Put Undo on Toolbar?

[v_kyr]

13 minutes ago, R C-R said:

For that to work, you would have to create the tooltip text yourself ...

Nonsense, tooltips can also be dynamically assigned/changed, or the associated tooltip can be taken from a written config file. - Aka you assign to button 5 one of a predefined functions from a list or selectable hashmap etc. The button 5 tooltip will then be assigned to the a associated function name and it's localized text, or another associated text then.

13 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Where in the Affinity apps do you see a tooltip (or icon or toolbar name) for Undo, Redo, Save, etc.?

It's even under MacOS possible to show up menu tooltips if needed or wanted. - Further we are talking here about some actually just via menus accessable functionality with now should be assigned to buttons (with tooltips) too. So basically nothing else then this (just in a more dynamically customizable manner) ...

 

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I don't see a Tooltip, but the function's name is in the menu, and in the Shortcuts dialog in Preferences. The application would just need to select the lowest-level part of the name. E.g., for Undo, the last part of Edit > Undo. For Save, the last part of File > Save. Those text strings are already built-in to the apps, and that's where they would be selected from to appear in a Tooltip.

That would work for items like Undo or Save, but what about things that are several layers deep in the menus, like in the Text or Select menus? Would "None" or "Behind" be a useful tooltips without more of the name? What about "Shape," "Name," or "Curves," just to name a few others.

It isn't that it is not doable; it just seems like it would take a lot of work to make it very useful.

[R C-R]

6 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Nonsense, tooltips can also be dynamically assigned/changed, or the associated tooltip can be taken from a written config file....

Yes, the apps could be coded to do all this. But I am asking if these generic buttons would actually something enough users would use to justify their addition to the code.

It seems obvious that as this discussion has progressed, this is about a lot more than just adding undo & redo buttons to the toolbar customizations. It seems that several users want the ability to add just about anything that is currently in a menu to the toolbar. I think for that to work via the existing View > Customize Toolbar UI, there would need to be quite a bit of work done before that was practical & user friendly enough to get much use.

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

Yes, the apps could be coded to do all this.

Yes, here's a simple OSX playground (using a very old Xcode 8 Swift3) just to show/demonstrate you what I meant with dynamics and reassigning something to one and the same button, so changing it's title and tooltip on demand ...

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

It seems obvious that as this discussion has progressed, this is about a lot more than just adding undo & redo buttons to the toolbar customizations. It seems that several users want the ability to add just about anything that is currently in a menu to the toolbar.

I would probably only add the two most wanted there, namely Undo & Redo. - Can't tell if it makes sense for other people to have other things from the Edit menu (like Cut/Copy/Paste/...) there on the toolbar then, or maybe even better in another own (on demand show/hide beside) panel which then allows to be customized too with some other additional/more icon button entries then.

Personally I think another panel (instead of the toolbar) for such customizable click icon buttons would be better. Maybe similar in function like the assets or styles panel, but here then instead for adding/customizing other click icon buttons out of a set.

 

[Pšenda]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

I would probably only add the two most wanted there, namely Undo & Redo.

I admire your efforts to continue this completely fruitless debate - it should be borne in mind that its aim is only to find complications where there are none, and to give the impression that even completely banal issues are really terribly complex that they could not be successfully resolved in 7 years.

[v_kyr]

9 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

I admire your efforts to continue this completely fruitless debate ...

You are absolutely right here, as often with certain people it get's a never ending and fruitless debate !!!

[Pšenda]

7 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

with certain people

In my work, these people are called "negative researchers" - they are not trying to find a way to solve problems, but only looking for reasons why these problems cannot be solved.

[v_kyr]

16 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

In my work, these people are called "negative researchers" - they are not trying to find a way to solve problems, but only looking for reasons why these problems cannot be solved.

And in my business we call them blatantly stupid-clever (dumm-schlau in german), i.e. people who always talk a lot about things (... like programming & software development etc.) that they actually have no idea, or experience about, but always pretend they either way know everything better. - No need to ask, of course those aren't problem solvers, but often tend to create many more additional problems.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

... so changing it's title and tooltip on demand ...

OK, but as I understand it, the toolbar icons would have to be created separately. Is that right?

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, Pšenda said:

I admire your efforts to continue this completely fruitless debate - it should be borne in mind that its aim is only to find complications where there are none, and to give the impression that even completely banal issues are really terribly complex that they could not be successfully resolved in 7 years.

Nope. Just trying to consider all the suggested options, including the customizable generic icons & any provision for custom toolbar icons other than the 1, 2, ..., 5 ones, & how doing any of this would affect the addition of other new features & bug fixes.

