Cura User Interface

[neotko 1,417]

Hi, Neotko here with a crappy idea, hope anyone find it interesting, or not

Was thinking today about the UI, IMO the weakest point of Cura. So for me making something clean it's a must and avoiding scrolls too.

So, the idea it's to use a simplistic FAV system, that could allow to make a profile with the options you really want, with a compressed list of options ready to use, and on a side option to Hide/Unhide the Full Enchilada of options - Endless scroll.

This way you could select on your profile what are the options you really want to have on first view. Mark Fav and it goes on your main settings list. Because in the end, when you have a good profile you only tweak 5-20 options, but not the 100 + scroll up/down/wherewasthat? felling

Ofc there's much more to fix, like Object selecting by name, asing a full profile to 1 object (even if some settings can't be applied) or just changing the 5 UI way. But that's for another day, also I don't get paid to redesign stuff XD

Cheers!

Note, this is a 5minutes Doodle

Edited October 13, 2017 by Guest

[ultiarjan 1,223]

Fully agree. The current setup basically forces you to keep all options visible.

Already around the first Cura2 beta period I suggested to somehow allow to link settings visibility to profiles. Another very simple option would be to just allow 3 or 4 levels of customized "settings views".

I do think also Ultimaker agrees there's some room for improvement here ..... they have a few UX design vacancies atm.

[tinkergnome 927]

Yes, i think i'm familiar with the "endless scroll" problem too.

It's more worse with the BETA 3. I made a screenshot to illustrate how it looks on my screen. A huge amount of space is wasted with the things that rarely change - like material and print core, but no way to hide these things...

Only 10 lines of the important settings are to be seen at once... that's where the endless scrolling starts... It's not unusable, but very inconvenient...

[ahoeben 1,986]

My advice would be to use the current visibility system for your "favs", and use the search on top for all the detailed settings you don't use all that often. Just making setting visible is going to result in a lot of scrolling, no two ways around that.

A system with "sets" of visible settings that are easily switched would be a good addition.

[ahoeben 1,986]

It's more worse with the BETA 3.

I agree. Unfortunately the design team has started focussing more and more on larger screens/window sizes. Once Cura 3 has launched, I might return to where I started and make a compact theme. This should be fairly easy to install/apply to your Cura installation.

[burtoogle 516]

I have noticed that recently all the text in the Cura UI has increased in size by something like 50%. This is on a Linux screen:

dimensions: 1920x1080 pixels (508x285 millimeters)

resolution: 96x96 dots per inch

For me, the text really doesn't need to be as big so it would be great to have a preference to scale the fonts.

[ahoeben 1,986]

I have noticed that recently all the text in the Cura UI has increased in size by something like 50%. This is on a Linux screen:

Is this just the "cura-themed" parts of the interface, or also the system-themed parts such as the preferences?

[burtoogle 516]

Is this just the "cura-themed" parts of the interface, or also the system-themed parts such as the preferences?

Just the cura-themed parts, the preferences dialog appears to use the same size fonts as before.

[ahoeben 1,986]

It is probably due to this change then:

https://github.com/Ultimaker/Uranium/commit/6cc4363480386c126df32c576c89a17d9df7d9dd

[nallath 1,124]

Only 10 lines of the important settings are to be seen at once... that's where the endless scrolling starts... It's not unusable, but very inconvenient...

 

The original design that we got only had room for 4-5 settings at once. I changed the margins so we could have at least a reasonable amount of settings on screen.

Setting visibility pre-sets is something that is pretty high on the backlog.

[ahoeben 1,986]

Once Cura 3 has launched, I might return to where I started and make a compact theme.

I have started that here: https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura/issues/2678

For now the gain is room for about 5 extra settings.

[UbuntuBirdy 56]

A dream would come true!