Transfered from EAP Ideas list
The Ribbon stuff is all nice and all, but I hope that the dev team are not thinking... 'Phew, that's the pesky human interaction stuff out of the way... back to debugging, performance, assembly code, lovely hash tables or whatever' :-)
There are a lot of things about the on screen UI components and the way they work that will bring a lot more productivity paybacks, and hopefully won't be missed for the commercial release.
Synchronised View Windows is one area where some lots of love and attention is in order, I think. Especially with the increased need to work in 3d and be safely on the BIM bandwagon.
More working in 3d means working more with multiple windows that need to be synchronised. Working with multiple views of the same thing is taken for granted if you consider the way MCAD drawings are almost always packaged with Top, Front, Side + Iso views. The view plane is flat but we need to work in 3d... so multiple view points orthogonal to each other are a staple.
It would be good to provide a means to keep the views synchronised to each other... when the user manipulates a view. Move View Center in Top View, the View Centers for the other associated views gets updated. Rotate the view in Top (or any other associated view) the rotation propagates to the other views, which add the relative 90 deg (or whatever) rotation on.
Even in 2d, this kind of synchronisation would be useful. You often need to overlay different files to check things. The user would have two windows open side-by-side with the same view center but have different levels/Refs on or off, and differing re-symbolisation. Navigator new feature opportunity?
Descartes already has some view synchronisation smarts...
1. Integration with Dynamic View tools looks very cool.
2. Ability to associate ACS' with particular DV's is also very useful.
... albeit with only one slave view. It would be good it the views were 'siblings' and not have a fixed 'master-slave' relationship.... at platform level.