Has anyone seen this?

[KipV]

Paolo - I still wouldn't see any problem with the swap feature even with swatches that are as tightly grouped as you have in your example. If anything the most difficult part of working with that gradient might be just trying to select one of those swatches! But once you have it selected you could still drag the light grey over the dark grey and they would swap. No amount of close proximity should prevent this feature from happening in the same way that having many icons in the OS X dock would make swapping icon position more difficult. There doesn't need to be shortcut combinations to do a swap in the same way that you currently don't need a shortcut when you drag a color swatch onto the end of a gradient to replace it's color.

[00Ghz]

I think Affinity is the only one exhibiting it’s current gradient behaviour with swatches. Apps I used so fat allow you to move swatch points away from edges. :)

[paolo.limoncelli]

Paolo - I still wouldn't see any problem with the swap feature even with swatches that are as tightly grouped as you have in your example. If anything the most difficult part of working with that gradient might be just trying to select one of those swatches! But once you have it selected you could still drag the light grey over the dark grey and they would swap. No amount of close proximity should prevent this feature from happening in the same way that having many icons in the OS X dock would make swapping icon position more difficult. There doesn't need to be shortcut combinations to do a swap in the same way that you currently don't need a shortcut when you drag a color swatch onto the end of a gradient to replace it's color.

 

I'm sorry Kip...  :)  It still doesn't sound so easy to me to be implemented... And used too.

 

The shortcut thing was a hint by MBd... 

I only answered that modifiers are currently assigned to other features of gradient editing.

 

For sure some tools in AD can be improved, anything can be improved, but the gradient tool is the very last IMHO...

 

 

I think Affinity is the only one exhibiting it’s current gradient behaviour with swatches. Apps I used so fat allow you to move swatch points away from edges. :)

 

Sketch works as AD

 

[MEB]

I think that ignoring the ⌥ (option/alt) modifier function to replace it with something else is not a good option. It's useful to have it available all the time at the press of a key, it's also consistent with the way all other tools work. Opening exceptions like this only makes the user experience more confusing and the application harder to learn.

 

There's two limitations in the current implementation that are somewhat related to the ability to detach the end node from the linear gradient's "path":

- It's not possible to swap a middle colour stop with an end one;

- it's not possible to add a new colour stop to the beginning or end of a gradient

 

Both Sketch and Illustrator allow to do this, but the solution isn't as streamlined as it may look.

- Illustrator uses an hover-state that let's you edit the stop colours within the canvas controls, but it also makes it easy (and messy) to perform clicks/actions accidentally due to this dynamic switching. It's also less flexible when you want to rotate the gradient path. Sketch doesn't offer this ability from the canvas controls as Paolo said.

 

- Illustrator and Sketch allow to do it from the Gradient Editor dialog too, which then updates the canvas controls. This leads to less complexity, but if you have a gradient with several colour stops the limited width of the dialog may be an issue. Illustrator however allows to extend the gradient dialog width.

 

In any case those situations aren't very common as Matt pointed out so i don't know if it worths the trouble of changing the canvas controls.

Maybe it's possible to find a compromise between the two, or just use the gradient dialog for those cases.

[KipV]

In any case those situations aren't very common

 

I am sorry I didn't follow what this was referring to since it was a long post. Could you tell me what two situations are uncommon?

[MEB]

Hi KipV,

I was referring to swap a middle colour stop with an end one and adding a new colour stops to the beginning or end of a gradient. Both end basically being the same; if we solve one of the issues we will have at least a workaround for the other. I'm don't know if there's still spare modifier keys for this or if it's too problematic change the code for the gradient canvas controls, but i agree that's useful to have a way to do it.

I'm sure Matt will find a good solution.

[KipV]

MEB, Currently when you drop a middle swatch onto an end swatch it replaces that swatch color. Right now there are two ways to delete a swatch, the way I just mentioned and hitting the delete key. Do we need both ways to delete a swatch? If we can replace a color on the gradient without a modifier key couldn't the swatch swap function replace the delete swap since delete can already be accomplished with the delete key? Maybe I am missing something from what you and Matt are saying.