The reasons Blender 2.7 will have a tabbed interface
Blender Guru has just posted an interview with Jonathan Williamson, joint leader of Blender’s new UI team, explaining the reasoning for the software’s new Tabs interface, due to be rolled out in version 2.7.
New, but not universally admired
The UI prompted long discussions on community sites like BlenderNation when the original demo video (above) was released, and again when early builds became available to test.
In the interview, Williamson and Blender Guru’s Andrew Price run through common questions asked about the change: namely, ‘Why are tabs being added?’, ‘Why don’t they have icons?’ and ‘Can I turn them off?’.
The full interview is nearly two hours long, and goes into far more detail that we can here, but according to Price’s own summary: “The tab design is a beta, and is subject to changes in future versions. Icons (instead of text) is certainly a possibility, but only if someone actually steps up to the challenge of creating some icons.”
(If you want to listen to the reasoning behind that summary, you may want to skip forward half an hour into the recording: the first part is mainly a discussion of the community feedback itself.)
Interesting stuff, but, we suspect, by no means the end of the debate. Blender 2.7 – which includes a number of other UI changes – is officially released in early March.
Listen to the full interview on Blender Guru