A traditional airplane cockpit is a terrible example to follow for software, analog instruments can't have menus, popups, tooltips, tabs, etc and cannot change depending on context or status. And also is full of things that you only really need when something goes wrong and many things that just show you the status of the machine and duplicate instruments in case the others fail. Most of this does not fit software very well, it's like having the task manager and all it's tabs visible all the time and having solvespace open at the same time in case freecad doesn't work.onekk wrote: ↑Wed Dec 21, 2022 9:12 am But how to deal with complexity? as airplane cockpit are not made to "impress users" or "confuse users", each button has his scope, and also here there are some efforts of "uniforming things" to reduce problems, that in this area are very dangerous, like some "aerial crash" has proven.
A good example of these concepts is the recent changes in sketcher and the core toolbars, previously it took the airplane cockpit approach (but worse because it wasn't as neatly organized), everything was shown at all times (and we even had duplicates too!), it overwhelms you with information and obscure controls, now we shows less buttons but it's the buttons that most actually want to use, some more advanced controls are available in menus and so on, the complexity is still there but the interface is better managed, no functionality was lost, in fact more functionality was added. There are still things to improve though.