Even More Inventory Changes

It sounds to me that all the bugs and problems reported so far with the current update's inventory mainly stem from a single flaw, which is the selection and scroll are not preserved though all events. Fix THAT, and the new design goes a long way towards being acceptable to the masses.

For me, as an professional interface designer/programmer, what I see in this update is a move towards better control over the inventory by coming up with a list of "things that would be nice/usefull" and implementing them, one after another. That's not good.

From experience, I can tell you that it makes for a FAR better interface experience if the time and effort is spent to design the required features as a single set. Sure, the programmers don't get to tick off "I did this, and this, and this" and make themselves look busy, but it's the end result that is most important not the steps to get there. Boiling the functionality down to a single concept results in a simpler and easier to use interface.

What do I mean by all that? Well, we now have a Sort menu, Tabs, searchingm, and a Filter menu... All to control what we see in our Inventory window. And THAT is too much. The interactions are many and confusing. Boil it down. Simplify the interface. How? There are many options, but let's try boiling it down to just Tabs.

Get rid of the sort menu, first of all. The only new menu item we'll need is "New Tab". This brings up a Tab Options window which has all the contents of the Filter window but adds sorting options, a title, body parts (something missing right now), and any other flags or toggles the userbase can think of to add. Set this up how you want and click Okay, and presto, you have a new custom-view Tab in your inventory. Right-click the tab and the pop-up menu lets you delete the tab or edit its options (by opening the Tab Options window for that tab again). These settings must ALL persist until deleted by the user.

The main problem with tabs is that there isn't much room for a lot of them the way most people shape their inventory window (tall and thin). Using the tab overflow pull-down menu, like in Firefox and other tabbed browsers, is one option. Selecting a tab from that list moves it to the far left and opens it. (But don't move a tab that's already visible to the left when clicked. Allow dragging of the tabs if you want to get fancy.)

But even this is a half measure. Lets integrate searching too! The in-window search box remains in this design, but it now only searches the items that are ALREADY VISIBLE in that tab. So if you have a tab showing all the textures added in the last month, searching there will never show textures added last year, or objects or body parts of any sort. If you want to search everything from the in-menu search field, do the search in the All tab.

But wait, there's more! Add search criteria to the Tab Options window. Now you can have a live-updated tab that shows all textures and objects that have "castle" in their name. Or a tab that has all folders with "Outfit" in their name for a list of all your quick-change folders. Now give the search field Google-like functionality and you can even make custom tabs that show specific items ("blue shirt" AND ("leather chaps" AND creator:"Philip Linden" AND "tennis shoes, white". What does this mean? You can have tabs that act like folders of ALIASED items! If those leather pants Philip made are no-copy, you normally could have them in only one folder. But with this system, you could have them in multiple tabs. Create three different outfits in three different tabs that have his no-copy leather chaps in them.

[The inability to do this with no-copy clothing is the main reason so many clothes are sold no-transfer, copy-ok. No re-gifting allowed.]

Heck, to keep people from having to formulate search strings like that for this very purpose, you could just make a blank tab and drag things to it, automatically modifying the options for that tab to include a search for that item's UUID and-ed to the existing options-search.

Can anyone see where I'm going here? It seems like a lot, doesn't it. Even MORE complicated than what this latest update gave us... BUT! BUT it all boils down to this:

You can have multiple tabs, and each tab has a customizable view.

That's it. Not complicated, just powerful. HOW customizable is the only real remaining question, but is answered in a single place: the Tab Options menu. I've just given samples of possible options. The rest of it - dragging tabs to reorder them, draging items into tabs to add that item to the tab's search string, creating and deleting tabs - that's all fluff.

But GOOD fluff.


Discuss.

Fabulous.

As I said in a previous post they should just hire you for the UI team.

While we are talking about it though I will ad my own modest pet peeve in regards the inventory system and searching which is the inability to actually search for a string. I am not techie enough to know why we cant do it or if its even possible, but the simple ability to put a set of quotes around a string of characters in the search window would make my inventory radically more efficient.

For instance I am building something called a "BIS Lander" therefore all the bits and all the textures generally begin with "BIS " and are generally in folders labelled "BIS (something)." Obviously, a search for "BIS" in my inventory returns the right items, but also acres of wonderful Kim Anubis items as well as scads of other stuff that is completely irrelevant to my chosen naming system for these parts. It opens about twenty folders instead of the two specifically named folders that I want to open.

If I type "BIS " (BIS space) in the search window I still don't get all the stuff that has BIS space in the name, I just continue to get all the stuff that has BIS in the name somewhere (Kim Anubis, Garnet's party in Bisque etc.).

This is absolutely nuts and would completely change the search feature if it would just search for what I typed instead of a dumbed down averaged out guess at what I might have been looking for.

The names of my items and folders are all character strings. I should be able to search my own inventory for... well a character string. Shoudn't I?

Toggleable support for regexp would be nice. Then ^BIS would match anything that started with capital BIS, but not things with BIS in the middle.

I'd rather have boolean search (see google).

Input "XYZ" and "FOO" -BAR and have the search return answers as google would. It'd make it a ton simpler.

By the scrolliing thing - do you mean - what I discovered? Which is that when I am moving things into a folder, the folder then scrolls up, even to out of sight, so that I have to drag it down again into the middle of the window so I can put something else in that folder?

coco

Interestingly that internally, one of my usability comments was: "Why can I turn All Items into Recent Items by changing the filter settings, and vice versa? And why, under FILE menu is there no NEW TAB option?"

