Gradient-fill dialog is still broken

[Stokestack]

The gradient UI is still broken in Designer, and probably Photo too.

Problem 1: It often takes numerous clicks on the Fill well to invoke the Fill panel.

Problem 2: There's no way to actually apply the gradient. Let's say you want to apply a black-to-white linear gradient, which happens to be the default when you select Gradient. Well... there's no way to apply it. There's no Apply button. When you close the dialog, the object's fill remains unchanged.

Problem 3: If you go to Gradient and select a color in the (perplexingly solo) color well, the fill does change... once. Any subsequent color adjustments do nothing.

Screen grabs attached. The Fill panel has been dysfunctional since day 1, which is inexcusable. Fills are a fundamental feature of an application like this.

This is Designer 1.9.3 under Mac OS 11.5.

 

[DWright]

Hi @Stokestack,

I have been trying to replicate this issue on my Affinity Designer and have been unable to replicate it as shown in the attached screen recording. Do you have any custom mouse settings applied

[Stokestack]

Thanks for your reply and effort.

Nope, no custom mouse driver or settings. I just tried it with my trackpad on my laptop and the problem occurs every time.

[loukash]

On 7/31/2021 at 9:31 PM, Stokestack said:

Problem 2: There's no way to actually apply the gradient.

This part of the UI is applied live to the selected object.

On 7/31/2021 at 9:31 PM, Stokestack said:

Problem 3: If you go to Gradient and select a color in the (perplexingly solo) color well, the fill does change... once. Any subsequent color adjustments do nothing.

You have to select a color stop on the gradient preview first.

[Stokestack]

Thanks for the reply.

5 minutes ago, loukash said:

This part of the UI is applied live to the selected object.

It didn't do anything to the selected object, so I don't know what this means.

5 minutes ago, loukash said:

You have to select a color stop on the gradient preview first.

Apparently not, because the color well is enabled and has an effect.

I really wish Affinity would clean the Fill UI up.

[loukash]

15 minutes ago, Stokestack said:

It didn't do anything to the selected object,

Because you haven't selected any of the color stops on the "graph".

15 minutes ago, Stokestack said:

the color well is enabled and has an effect.

Fair enough, confusingly, that kinda looks like a UI glitch aka "a very minor bug".
What currently happens is:

• if you're creating a new gradient fill on a fresh object, no stop is selected upon opening the popup window
• if you don't select any of the gradient stops and make changes to the gradient paramenters, the default gradient is applied to the object

Upon closing and reopening the popup window, the first gradient stop will be selected (and cannot be unselected) and you can edit away as you see fit.

Edit: Just realized that the stops can be deselected by clicking on the gradient preview field

Edited August 5, 2021 by loukash

[Stokestack]

Just now, loukash said:

Because you haven't selected any of the color stops on the "graph".

I didn't need to; the presented gradient (black to white) was what I wanted.

[loukash]

1 minute ago, Stokestack said:

I didn't need to

If you want to change any values, you have to.

[Stokestack]

2 minutes ago, loukash said:

If you want to change any values, you have to.

I didn't want to change any values.

[loukash]

Then all is fine, right?

[Stokestack]

Sure... if you want a broken Fill dialog.

[loukash]

I don't know why on your Mac the Fill button doesn't immediately react to clicks. This is an issue I can't replicate.

That said, I've seen – and reported – UI glitches like this before. In some cases they would affect only specific MacOS versions, and – oddly enough for some weird programming reasons I have no clue of – specific language (!) settings only.

[Stokestack]

I'll try it on my desktop computer when I get back to it, but I'm pretty sure it behaves exactly the same way. So that's two Macs (a first-gen 5K iMac and a much more recent MBP). But the fact remains that there's no Apply button to actually apply the fill. If the presented fill is already what you want and you don't need to alter anything, there's no way to say "OK, do it." That is a glaring UI-design problem.

[walt.farrell]

3 minutes ago, Stokestack said:

But the fact remains that there's no Apply button to actually apply the fill. If the presented fill is already what you want and you don't need to alter anything, there's no way to say "OK, do it."

But you don't need a way, either. It is supposed to (and does, for me on Windows) apply instantly to the selected object when you choose the Gradient Fill option in the Context Toolbar.

I find that in 1.10 the default gradient is no longer white to gray, but white to white, so there is no visible effect until a node is seleted and the color well is updated. But any change made to the node via the color well in the gradient dialog is instantaneous.

So if that's not happening for you, you have more than one bug occurring.

[RNKLN]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

I find that in 1.10 the default gradient is no longer white to gray, but white to white

I created a new document in 1.10, added a fill layer (white by default) and applied a gradient. It was a white to black gradient. What were the circumstances under which you tried to apply the gradient?

Note: forget it. Old mistake. I was using Affinity Photo (which has fill layers). I can confirm that in AD it's a (almost) white to (almost) white gradient, all at a sudden.

[walt.farrell]

6 minutes ago, RNKLN said:

What were the circumstances under which you tried to apply the gradient?

Rectangle, and setting the Fill in the Context Toolbar. I'm sure it was white to gray before, but now, just white. Both Affinity Designer and Photo.

Assigning a linear gradient to a Fill Layer is still white to gray.

[RNKLN]

I see this as default when I follow your steps. It looks different than before (although I'm not 100% sure) but it's not white to white.

Anyway, some changes, not necessarily improvements. Not a big deal for me and I can't say that I see the dialogues as broken.

 

[walt.farrell]

Thanks for the screenshot, @RNKLN. That's close to how I remember it looking before.

Here's what I see in Photo:

But I think I've figured it out. It's white to whatever the current color of the object is, and I seem to have gotten my object default fill set to white somehow, where before it was more of a gray color.

 

 

 

[Stokestack]

One of the problems here is the misuse of a tabbed dialog. Tabs are for organizing different properties of a selected item, or for grouping settings into categories (like system preferences). They're not for choosing mutually exclusive options. It was even worse when there was a Fill tab called "None," which bafflingly had color swatches on it. I don't know why Affinity clings to this design.

Another problem here is the failure to indicate what most of the settings on the gradient tab refer to: a "stop." And if there's no stop selected, all of those controls should be greyed out. These are UI conventions that go back decades, for good reason: They inform the user of what he needs to do, or at least that there's something he needs to do.

This is not that hard a problem to solve. The fill type should be selected from a list of options, not presented as a bunch of tabs that are all available at once. Here's a suggested design.

[loukash]

14 hours ago, Stokestack said:

That is a glaring UI-design problem.

The problem here is this:

15 hours ago, loukash said:

• if you don't select any of the gradient stops and make changes to the gradient paramenters, the default gradient is applied to the object

That's the UI bug.
If no gradient stops are selected, all corresponding parameters should be grayed out. Which they are not upon opening the Gradient tab on an object for the first time.

13 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I'm sure it was white to gray before, but now, just white.

It must be some kind of a Defaults setting because my default gradients are K:0 to K:100. Which is what I once presumably saved as a default…

8 hours ago, Stokestack said:

Here's a suggested design.

I like that!
The current layout of the tab is a mess.