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Designing a UI framework for CAD & Tooling applications, Territory Tabs. The design will be based on my own experiences with all varieties of these apps, and watching others succeed and fail when using them. I'll also be developing a CAD program with this framework!

Easy for Novices, Open to Experts

• Tightly constrained UI design environment for a streamlined, consistent, easy-to-learn user experience.
• ...but with a completely exposed configuration for the experts.
• Ultra flat and wide feature heap with a central, easily-accessed fuzzy search for navigation.
• Frequently used features can be turned into Tabs, which sit inside non-overlapping Territories.
• Layout and linked layout features emulate workflow tabs.
• Multi-window workflow support.
• Works with keyboard only, mouse only, and touchpad only. Keybinds & shortcuts, naturally.

Consistent UI Rules

• The only opaque overlays are context menus and toasts. Nothing else overlaps!
• Features are never hidden or removed, and can only be disabled (greyed-out).
• All disabled features will have, on-hover, a reason for why it is disabled, and a meaning for further explanation.
• RuleSets (exposed Systems) govern feature enabling/disabling, among many other domains.
• Modern quality of life standards, like toggling UI elements not moving the toggle source.

Lessons Learned

• 30 years of CAD & Tooling design errors have informed the priorities of Territory Tabs.
• Version-controlled, SHA1 Repository compatible, deterministic Operations for a single source of truth.
• Taskpool for predicting & parallelizing large Operations.
• All features and actions exposed out of the gate for scripting and integrations with other apps.
• All ECS, all the time.

Core Territory Behavior

• [] Redesign Move and Resize to be decoupled from display lbraries.
• [] Implement Locked Territories

** Features **

• []

This work is dual-licensed under Apache 2.0 and MIT. You can choose between one of them if you use this work.