coloured tabs for quick identification

Skippy

As my project is getting larger with multiple part studios and a few assemblies I'm finding myself wishing I could change the colour of tabs to mark some of the main ones for instant identification. For example being able to mark my main assembly in red and my current part studio in green would make things easier for me. Has anyone else ever thought this might be handy?

philip_thomas

Hmm - thats a pretty good idea! Anyone else want to weigh in on this one?

imagineered

Yes, colour coding on tabs & even tools would be faster & easier to recognise

traveler_hauptman

(Note: Each part studio, assembly, or imported doc is an "element" of the Onshape document. I'm using Onshapes internal names for things so they don't misunderstand my meaning. )

While I have nothing against color coding, this feels to me like a feature request that only exists because the need (managing, organizing, navigating the different elements of a document) is not satisfied by the UI approach (tabs).

I'd much rather that the element menu dialog be elevated to be the main UI element for document elements, with tagging, folders, filters or whatever other organization tools you decide to use.   Reduce the document-tabs to be the list of most recently used elements, and only show as many document-tabs as fit on the screen.

I think the UX meeting that decided tabs would be a good idea severely underestimated the number of elements in each document and the length of descriptive element names.

So, yes colored tabs would help but it would be even better to fix the problem at it's root.

viru

@Skippy, i am agree with you. It will definitely provide value addition to Onshape. It not introduces by Onshape maybe due to it takes more graphics space and will affect on part or assembly loading time.

andrew_troup

I wonder if it would be better (if tabs are retained) to list them down the right boundary, rather than across the bottom one. They could be pulled out wider to read the whole name, then manually slid (or auto-slide, if that was the chosen behaviour) back to the previous width.

You can list a whole lot more items (elements) in a column than in a row on a given monitor, even allowing for the width of monitors being much greater than the height.

If colour is to be introduced to the OnS user interface, I would personally prefer to see it judiciously applied to the feature list, preferably to link features with parts

Skippy

I can see that a complete redesign or replacement of tabs could be a better idea in the long run, It must be a real pain for very complex projects. Colour coding just seemed like it could be a handy optional thing for some people. A ticket has been submitted so will see what happens.

shashank_aarya

Colour coding will definitely work. But my opinion is that it should consume minimum display memory as far as possible so that it will not affect the speed of modelling.
I was also thinking about another proposed resolution for identification of known tabs. How about provision of adding the frequently required tabs in favourites or bookmarks? That can be a separate button near to + sign. It will minimize the unnecessary scrolling and searching of tabs when they are too many.

Skippy

shashank_aarya said:

Colour coding will definitely work. But my opinion is that it should consume minimum display memory as far as possible so that it will not affect the speed of modelling.
I was also thinking about another proposed resolution for identification of known tabs. How about provision of adding the frequently required tabs in favourites or bookmarks? That can be a separate button near to + sign. It will minimize the unnecessary scrolling and searching of tabs when they are too many.

An open tab in a browser tab option would be great actually. I know you can do it by opening a document twice in two seperate tabs but a simple right click and select would be handy.

3dcad

I would like to see only categories in a row at bottom and hover to open vertical list. Categories could be: Part Studios, Assemblies, Imports, Favorites, Latest etc..

Currently I ignore the row in bottom and use only the 'mega-burger' menu next to + -sign

kinsleymark

Asana (www.asana.com) does a great job with using colors to tag projects. Like OnShape, Asana is very clean, minimal, and monochromatic (which is VERY nice!). However, they OPTIONALLY add the ability to assign any one of 16 pre-set colors to a Project in order to set it apart. It's up to the user to determine how they'd like to use it (ie. just for important projects? all similar projects grouped together? all projects that belong to a specific team? etc). It's very flexible, open-ended, and non-intrusive. It does a good job of allowing the user to assign whatever value or representation they want -- without forcing them into a specific way of working.