1-Visitor

Question

WF5 Detailing UI

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
April 5, 2010
55 replies
24672 views

We adopted WF5 last week and I have had nothing but complaints from the user community regarding the increased amount of clicks to complete tasks. They have also found multiple problems using the show annotations tool. Does anyoneone have similar experiences or found ways to reduce the number of clicks in WF5 detailing.

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D

DaveHeipel

1-Visitor

Olaf,

You can set up the menu the way you depict. The first thing to do is go to the Toolbars tab in the Customize dialog box. In the upper right corner is a pulldown that lets you specify Left or Right for the menu bar. I just found that yesterday. It is also possible to arrange your toolbars below the menus as shown in one of the attached pictures. Of course now it's starting to take up a lot of vertical space.

I'm still playing with the UI and thinking about the optimal arrangement. I may have to minimize the ribbon and see how that plays out with the work flow. This discussion has helped a lot to get the ideas flowing.

Hi Raphael,

Thanks a lot for joining this discussion. This shows how dedicated PTC
is at listening to their customers.

One of *my* biggest complaints for now is about the position of the
standard File, Edit, View menu's.
With the Ribbon UI they were moved to the top *right* side of the
screen. They were obviously moved over there to save valuable screen
space.
But that is not intuitive at all. I know of *no* other Windows
application that has these commands in an other corner than the top
*left* corner.
Also some of these commands will be only available in a flyout menu on
smaller screen resolutions:

I was also told that these standard menu's will be gone in future
releases of ProE anyway.
With that I have to disagree completely. The fact that Microsoft decided
they didn't need them anymore in Office should not be the reason to
remove them from Pro/E. The idea behind the Ribbon Interface was to
simplify the command structure to a more taks based structure where you
just simply follow the task in the tab's from left to right and then
your finished. But working with 3D and 2D CAD is way more complex than
working with Office documents.

I think that PTC should keep on concentrating on an multi driven User
Interface with

*
General menu's: File, Edit, etc (with all the commands and
additional commands provided by toolkit applications)
These should be placed in the top left corner.
*
Toolbars (with the most important commands)
*
Ribbon UI (with all the commands)
Including a lot of the optimizations suggested by the users.
Like a quick Ribbon UI close/open button.
*
Dashboards
*
Mapkeys

To underline my idea. Here a Photoshopped version of the WF5 Drawing UI
as I would prefer it with the standard menu's in the top left corner and
a quick Ribbon UI toggle button.:

Olaf Corten
CAD/PLM Manager, Besi Competence Center - Other Business Applications
Fico BV, Ratio 6, 6921 RW Duiven, The Netherlands
Tel.: +31 26 3196215
Fax: +31 26 3196200
Mobile: +31 644548554
www.fico.nl http://www.fico.nl

R

RaphaelCNascime

1-Visitor

Hi Jim,

The buttons for commands in the Ribbon can be customized. You can either
select Tools > Customize Screen or just select Commands... from the menu
if you right-click on the Ribbon.

If you right-click on an individual command, you have options to display
the button with just an icon (no label), just the label (no icon), or
even make it a large button.

This should get saved with your config.win settings and stay that way
next time you start Pro/E.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Raphael

Raphael Nascimento

Product Manager

Pro/ENGINEER Detailing

J

jasonb13

Author

1-Visitor

In Reply to Raphael Nascimento:

We did implement keyboard shortcuts to switch tabs. This is activated by
pressing and releasing the ALT key. Not only can you switch tabs with
these key tips, but you can even choose commands that way.

Mapkeys have been designed to work outside the active tab as well as to
switch tabs. So, if you find that you have a command that you use often,
you can record a mapkey for it and it will run regardless of which tab
is active.

Someone mentioned customization of the ribbon. We did implement some
limited customization in Wildfire 5.0, but plan to offer much more
customization capability in Wildfire 6.0.

The ribbon can be minimized to clear up screen space - I think someone
mentioned that as well.

I could probably go on about other specifics, but I really wanted to
point out the thought process behind the UI decision and how it fits in
with a longer term strategy.

Thanks for your time and if anyone has additional comments, feel free to
email me.

