Zach, would it be possible to have both ‘small’ and ‘large’ icons for the nodes?
Having played around a little you seem to lose a lot of valuable screen space when trying to look around at what each node does. I love the fact that these exist and it’s sublimely helpful to someone starting out like me but ‘scrolling’ as such seems to take longer. In other words - they are awesome but customisation of them would be more awesome.
Also, are you aware that Design Script in ‘Code Blocks’ appears to be broken? As indicated in my image below I can’t seem to create a ‘Points.ByCoordinates(0,0,0);’ anymore nor a ‘Line’.
There is some work going on right now to eliminate some of the extra space in the margins, so you should have a much more efficient use of screen real estate.
For the Code Block Node break, It looks like you have Rhynamo installed, and there is a known issue with some packages conflicting with code block node tools. We have a fix on the way for this:
Zach - One major update I would like to see is the ability to withhold information within the dynamo graph. If you could turn off run on nodes earlier on in the sequence but the information from the last time it was run is held, then when you work on something further down your definition you don’t have to re-run the whole graph. If the script is long this can be time consuming especially if you just want to check if a couple of nodes that you have inserted work as you wish.
Also I’m still awaiting patiently on Ian’s teaser update on colour within the dynamo geometry engine rather than only the use of overriding colours in of geometry in Revit
Agree with Shaun on including icons on nodes. Also please allow users to set preferences on whether to show icons or not. I’ve noticed a great diversity of preferences in similar UI’s like Grasshopper.
I also agree that the panel on the left takes up too much space in it’s current design. Grasshopper’s UI is in many ways more compact, convenient and efficient. For instance, the tooltip displayed when hovering over the name of a node dissappears after a brief while, too quickly for to read some of the descriptions. Whereas it should remain there until I move the mouse pointer away. Aligning nodes to justify left/right/center should be available on the canvas ( if it already is, sorry for missing that) instead of having to go to a menu at the top left of the screen. There are various other examples like this that makes the overall user experience inefficient enough when it comes to design that the designer loses his/her trail of thought or has to remind his/herself what they’re trying to accomplish. This could be different for software developers whom have more experience with procedural thought processes and mentally retaining more involved levels of abstraction. Try to think like a designer as often as you can.
As a general comment/suggestion, I think it’s critical that you are at all times aware of what assumptions you are making when designing UI. Wrong assumptions are probably the single most influential factor for unsuccessful UI’s, in my humble opinion.
