Arrow next to "More options" should point to right when hidden and down when visible

[Keith Hughitt]

The usual convention for collapsible menus with arrow icons is for the arrow icon to point to the right when the section is hidden and to point down when the section is visible. For example, the layers, adjustments, and HEK Events sections all follow this convention.

Because it might be confusing to have to similar looking buttons near each other ("play" and "open menu"), it might be good to either move the movie options to a separate section similar to the image adjustments section, or use some other UI component.

[Daniel Mueller (dmueller-esa)]

Hi Keith,

In principle, I agree. However, a rather flat downward-pointing arrow is also used for pull-down menus (see e.g. "Settings" on google.com). So I'd rather tweak the current icon a little than adding another section. One key constraint is that I would like to be able to have mini-view, movie controls, layers & adjustments open at the same time, which requires almost 1000 vertical pixels in the default configuration.

Cheers,
Daniel

[Keith Hughitt (keith-hughitt)]

Perhaps simply removing the transition and only displaying the downward-pointing arrow (similar to Google) would be more intuitive, although I think that they way the use it is also a slightly different UI pattern (popup vs. accordion/embedded section visibility).

Another option might be to create a context-sensitive section on the top panel to the right of the "track" button. When the "movie controls" section has focus you could then display those options there. I'm not really sure if that would be an improvement, however. Probably the best thing to do when someone has the chance to work on the UI again would be to create a few mockups of alternative layouts and show them to people on the dev list and also to novice users and see what works the best.