fold out history of tools, and tool settings with button to fold out more advanced settings that do not fit.
- Yellow: info messages similar to what we have now appearing. When there is no message this could be compact showing just a button to see the history of messages (or it could compactify after a few seconds like it does now). It could even always be compact and show messages as tooltip like message bubbles that overlap.
- Light green: for render window it could show stats and progress.
- Other things that could be here: playback buttons, proxy settings, scene stats, .. or whatever type of thing addons wish to make available here.

Jobs (render, bake, ..) are a bit unclear here.

They could fit next to messages or be integrated with it somehow, like a message with a progress bar and cancel button.
Blocking jobs could take over tool settings and show progress bars etc.

Self-Evaluation

Pro:

Cons:

Making things global gives some friction with the multi editor concept.
If you make own screen layouts you need to do more work setting up this second top bar.
Is there really enough space in one bar for this (the mockup is narrow though)?
Quite a bit of work to implement :)