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

OK, but as I understand it, the toolbar icons would have to be created separately. Is that right?

Depends on implementation design and what makes more sense in terms of a general flexible handling here. Mostly in SW development you will keep those as easy accessable, reassignable and exchangable resources, aka keep things as flexible and easy changeable as possible.

In the above shown Playground for example one way would be to add those as resources, which you then dynamically can associate by their icon name in code. You can of course also always reassign a different one to a button (change it's associated icon on the fly). - See button1 here, first applying an undo icon and then reassign a different redo icon to it ...

 

As another way instead, one could of course also dynamically create an image/icon in code and assign that to a button. That would then be similar handled to this checkbox creation and assignment sample here in code ...

 

 

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Depends on implementation design and what makes more sense in terms of a general flexible handling here. Mostly in SW development you will keep those as easy accessable, reassignable and exchangable resources, aka keep things as flexible and easy changeable as possible.

I am not sure if you understand what I am asking about. It is if they are already built into the apps somewhere or would have to be added as new resources.

[v_kyr]

6 hours ago, R C-R said:

I am not sure if you understand what I am asking about. It is if they are already built into the apps somewhere or would have to be added as new resources.

Look through the app resources and you will know!

[Customer Feedback]

A customer created a feature request for common functionality that would be child's play for Serif to implement. Whether Serif chooses to do so is another matter. It's about business priorities and of course good or bad decisions on Serif's part. We'll see.

But why customers who are interested in this feature request should experience one thread after another being destroyed by side and up down chatter that could be kept private is beyond me. 

The thousands of posts by some commenters in a few years tells me that for some this forum is more about something other than design and productivity, let alone deliverables and billing.

For serious customers, this is killing the value of this forum. I simply don't have the time or inclination to navigate around all this noise.

Maybe Serif should consider making a real support and feature request forum for customers with money and deadlines at stake, and then a community forum where all this talk can take place.

/Eddie

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Look through the app resources and you will know!

I can find icons for very few of the toolbar icons in the app's resources folder, so I must be looking in the wrong place for them.

That's part of why I asked about this.

EDIT: So for instance, in the Applications/Affinity Designer/Contents/ Resources folder, there are 117 small tiff image files, most of which seem to be for tool cursors, most (all?) containing two resolutions (72 & 144 DPI); plus nine JPEG files, none of which are for tools or toolbar icons. There are 15 png files there as well but the only one that looks like anything on the Toolbar is ythe assistant.png file. 

There are over 1000 png files in the /Applications/Affinity Designer.app/Contents/Resources/AffinityDesigner.help/Contents/Resources/shared/ui/ but none of them appear to be anything used in the UI outside of the help topics.

I can find no other instances of any PNG files in the AD resources folder, nor anything that looks like most of the icons available for the toolbar customizations or defaults.

So where the heck are all those icon files stored now? I would have sworn that in the 1.9.x versions there were thousands of icon files in the resources folder, apparently in the 1.10.x versions something changed.

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, Customer Feedback said:

I simply don't have the time or inclination to navigate around all this noise.

Maybe Serif should consider making a real support and feature request forum

A request for a request area for requesting requests. Alternatively: Conducting polls to decide which request to request. Top tip: Users decide by their likes which posts can be read by Serif at all. Finally: users pay for posts + pay to get read ... etc. 😇

Sounds some have both in mind: A custom app interface for every user and a custom forum for every user's individual bubble. – I don't need this claptrap either, but isn't it obvious that "nonsense" and "real matters" are close to each other, depending on our own views? – How to reduce or unsubscribe from an agitated thread until its waters have calmed:

 

 

[Customer Feedback]

I never enable notifications anywhere. But the forum is a junkyard of irrelevant content for people coming here to actually find information in threads that go on, page after page of empty debates or last word freak posts.

This forum is clearly more of a hobby for someone than a customer channel. They certainly deserve a separate forum. But results-oriented, focused customers should have theirs.

Well, speaking of which, my feedback is for Serif. Not to feed another long debate. It will be without me.

[R C-R]

10 minutes ago, Customer Feedback said:

Well, speaking of which, my feedback is for Serif.

You know there is a separate set of forums for feedback, right?

[DavidK]

On 1/13/2020 at 9:06 PM, walt.farrell said:

Do you mean "on the toolbar"?

If so, you can't. It is available only via the menu or the keyboard shortcut.

As a past PagePlus/PhotoPlus user I find the missing save, undo, redo, print etc. toolbar icons the most annoying "feature" of the Affinity products. The only thing that is more annoying is that I cannot directly import PagePlus files into Affinity Publisher and have to do this through a PDf file, which loses all the formatting for mutli-page documents and any master pages I had set up.

