Venting my feelings for the change in the blender UX design. Can not create a cylinder to save my life.
The new search features in 2.5+ though makes it worth the learning curve, especially for us casual users.
I opened blender, typed in ‘add’ to see what shapes I could import. And what do i get?
http://puu.sh/30xbj.png
Add worm gear?!
my blender doesn’t have any worm gear, I even searched for it, so I have no idea what that is. But just pressing the spacebar once should bring up a menu with the top option after search being the add object menu, which brings up add mesh and then cylinder.
How about just in the top menu, next to file, there’s this menu called…Add, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that all objects can be added that way.
Add…Mesh…Cylinder.
The menu on the left will have a set of parameters you can adjust for the number of vertices, height, etc. If you click and drag on each slider you can change the value dynamically to your hearts desire or you can click and edit the numbers directly. The parameter adjustments stay active until you perform a different operation.
Phew…that was a tough one…
Of course, now we can insert our personal opinions about needing an icon with the picture of a cylinder on it to do this sort of thing, which Blender can have, but those of us who actually work with the program to model things will say that the number of times you ADD something is minimal in comparison to all the other things you need to do to model something, other than cylinders and boxes, so an icon is a gross waste of screen space for something you do maybe once or twice per modeling session.
There are of course hotkeys for this (SHIFT + A), all of which can be customized, and you can access this stuff with the spacebar menu if you enable the plugin, Dynamic Spacebar Menu, inside preferences, inside plugins.
Preferences are…where they are in most programs, inside the File menu.
You can also change to left click to select in that preferences menu too, as well as many other things if you take the time to read the choices.
As a general rule of thumb, default hotkeys in blender are often based on alphabetical association, but this obviously can’t always be true, and makes it easy to learn some, but not others, although alphabetical is admittedly not be the optimal solution for being “fast” with hotkeys, thus the customization options.