Unity Hub 2.0 Feedback & Please restore the list view for installs!

Unity Engine
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Just update the Hub to 2.0 and its a bit of a mixed bag.

Overall the new appearance was a pleasant surprise. It feels much cleaner, more professional and with an improved layout. However my main annoyance and a real bugbear is the new installs layout. Please provide an option to have a list view alternative!

Installs Tab
So the grid layout is just such a waste of space and provides zero benefits! Sure its pretty to look at but usability wise I find it very hard ‘at a glance’ to see what i’ve got installed. My eyes have to move in weird patterns to find Unity version and see what modules are installed. Not to mention scrolling isn’t smooth and the grid appears to just jump up/down in cell height, meaning you have no really idea if things have moved or not.

I’m sure some users will like it, but personally i’d much prefer a list view alternative. Have it presented pretty much like the new Projects tab and were good. A list view provides a far superior readability as you can just scan down rows to determine which versions are installed, then look across the columns to gain additional information such as modules installed, LTS etc, sort by column etc.

Projects Tab
My initial reaction was positive, its nice and clean with a good list layout. However upon reflection there are some awkward aspects.

1. Column Widths
My Project names don’t come close to fitting and that is a problem as projects frequently have similar names and differ only in some versioning information in the file name or specific client names. As some of my projects are reskinned for different clients, the client name comes after the project name and that is getting truncated.

While its possible to expand the width of the hub the space of the columns is unintuitive as they are all the same width. This is rather puzzling since version, platform and modification are all considerably shorter than potential project names and in fact they probably wouldn’t need to expand at all.

Please consider making it so that expanding the hub width gives priority to expanding the project name column.

Oh and expanding the window width is not a good solution as the hub appears to forget its last dimensions every time you close it ( its still in the taskbar so not quit ?).

2. Row Content Alignment
I find it awkward that version, platform and modification are all centered, I feel these would look far better and be more readable if they were vertically aligned top - to match the position of the filename.

3. List Headings
The list heading is the same depth as other columns, but it doesn’t need to be. Be nice to get back some vertical space and make the heading row say 60-75% the height it is now.

4. Loss of Project Location
Pretty sure we used to have that in the list and now you have to roll over to get it in a popup and the popup is rather short in width ( forcing the location path to be two or even three lines deep! ). Not sure if losing it from the list view is a big issue, but having a wider popup is essential.

Create New Project
I like the new design here, it looks clean and good use of space. Though depending on the number of templates that might be here I suspect an alternative list view might be beneficial.

General Comments
Sort order requires clicking on the arrow and not the column header. - Its a bit of a pain and confusing at first, would expect clicking on an already selected column header would toggle the sort order. This would also be more consistent, as clicking on the text of the Unity version of a project or target platform brings up their respective popupboxes, you don’t have to click on its little arrow.

Overall the performance appears rather poor, and much worse than I remember in previous versions. Clicking on the side tabs you can see the Google Material UI look clearly as the button animation is slow and freezes. Not sure what the cause of the sluggish performance is but pretty sure it could be improved, even if its just giving the impression by waiting to load data until button animations have finished or something.

Anyway despite this wall of text, overall I’m still loving the Hub, it has been a great boost in usability and productivity. There are some issues here and there, but hopefully these can be quickly addressed and rectified.

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Hi!

Backing up the feedback regarding Project path location./
Path use to be immediately available, written under project name. No action needed. Now it requires 2 actions. Some serious lost in UX in my opinion.

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Great feedbacks.

Besides re-showing project location, could you please add a “nickname”/alias feature for projects? Sometimes, we have projects located in folders having the same name, which leads to many project names looking the same in the list. We then have to check project locations to differentiate among them, and that is quite inconvenient.

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Yeah I can’t quite decide whether it is important for myself or not, but that is not to say there isn’t plenty evidence that it really should have never been removed. Must have read half a dozen replies to the Hub 2.0 beta with devs who end up having to name each project the exact same name ( ie. ‘Unity’ ) and for whom there is clearly no alternative to path location as a means of differentiation.

I think the question is what is the solution, one which i’m dismayed was never even addressed by the team over the two months or more of beta or even alpha.

