Thursday, April 15, 2010

Dept. of Wishes - Project Browser Enhancement

A designer today made an interesting suggestion for Revit's Project Browser. What? A suggestion for Revit already? 2011 just came out! He hasn't even seen 2011 yet. He's been thinking about it for some time as their project has progressed and the number of listed views has grown significantly.

A nice example of what he suggested is the Materials dialog. At the top is a field to enter search criteria that the materials list will refer to and reduce the list according to what you type. Type W...you get all the materials starting with W. Type "WO" and you start seeing fewer items and it becomes much easier to see "wood" materials. Type the rest and you only get materials with wood in the midst of the name.


Imagine this same concept at the top of the Project Browser? Want a floor plan? Type "Flo". Want to see second floor plans? Type "Sec". The Material Class field allows us to chose a predefined class to restrict results in the list even more. This could be used to define floor, ceiling, detail plans etc. The results would be limited to just floor plans, or elevations by choosing the View Class.

Might even do away with a general listing of views? Considering 2011 has the Properties Palette and the Project Browser stacked it could make the Browser much more practical at a smaller footprint.

Very interesting idea Seena!!


3 comments:

Unknown said...

I love the dynamic filtering the material dialog provides and have always wished it could show up elsewhere in the program. Here's to hoping they listen.

Dan Stine said...

Adding to this idea, and something I have thought about, would be to filter the Component list. A large project can have 100's of families, making it hard to find a specific toilet or cabinet.

The idea mentioned here could be used to filter the families section of the Project Browser in addition to views.


Great idea!

Unknown said...

Nice. Glad to see someone pick up on that. In fact, the original idea we had behind this UI was to extend it to the project browser, and I've even toyed with the idea of using it to locate commands, families, you name it!