Scale operator icon OR make template_icon clickable
For addon development - I continually run into wanting large - clickable - images that operate like a normal blender operator. We have template_icon_view but if you change the value in the backend, msg busses can't detect that change if you have it subscribed to the window manager - so this seems like a solid fix to allow developers to have much more condensed and concise addons and UI presentation.
2 Comments
Consistency is key in ui ux design. when allowing different size icons adding would use this to scream to the user click me. From a single addon perspective this seems ok and desired, but from blender whole this could irritate users. For this reason icon sizes are standardised.
From design point of view there are often other solutions that work for an add on developer and user and blender as a product.
Not saying that most add on developers would misuse if supported, but this opens up possibilities that blender can become a Christmas tree. How can we address this?
Personally I would start with a design. The requirement of wanting larger buttons could also mean that the ui design is bad, and a larger icon is used to fix this. It is better to fix the design than add features that could become irritating.
Template icon isn’t designed to be clickable, only presentable, would not alter its intention as changes in intention can lead to many undesired artifacts. For instance how would you setup parameters that you want to pass to an operation without breaking the basic principles of blender ux.
I want to start by saying thank you! I love to see a dev taking their valuable time to answer the question with legitimate reasoning behind their response :) To answer your question, I would pass parameters as you would normally - just by using dot notation on an operator. Seeing template icon viewer makes me want to click on large images - and that is already a supported blender UX element - one that is widely used. I would ask if adding a parameter that makes it a single click operator that different from having the window manager update and then having a msg bus try and intercept the blender output update? Or, a fantastic solution might be to add python updates if the template icon view target is changed by code - so that if updated, it could send an event in the scripting tab as if you were to do it manually - that could be the entire fix - without adding in scalable icons. :) Again, thank you for taking the time to even give a response in the first place! I hope you have a great week!