I was thinking of it like Firefox (my fave current web browser).

BTW a lot of what Tiger touches on just hasn't been done... yet. (Hint hint.)

I guess part of the problem is what we have is embryonic: it's like a flight of stairs leading somewhere, and we're like, "Oh! Oh! There's still a chasm!"

But Tiger, where are your trademark pictures to explain it to the word-short? And when will we get more updates to your mavellous blog?

Discuss? Everything you said sounds perfectly spot on! Where do I sign?

Also think iTunes' playlist folders, but combining the smart folders with the hand-assembled folders. Something that iTunes is lacking. But Firefox's tab management (with a few tweeks from a plugin like Tab Mix Plus) is a good model for that part.
grin
I should cross-post it to the blog, I guess, but there's little need for pictures in this case. It would look the same as what we have, except the filter pop-out pane would become a modal window in its own right... And with a few more elements in it.

And yeah... I can get wordy, I'm afraid.

new inventory is driving me nuts too. what i hate is that everything resorted to being alpa sorted instead of date, so no big deal just change the preference, right? well it only works when ur in inventory directly and not when accessing via appearancs...lemme 'splain

for example -
im making clothing and i choose to select a texture...instead of seeing the item i just uploaded first its all alphabetical and i have no option in that window to change that. i have about 8 million textures so its a total nuisance to have to scroll through. i want to see the texture i just uploaded like i always have before. my pref is sort by date, why doesn't it show that way when im working in appearances?

also, i received a pricey gift tonight from a friend and notification that SLex had delivered it. however, to save my life i can't find it in inventory. I even found out exactly how it appears in inventory so i could search for exact name. it is simply no longer there. gone.
later i uploaded 2 textures that 5 mins later when i went to utilize them, only one was there - they had the similar names txt1 and txt2 so finding one, the other should be beneath it..no. poof.

finally- my friend was retexturing her club with a copyable texture she has used numerous times in the past. since the change to inventory, she is having a nightmare problem. she selects a wall segment, clicks texture and chooses it and for some reason now that texture is removed from inventory and placed into the object. she has to drag it back from the wall segment into her inventory to use it on the next section she is texturing. needless to say there was a lot of profanity going on.

so far, i'm not seeing really what the improvements are even supposed to be? ok, maybe recent items? but what other tricks does new inventory do besides not function properly? oh, NM! the disappearing trick!

*claps*

Add: right-click folder, choose Make Tab From Folder, the new tab contains the contents of that folder, updated live.

Add: drag a tab off the Inventory window to form a new Inventory window containing just that tab.

What about metadata tags for each object too? Then instead of the randomness right now you could just search for sword or car. I guess it's a lot to expect though

Also, library would deserve to be in it's own tab! No more getting in the way when you want to get at your own stuff.

Ah yes... I meant to add metadata to the list as well, both sytem and user defined. Forgot to, thanks for the reminder.

As to the Library... I was thinking about that. Using tabs, I think the shared Library should stay were it is, but there's no reason a tab can't be set up to show just it. But in an "all" tab, it should remain just as it is.

The other option is to not use tabs at all, but insead use top-level folders like Library and Inventory. The difference would be that these new tab-like top-level folders would have a different icon indicating their contents are all aliases set through their options. They would act just like tabs but would be mixed vertically into the inventory instead of packed horizontally across the top. Personally, I don't think that would be as convinient, however. The best way would be to have a second vertical colum to put these tabs/folders into, like the side bar in iTunes, for example. But that would take up more screen realestate.

Hmm... Perhaps include a setting for the Inventory window picking which edge to put the tabs on, so that they can be run sideways along the left or right edges, where there could be more room depending on how the user has arranged their windows.

Very good ideas Tiger. I think I might favor the folder approach (kind of like "Smart Folders" in MacOS) that you can set up filters for and are remembered. For example, you have a "New Items" folder which is anything acquired in the past three days. Basically what you just proposed. And maybe these folders could go into their own tab.

I would say that Library belongs in its own tab, because taking it out of your normal context reinforces the fact that it's completely separate from your inventory.

So basically we'd have 3 tabs:
* My Inventory (what we have now, minus Library)
* My Folders (all user-created folders with saved filter criteria)
* Library (just the current Library folder)

That way we can take advantage of the logical separation tabs allow without having the overflow problem. Having a separate tab for each custom filter would be a bit too much I think.

That's a great blending of the two ideas, Milo.

I'd buy that for a dollar.

Just need to be able to pick which of the two other tabs (Inventory and Library) to search through when making new "smart" folders, or both. Two checkboxes shoudl do it.

*goes crazy watching her inventory open up all its folders each time she does something, and keeps having to open up a new inventory windows to fix it*

I cannot understand this one simple thing...

Inventories are very much like... no... almost exactly like looking for a file on a hard drive.

Why didn't they try to use the way that Windows or Mac OS displays hard drive contents as a template? Why reinvent the wheel and create this whole new, other way of doing things that feels awkward and strange to most users, whether or not it works?

And on a related note, why take an essential, very important part of the client, and redo and deploy it without better testing? They held back 1.10 for quite a while, testing all the new features and quashing bugs. It paid off. 1.10 was a relatively smooth update. 2 weeks later, they act like a different company altogether and impulsively deploy a buggy and bizarre update to a part of the client that was WORKING JUST FINE.

This is really, really annoying.