[thomaso]

On 6/21/2022 at 5:58 PM, Customer Feedback said:

I never enable notifications anywhere. But the forum is a junkyard of irrelevant content for people coming here to actually find information in threads that go on, page after page of empty debates or last word freak posts.

This forum is clearly more of a hobby for someone than a customer channel. They certainly deserve a separate forum. But results-oriented, focused customers should have theirs.

Well, speaking of which, my feedback is for Serif. Not to feed another long debate. It will be without me.

Help? I fully agree that information can be difficult to find, especially when heterogeneous groups of different skills & levels communicate with each other. But here I don't understand the contradictory consequence that this user seems to draw to avoid or improve this disadvantage.

This discussion about Toolbar buttons is used by someone named "Customer Feedback" to inform the community that her/his feedback is "not to feed another long debate" – while this post does feed a debate which is one of the long threads + this post does not relate to the threads topic at all. To complete the oddity the OP first regrets "empty debates or last word freak posts" but ends the post with a comment about eventual responses: "It will be without me."

Is the goal "Don't call me, I'll call you"? – Or was this meant as a joke that I just don't get?

[thomas.dahl]

On 7/29/2022 at 7:35 PM, DavidK said:

As a past PagePlus/PhotoPlus user I find the missing save, undo, redo, print etc. toolbar icons the most annoying "feature" of the Affinity products. The only thing that is more annoying is that I cannot directly import PagePlus files into Affinity Publisher and have to do this through a PDf file, which loses all the formatting for mutli-page documents and any master pages I had set up.

It seems a large number of people would like these buttons to be available.  They could be disabled by default to satisfy the nay sayers.  I am not clear why they care if the option is there, or not, if they are not subjected to them by default.

Seriously Serif, please just add them..   How hard can it be as the functions are already there but buried behind menus and keystrokes.

I get that PagePlus files might be tricky to import.  I can live with this limitation although it is a little annoying.

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, thomas.dahl said:

I am not clear why they care if the option is there, or not, if they are not subjected to them by default.

A general, clear reason to disagree to a certain feature request could be the limited development capacity available for both features and bug fixes.

[thomas.dahl]

19 hours ago, thomaso said:

A general, clear reason to disagree to a certain feature request could be the limited development capacity available for both features and bug fixes.

I get that, but this was a requested made by many users and a long time ago..  Other features keep getting added which are less interesting for me.  I actually put these buttons in a category of basic functionality.  Yes, it might make Affinity product seem less like Adobe by adding convenience in a complex product, but this used to be the reason why the Serif products were so popular back in the day. 

It seems Serif has lost sight of their heritage in the rush to give Adobe a run for their money.  Do not misunderstand me, I like the Affinity range and use the products, I just wish they were easier to use for the periodic user.  If you live in the Affinity space all day long it makes no difference as you know all the shortcuts and adjustments.

I would be happy to pay a bit more for Affinity products in exchange for some of that convenience.  They are inexpensive so it is tempting to purchase purely for that reason, but how many casual users actually continue to use them after a week or so..  How many are prepared to go through the steep learning curve to simply adjust a few photos or make a "lost cat" poster.

An other example I could mention is the "right click" menu.  For example when a text box in Publisher is selected why are its settings not an option when right clicking on it.  You have to go hunting elsewhere for this.  It actually took me ages to find the first time.

Simple "undo" and "redo" buttons are great for seeing the affect of changes you have made.  This really helps when learning the tools and other processes within the product.  The same goes for "Save" button - it would be a great convenience and a comfort to have. 

[R C-R]

6 hours ago, thomas.dahl said:

Simple "undo" and "redo" buttons are great for seeing the affect of changes you have made. 

FWIW, the History panel provides a very powerful way to do that, & since it is possible to save the History with the document, it is one that can be used even after the file is saved & reopened days or years later.

[Pšenda]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

FWIW, the History panel provides a very powerful way to do that, & since it is possible to save the History with the document, it is one that can be used even after the file is saved & reopened days or years later.

As has been said here many times - let everyone use what suits them best (that is, if Serif is willing to implement it). It is no more than two simple buttons on an otherwise empty Toolbar*) (even on small monitors), ideally with a history (see my previous post) that, if saved with the document, could be used years later. It is not always convenient to have another panel open for adequate functionality, which unnecessarily fills up the workspace and makes it unclear. I prefer to use workspace for far more important and much more used panels/studios.

*) The Toolbar is so empty that Serif even invented the completely unusual and non-standard dynamic spaces - luckily they can be gotten rid of.