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From left to right it is Front, Back, Top, Bottom, Left, Right. I do need to edit the images to remove that bit of grey background we don't use anymore.
good looking mapkeys you have created, but I think Pro/Engineer is famous for mininum number of icons and minimum screen clutter. So instead of increasing screen clutter( and another thing you may wrongly click on an icon) its better to have a keyboard shortcut.
At last count I had about 200 mapkeys; remembering typing viewf, viewbk,viewt,viewbt, etc is just another form of clutter - not of the screen but of the mind.
For most people, 20-30 is all they need. I just got back from a consulting assignment where the company had something like 90 mapkeys, and most of them went unused. Many had not been updated from previous versions of the software, so they were worthless, and others had been converted into icons that cluttered up the left and right sides of the computer screen.
There's nothing wrong with mapkeys, custom icons, and custom menus, but at some point they can become overkill. But it's all user preference.
Well, with both design and NC Programming interfaces, the mapkeys multiply like rabbits. I'm sure most of them are unused, but that's not really the point. I just disagree that the mapkey is faster when entered via the keyboard versus an intuitive icon. I have toolbars set up for design, drafting, NC programming, and Mechanica. Believe me, if you've never delved into the minutae of Pro/NC you have no idea how helpful a mapkey pegged to a good icon can be. Also, I think it far more likely that a user will mis-type a mapkey than select an incorrect icon.
As for ProE being famous for having an uncluttered interface, I view it more as a lack of initiative on the part of PTC to create a truly useful front-end, not some virtuous adherence to the principle of cleanliness.
I think the key here is GOOD ICON. There are very few icons in the typical GUI that are even close to being intuitive. I personally still prefer the old menu manager over hundreds on meaningless blob icons.
P.S. I think the view icons above are pretty good by the way.
Funny thing about icons as opposed to menus that I noticed as I was training someone this week: with a icon you don't have a accurately descriptive way of telling someone what to pick. Pick the icon with blue trapezoid instead instead of pick feature, create, protrusion.
Anyway, peter, those icons are very good! How did you create them?
I started making these icons back when 2000i^2 came out. I've drawn them right in the Edit Button Image application in Customize>Commands. Tedious to be sure.
I do have to admit that while I had to draw every pixel, I did have some inspiration. I fired up a copy of SolidWorks 99 on my laptop, studied how they laid out their interface, and did my best to emulate it. The whole Object-Action thing precluded using a lot of it, but there were enough areas of overlap that made a real difference in usability. This is especially true in Drawing mode.
Some other icons came from configuration files I got from my PTC applications engineer, and I altered them to suit my needs. For example, this is the core modelling toolbar. Red icons remove material, blue icons add material, and the rest are self-explanatory (I hope). The addition of the flyout menu helped quite a bit, too.
You will have to use Wordpad and copy/paste them into your default config.pro. You should have a company-standard config.pro set up on a server somewhere and make a batch file that launches ProE. In the batch file, we wipe out local config.pro & config.win and put fresh copies of the standard ones in the <loadpoint>\text folder each time a user starts. For example:
In that example, e:\proe_work is the 'Start In' location of the shortcut, so that is where local config.win files would be placed by default if the user has created one.
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