Not 'defects' as such, but odd UI annoyances

[Mike Swartzbeck]

How do I detach the toolbar from that one image window; the blue skeleton image? I can't seem to find anything in the Prefs or the Help. And, why am I unable to click on the skeleton image to bring its window to the top? It's kind of stuck there beneath.

How do I set newly-opened images to open in their own new window, instead of as a tab in a window with a previously-opened image? Once again, I see nothing in the Prefs, nothing in the Help. Maybe I missed something?

Why do image windows obscure palettes by default? Palettes should really always be in the front. Using the menu to try and 'force' them to the top doesn't really work as I'd hoped. Constantly fishing around for buried palettes is a drag.

 

That said; v2 is still a bargain and overall I'm still really liking what they've done, but... there's these funky little UI issues, and the Toolbar separation thing kind of blows off every princple of Mac UI from Day 1.

 

[firstdefence]

What's crazy is they had Separated Mode that did everything you want in V1

Top/Main Menu detached, Panels on top and images were stacked ready for editing.

[Old Bruce]

15 hours ago, Mike Swartzbeck said:

How do I detach the toolbar from that one image window; the blue skeleton image? I can't seem to find anything in the Prefs or the Help. And, why am I unable to click on the skeleton image to bring its window to the top? It's kind of stuck there beneath.

As things stand right now we can't. What we have to do is make a new blank document to 'hold' the "toolbar" and then you can drag the skeleton out of that now two images in tabs window.

An aside: As of late (the last ten years) the Mac OS and many Applications have been getting fashionable, for want of a better word, user interfaces. Much to the detriment of actual users. Grey text on grey backgrounds because it is less distracting. No indication that some random little graphic is actually a button.

[Granddaddy]

1 hour ago, Old Bruce said:

As of late (the last ten years) the Mac OS and many Applications have been getting fashionable, for want of a better word, user interfaces. Much to the detriment of actual users. Grey text on grey backgrounds because it is less distracting. No indication that some random little graphic is actually a button.

Also a problem with Windows. It is increasingly difficult to tell which of several windows open on two monitors has the focus as more applications decide to prevent the title bar from changing color when it is active. Also, the 1 pixel window border was once resizable so it could be seen and grabbed and colored in contrasting colors. The latter is still possible, but when you are working with a couple of larger high-resolution monitors it is becoming increasingly dysfunctional because it is too thin to see.

I imagine these clever design innovations are taught in so-called design classes. Dysfunctional, non-ergonomic interfaces have drifted into software from print publications that are frequently unreadable. Whatever happened to black text on a white background. It served civilization well for thousands of years.

As my mother used to say: "Oh well. What can you do. You just have to put up with it I guess."

[debraspicher]

I liked Separated Mode in PS when I was working with rasters way back in college on Macintosh. Especially with painting and having references on a single screen. In Windows, I find it's necessary to have multiple screens to achieve similar usability.

This would be fine (for my setup anyway) if we didn't have oversized windows when undocking. Zooming out to smaller views requires the user to manually resize panels each time which is disruptive. I use New View a lot in windowed. I use other apps to manage my references such as Fast stone, etc, on a secondary screen in Affinity.

[Mike Swartzbeck]

Being able to detach the Toolbar, so that I could just click a little tab and collapse it to icons or just a "nugget", would be ideal.

Not a dealbreaker by any stretch, but the toolbar permanently attached to one image, and having that window kind of "stuck" behind any other open windows, is kind of awkward. Having the other open images in tabs instead would be tidier, I guess, but there are a lot of times when I work with separate images side by side and need to see them at once... and there's that one with the Toolbar attached which can't really come to the front.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, Mike Swartzbeck said:

Not a dealbreaker by any stretch, but the toolbar permanently attached to one image, and having that window kind of "stuck" behind any other open windows, is kind of awkward.

Not just awkward but a very poor UX choice that I think no Mac user would want to have to put up with.

We really, really need the old separated mode to be included in V2. The tear off tab thing is not even close to a suitable replacement for that.