sambeau

My only problem with having the gestures on the trackpad only is that I have both a mouse and a trackpad so I would have to take my hands off the mouse to use the trackpad (and I'd drop any object I was moving). The beauty of using the mouse scroll wheel is that you can scroll mid edit, while you are moving something - an object, a line-point etc. Having pan on the spacebar invalidates it's use during text editing which is a shame so I'd ideally like a secondary button that had no effect during text editing - maybe Control could step on or a modifier could be applied to space. I could, however, see myself happily switching to the trackpad during a text edit for this reason. I *do* find moving back to any editor I used heavily before I embraced zoom & pan feels like going back to the dark ages. I've tried Fireworks, Ai and Photoshop and they all drive me mad (even though Photoshop has some support for it).

I'm a long time Microsoft Expression Design user which probably makes me one of a kind and the last of my race! :) Even worse I am an even longer-time mac user so have to keep a Windows VM around to do my editing in. Q: Why on earth would a Mac-using Graphics ? UI designer be using such an obscure graphics package? A: Gestural Zoom And Pan In MS Design you don't have explicit pan & zoom tools, you pan using the space key and zoom using the mouse-wheel. Once you get used to this it is very hard to go back. Even better is this lovely piece of research by Bret Victor: http://worrydream.com/#!/GesturalZoomAndPan It goes one step further and is really intuitive once you've tried it. I would find it hard to give up my mouse zoom TBH and I'd probably also want the panning seen in Bret's demo to be on the space key, not the command key but if I could have this level of movement around my document I would finally be able to consider jumping ship. Please try the demo at worry dream! I'd love to see you try something like this. Also - MS gives MS Design away for free these days and I recommend you look at it as it is still a really good editor - simple / focussed - I'm sure you could find some inspiration in it (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36180). I use it to create all my SVG images these days (I export to XAML and then translate them to SVG using a script). It's a slightly clunky workflow but it has a level of accuracy have yet to see elsewhere. Thanks.