Personally I see a few options

  1. Bring it back by default.
  2. Bring it back as a optional setting ( default on or off? )
  3. Bring it back by default but place it full length of the row, beneath the other information since there is a lot of wasted space. Would have to see what it looks like - but potentially a very useful design layout choice.
  4. Be clever - if the project name is the same, replace or prepend the displayed name with the first unique parent folder path. Though probably still want the full path as an optional setting.
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Yeah I read about the nickname idea, but not sure i’m convinced its the right way to go since it obviously relies on additional data being stored and potentially lost. Then again if this data is stored in ProjectSettings and some of that is lost you are in potentially a lot more trouble then just seeing the project name in the hub :wink:

I don’t see why it couldn’t be implemented though, perhaps along with the ‘being clever’ option in my last post and then provide the choice as optional setting in preferences of the Hub.

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VERY FRUSTRATED that the project path is no longer visible! We have Unity projects nested in larger project hierarchies and they always have the same folder name (eg, “UnityProject”). This means that everything in Unity Hub has the exact same name. Furthermore, when I mouse over the name, I only see the start of the project path as the end is truncated.

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Yes please. The current tiles are neither sorted, nor is there a good reason to have them. Unless you can change the logo or something :stuck_out_tongue:

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We have several assets projects as sub-branches and they all have the same project name. The path was the only way to differentiate them. Now we’ll have to open every time using the “Open” menu, to browse to the correct folder.
Add back the project path in the list please

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Yeah I did consider afterwards it might have been nice to have the whole tile be colourised or something to denote release, beta, alpha or even a picture of the startup window of that version of unity. However while pretty and somewhat useful, the same information could just as easily be conveyed in a list view anyway.

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The full project path is vital !! This is useless, I have paths that direct me to the project workspace and I can’t get to distinguish between the 2 copies of my project… this is very bad, what kind of workflow supports trusting the name of the app without checking the path ? I have 3 to 4 copies of a project when working on different features of the same project…

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Full path is vital for us as well! Fortunately I had an old installer for Hub 1.2.0 lying around because archives of past Hub releases seem to be non-existent!

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875×402 27 KB

The decision to remove the project folder was really unfortunate. How about asking developers before you roll out such changes?

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Its been in plan supposedly since a year ago, but it is really crappy that it didn’t make it into this version. It was a really terrible decision to not include this at all. I’m hunting for old installers of Unity Hub to revert if anyone has an older copy around.

https://discussions.unity.com/t/707716

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Since we have multiple branches of the same project, we also feel that the loss of the project path indication is a drop in quality of life.

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Dev or staging branch?
Not much of a gambling man myself…

4538644--420748--upload_2019-5-14_14-15-28.png

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Same problem here. I have a copy of each project for each platform because the platform switch takes so long and I can working while I do a build for another platform. Without paths the Unity Hub is useless for me.

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You can hover the Project name to see the location. But I agree it is not ideal and feels clunky. I would prefer to see the Path explicitly there, or just allow developers to give custom names or meta info to projects in the Unity Hub.

I also have several project copies for the different platforms, as it takes long and haven’t gotten around setting up the Unity Cache Server system.

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Like many here, I find the previous UI that listed the path of the project along with the final project directory to be much more useful. For some of us that final directory is not the actual project name, so having the path (which includes the project name at a higher level) is much more useful.

The other feature that I would love to have is the ability to remove items from the project list. This functionality was added to visual studio years ago and I have found it extremely useful. I have some unity projects on the list that are years old and not even present on the disk anymore. The ability to trim down the list of projects to something relevant would be very welcome.

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Another vote for restoring project location to full visibility here. It’s a pretty essential part of my workflow to have multiple clones of my repo open for on/off tasks like upgrading Unity version or experiments and this change really isn’t an improvement at all.

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Hovering to reveal the path doesn’t even work right, it shows a truncated mess, sometimes not even enough of the path to distinguish between projects once you scroll down in the list a little. This behaviour of reducing the tooltip to a single line after x projects is so bizarre! I’ve got 6 branches of just one project that all show near identical paths!!! I’ll be making an effort to roll back to 1.6 until some better solution is found.

New interface is far too “fancy new age” as if catering to some hypster end users instead of the developers that are actually using hub. Developers need context and information. You can’t take that away and expect everything to be fine.

2 Likes