Can You Please Make the Studio Panel to Have Adjustable Width?

[R C-R]

10 hours ago, Wosven said:

So I'll say... Nice try, but it need more work to be usable.

Agree with that, for sure.

[Bynah]

On 10/8/2021 at 12:50 PM, wonderings said:

Now compare Indesign above to Publisher. Now this is on a 27" 5K screen so not a big deal. Move that to a 13" screen and it is a world of difference 

Again, I want to ask that Affinity Photo could make a collapsible studio panel on the right the way Adobe does. It is very easy to use. The icon you click is all that opens at a time and you have everything you need in it. When not using it it is neatly tucked out of your way. On my 15" screen this would be most helpful.

 

[wonderings]

9 hours ago, Bynah said:

Again, I want to ask that Affinity Photo could make a collapsible studio panel on the right the way Adobe does. It is very easy to use. The icon you click is all that opens at a time and you have everything you need in it. When not using it it is neatly tucked out of your way. On my 15" screen this would be most helpful.

 

Looks like Adobe just brought that out with the latest version of Indesign 

[Bynah]

This is the interface on Photoshop CS5. I love it!

[wonderings]

On 10/29/2021 at 10:33 AM, Bynah said:

This is the interface on Photoshop CS5. I love it!

for me personally I love my tool bars to the screen edge, that way the image or file I am working on will never go behind the tool bar which would obstruct my view. Definitely cues to be taken from Adobe, they have been doing this for a very long time. 

[Amdival]

This exact topic is the biggest source of frustration for me when it comes to learning the Affinity Apps.

The panels take up way too much space. There is no way to elegantly arrange them if I want more than about 4 open at the same time. They seem to be intended to only be pinned to the left and right. When they are pinned to the left and right, my eyes cannot easily distinguish what I have. Everything blends together visually. I think the tops of the panels should be a different color.

Floating them has been mentioned, but good luck with that. The panels are a buggy mess when trying to move them around.

I'm assuming the developers use 4k monitors and are oblivious to these pains. That is admittedly a baseless assumption.

To comment on scaling down because that is the topic: Web design has figured this out with responsive design. Blender also has a beautiful solution for allowing the user to scale down panels.

With all of that being said, I think there are some ways to make the UI navigable:
- pin the panels to the sides and collapse them all. Then save the collapsed layout as a Studio Preset and map it to a keyboard shortcut so that they can all be collapsed with just a button press. This way they take up minimal space, they are all on screen and they are all easily readable.
- Another option: Map F1-F9 to Studio Presets. Then put only a few panels on each preset. Now they can be easily switched between.
- Map "View>Studio>Show Left Studio" and "View>Studio>Show Right Studio" to keyboard shortcuts. I use Q and W.
 

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, Amdival said:

The panels take up way too much space.

Are you aware that you can group them into tab groups, double-click on the panel name to collapse it to just the name header & then single click on any of the collapsed names to expand the panel to its previous size?

1 hour ago, Amdival said:

Floating them has been mentioned, but good luck with that. The panels are a buggy mess when trying to move them around.

What bugs are you seeing when moving floating panels (or tabbed panel groups) around? This seems to be working correctly for me.

[Amdival]

57 minutes ago, R C-R said:

What bugs are you seeing when moving floating panels (or tabbed panel groups) around? This seems to be working correctly for me.

- When moving panels they seem to be trying constantly to snap to things I don't even see.
- The mouse pointer doesn't stay on the panel where I clicked it.
- They often render weird (see image).
- If I arrange a group of them that are snapped together, then try to move the whole group, some of them fall off of the group and get left behind.
It's not near as bad as it used to be though and these bugs are low of my gripes about the studio panels.

 

57 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Are you aware that you can group them into tab groups, double-click on the panel name to collapse it to just the name header & then single click on any of the collapsed names to expand the panel to its previous size?

I am aware I talk about that some in my post. The workflow that I have settled on makes use of keeping the panels collapsed, and it actually works out pretty nicely. The arrangement is different than any other software I use and it took a bit of hacking around with the UI to come to that solution.

When I say they take up too much space, that is when trying to have a few of them expanded. I am used to being able to have useful tools expanded and visible. With Affinity, Each expanded panel takes up a lot of screen space. See my example screen shots. My right panel for Illustrator has a ton of tools all visible and with so much extra space. Affinity struggles to allow 3 stacked panels. I have 4 stacked in the screenshot, but that layers panel is completely unusable.

 

[R C-R]

20 minutes ago, Amdival said:

The arrangement is different than any other software I use and it took a bit of hacking around with the UI to come to that solution.

FWIW, VectorStyler also supports the double-click to collapse panels or panel groups convention. It also has similar float, docked, & tab group options.

24 minutes ago, Amdival said:

Affinity struggles to allow 3 stacked panels. I have 4 stacked in the screenshot, but that layers panel is completely unusable.

Have you considered combining for example the Color & Swatches panels into one tabbed group, similar to how you have done that in Illustrator? That would give you a lot more room for a taller Layers panel. Also, if you don't have a lot of screen space to work with, it may not be ideal but you could set up keyboard shortcuts for some of the panels you use less frequently than others, so you can toggle them on & off.

[Bynah]

On 10/29/2021 at 10:33 AM, Bynah said:

This is the interface on Photoshop CS5. I love it!

I am just wondering if any of the Affinity Tech/Developers are tuned into this conversation. Do you all have anything on the horizon or in the works to take the  SI to this level? It seems there are many of us that would really really appreciate it. Just wondering if it is even a hope to be had.

thank you!

[walt.farrell]

24 minutes ago, Bynah said:

I am just wondering if any of the Affinity Tech/Developers are tuned into this conversation

They read the discussions in the Feedback forums but usually do not participate in them, nor discuss future plans.

[Bynah]

oh. that's kind of sad.

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, Bynah said:

oh. that's kind of sad.

Maybe kind of sad, but the reason the developers do not usually follow topics in the Questions section is there are so many topics here that they would have very little time to work on the apps if they did.

[Hilltop]

I must say that I really don't like the UI of the Affinity apps. I like to click buttons and right-click context menus for direct action or access and not having to dive into all sort of submenus. For instance, the fact that you have to click View/Studio before you can access a panel I find quite frustrating. I'm using a wide screen monitor and there's all this empty real estate but hardly any way to customize it to my needs and situation. 

I found a workaround for the studio panels by grouping them into two clusters and placing them in the empty space next to the menu bar. That helps a bit but I had to make the panel groups quite wide to make sure there's enough empty space on the top bar for me to not hit the 'X' by accident when double-clicking to close them and have the whole group disappear. With the new Studio Presets that's less of a problem but still. Of course the wide panels are difficult to move around and block the design I'm working on, so I have to move around the canvas etc. 

Let's hope they're redesigning the apps interfaces for version 2 and make them much more customizable so that each user can create their optimal workspace!

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, Hilltop said:

I like to click buttons and right-click context menus for direct action or access and not having to dive into all sort of submenus. For instance, the fact that you have to click View/Studio before you can access a panel I find quite frustrating.

Are you aware that you can assign keyboard shortcuts to any Studio panel to toggle opening & closing them without having to open the View menu?

To do this, open Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts, set the second popup to "View" & scroll down until you get to the Studio > {panel name} section, & enter a keyboard shortcut for that panel in the field on the right.

On Macs, in the same area you can also set a shortcut for showing/hiding the left & right Studios (the panel groups).

[Hilltop]

Yes, I am. But as I wrote in my post, I like buttons and right-click context menus. Besides remembering the shortcuts to all those panels is not really feasible nor desirable.