Project bar design

OK, I've just about finished a total rewrite of the project bar and all surrounding things to do with it.

Here's how it's looking:

<img src="http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/6646/projectbardone.png">

Layouts, event sheets, objects, object folders, resources, etc can all be added/removed/reordered, expanded and collapsed. Sound and music can be previewed via right click and menus.#

One thing I'm not sure on is having families in there; is it necessary or helpful? You can right click the stub to access the family manager, but beyond that it just shows families in use.. maybe useful for a quick overview but..

It'd be good to get feedback on the design; how could/should fonts, colours, bold/italic/underline, etc or more items be utilised to make things even better?

Maybe there could be an option to change the folder color? Something to keep the eye from slipping past all that yellow. You'd really only have to have a few different colors to choose from to make a difference.

I agree about familes, they have their own editor, and its not like you can do much from the project bar.

Now if you were to put a plugins, or behaviors section in instead....

Rich, you're awesome. This'll make it _MUCH_ easier to organize things and keep them under control. Looks really clean and tidy to me.

The families in there sound a little redundant, yeah. Especially since you could just set-up a hotkey for the family editor to pop up.

OK, families removed.

Is the rest of the design okay?

Global variables, attributes etc.? Bit redundant, maybe, but it is nice to have all such resources in one place

Also behaviors, effects in use?

Looking nice! Yeah I agree with Mipey, behaviours and effects in use would be handy, although the latter more so.

How/where/why would they go/be useful?

Cause you'd have every major control in one place. Wanna change a global variable? Do that in the projects bar. Wanna change a private variable? Do that in the projects bar.

We could have a 'Variables' Folder with subMenus for 'Global' and 'Private'.

Under global, we'd have all the global variables. Under 'Private', we'd see a list of objects that have private variables, which we could expand and create / remove pv's.

Also, what about Function objects and accessing their keys? So we could directly set some keys in the function object in there and trigger them using events.

Uh... private variables are gonna multiply like crazy. It is best if we leave them under respective objects they belong to.

Anyway, for behaviors, it'd be nice to see which objects have each behavior type, in case I missed one or want to change some behavior settings across the board. Basically, when you add a [Bullet] behavior, you'd get a Bullet folder under Behaviors folder, when you open it, it lists the objects with said behavior.

OK I've added global variables.

Controls will be handled via a dialog, in the new redesigned control system, which makes for better usability and sense than if it were crowbarred into the project bar, I'd think.

I'm still unsure whether to add a behavior/effects folder, even if it's hidden by default and only shown in an advanced mode. It's a lot of extra work and I can't really see why it's particularly useful, though I'm open to persuasion.

The logic behind adding something to the bar is that you can do something with it. With the new global variable addition you can add variables or delete old ones; with event sheets you can add/reorder, with resources you can add/remove etc.

Well, where do we get the list of used plugins, then?

Suppose that someone's been working on a big project for a quite while, adding and removing behaviors... then forgot about one particular behavior that isn't even used. That leads to bloating and potentially bugs.

Right click the application and selected 'view used plugins' to see what's been used.

Oh yeah! Thanks!