Hi Raphael,

Thanks for joining in our discussion and making yourself avaliable. You've pointed out some things that I didn't know was possible and would like to test some of these things out. Could you comment on the show model annotations? It seems that when opening up a drawing created before WF5, there are a lot of model annotations that show up as being erased. Is there an easy way to delete the erased dimensions so the user can show dimensions by feature? Or is there a way to show erased dimensions other than going into the drawing tree and hunting for it view by view? I think the dimensioning is where I am getting the most complaints and after working more with the users I can see there point; it is very hard to find dimensions in many cases.

Thanks again,

Jason

D

dgschaefer

21-Topaz II

We haven't implemented WF5 here yet, our customers are on WF3 or WF4.
Looking at this issue, I see that I'm going to have a challenge.

We use custom pull down menus for making company wide mapkeys available.
We've found that we can successfully load two config.win files if they
each manipulate different parts of the window. So, company changes go
in the pull down menus, users can change anything else. It works very
well, loading two config.win files without this distinction is
problematic.

This UI is going to push our company mapkeys, which we have a lot of
time invested in (and save us a lot of time as well), off the screen.
Hopefully I can add the instruction to push the pull downs to the left
and up to our company config.win without messing up the user config.win
files.

BTW - I liked how you said that the ribbon would be fully implemented in
WF6. That made me chuckle since we've been told that Pro|E would be rid
of the side menus in the 'next release' since WF1 debuted and they are
still here in WF4. If I was a betting man, I'd bet they still are in
WF5 too.

Doug Schaefer

R

RaphaelCNascime

1-Visitor

Hi Olaf,

Thanks for the feedback. Wildfire 5.0 does allow for the menu bar to be
positioned to the left.

Go to the Toolbars tab of the Customize dialog (Tools > Customize
Screen) and you can select the pull-down to position the menu bar on the
left.

While it does break with convention, we positioned it on the right by
default because the pull-down menus tended to overlap and get in the way
of the ribbon tabs. However, because we recognized that some users would
rather keep it in its familiar location, we allow the option of
customizing its location.

Hope this helps,

Raphael

Raphael Nascimento

Product Manager

Pro/ENGINEER Detailing

R

RaphaelCNascime

1-Visitor

I forgot to mention that you can record a mapkey that toggles the
Minimize the Ribbon command. It might be even faster to hit a mapkey
than to click a button to toggle the Ribbon.

Raphael Nascimento

Product Manager

Pro/ENGINEER Detailing

J

jasonb13

Author

1-Visitor

In Reply to Ken Nunn:

I absolutely agree with Olaf .

cid:235424905@08042010-1711

I would be significantly more productive with this as it offers the best of
all worlds.

Ken...I found how to move the menubar to the left side of the screen, but how did you get the toolbar to go between the menubar and the ribbon?

Thanks,

Jason

O

ocorten-2

12-Amethyst

That's cool enough (still the toggle button would be more in sync with
the rest of the UI).

And what about the plans to remove the menu bar in a future release?
Will you keep supporting the File, Edit, etc menu's?

S

STEVEG

21-Topaz I

One other major thing asked by the users is the ability to customize the right-click menu. Any comment on that Raphael?

Steve G

J

jflores-3

1-Visitor

Thanks Raphael,

I did use the RMB for customization; it was just a short cut to the
tools customization where as you mentioned customization in WF5 is
pretty much limited. Goo to know about the RMB for icon names.

I played with the ALT and keyboard short cuts a was a bit disappointed
with some of the keys that were used. Did not know they were there
because the titles did not have any underlining to clue me in. I can
see why not; in the case of Annotation none of the letters can be
underlined because none were used for the shortcut because they were
already used elsewhere. Seem like "N" would have been a good choice for
Annotation, if it were not used for Info, that probably should have
used "I" since it is not used elsewhere. Then S could have been used
for Sketch.

* L = Layout

* S = Annotation

* K = Sketch

* U = Publish

Some of the commands themselves will be more difficult to memorize than
need be because some use numbers, some do match well, others are
backward or use a letter not relevant to the name. Some made since and
other did not, in many cases when I hit the key that probably should
have been used and found it was available and left me asking why?

* 1 = Standard dimension

* 2 = Reference Dimension

* SL = Snap Line

* TW = Wrap Text (why not WT to match the name and the way a user
would think of it)

* RO = Rotation

Thank you, Jim Flores

Mech. designer/CAD admin.

Clinical Care Systems

Philips Healthcare

2271 Cosmos Court

Carlsbad, CA. 92011

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