Affinity Designer - Rename undoable operation message for swatch rename

[benedictchua]

Hi Affinity team,

I received this prompt when renaming a fill in Affinity Designer. While I understand that the prompt indicates the change is permanent / non-reversible, it would be great if the language of the prompt could be simplified.

A blurb like "This change is reversible" or "You can undo this later" would help improve usability.

Or removing the subtext entirely - If I try to "undo" the change, have the application present a pop-up message.

Thanks for looking through this suggestion!

Edit: TY LondonSquirrel for the correction

Edited January 16, 2023 by benedictchua

[benedictchua]

Sorry, yes, you're completely correct. I misread the subtext blurb. Will update to request "This change is reversible" or something easier to parse. Thank you! 🙂

[RNKLN]

Why even bother to have a message at all?

[loukash]

37 minutes ago, RNKLN said:

Why even bother to have a message at all?

This.
Since almost everything is undoable in Affinity, only those actions should even bother to warn when they are not.

[Fritz_H]

I don´t know if the following is language-specific but in german we say, that people do not read/understand/"process"
a NOT in a message.

Wording-Suggestion:
"This operation can not be undone."
(I know, still contains a "not" ...)

but the real question is:  WHY?

 

[walt.farrell]

43 minutes ago, loukash said:

This.
Since almost everything is undoable in Affinity, only those actions should even bother to warn when they are not.

The message says you cannot undo the change. That's why there is a message warning you.

(I'm finding this conversation confusing, and I'm not sure which participants understand that correctly.)

[loukash]

1 minute ago, walt.farrell said:

The message says you cannot undo the change.

Haha, you're right.
Even more proof that it's just bad UI communication.

Fun fact:
Renaming a swatch is an undoable operation on Mac (v1.10.6)… 

[loukash]

5 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

(I'm finding this conversation confusing, and I'm not sure which participants understand that correctly.)

English is only my 3rd language, so I thought I'd better look up the New Oxford Dictionary:

Quote

undoable |ʌnˈduːəb(ə)l|
adjective informal

unable to be done; impracticable: some wild request that's almost undoable | (as noun the undoable) : one man is daring to do the undoable.

Hm…

[walt.farrell]

32 minutes ago, loukash said:

Fun fact:
Renaming a swatch is an undoable operation on Mac (v1.10.6)… 

Interesting fact.

As it turns out, that's also true on Windows, but only if the swatch is in a Document Palette. If it's in an Application Palette, the rename operation is not recorded in the History, and you cannot Undo it.

There's a bug, though, because you get the warning message in both cases (Document and Application), but it is undoable when it's in a Document Palette because in that case there is a History entry.

Note: History records changes to the document, so it makes sense that changes to a Document palette are recorded, but changes to an Application Palette are not. But the message should only be issued for renames within an Application Palette.

Note 2: Getting the message (for a swatch in an Application Palette) may be considered important because you lose information when you perform the rename. For example, you might have a swatch named H:0 S:100 L:50 and if you rename it to XYZ you've now lost the HSL values unless you go back and measure them. That's perhaps not terribly important for HSL-based colors, but recovering the value is more difficult than simply performing an Undo.

[walt.farrell]

53 minutes ago, LondonSquirrel said:

You can not unrename this palette. How about that for some word mangling?

Just to start the mangling, please note that it's not about renaming a palette. It's about renaming a swatch within a palette.  

[Dan C]

Hi @benedictchua & all others here,

Thanks for your report and our sincerest apologies for the delayed response here. We are exceptionally busy following the release of V2 and we thank you for your continued patience and understanding here.

I can confirm that I've logged this with our developers - as I understand it this wording means you should not be able to undo the change, but as reported this it not always the case.

Therefore I have requested that the wording is changed to be more clear, removed when editing document swatches (as it is not true) and to bring consistency to the wording in the History step itself when editing the name of a regular or registration swatch, compared to a global colour swatch.

I hope this helps

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "Inconsistent behavior when renaming and undoing renaming of swatches, warning shown in UI is not always applicable" (REF: PD-371) has been fixed by the developers in internal build "2.1.0.1728".
This fix should soon be available as a customer beta and is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Serif Info Bot to notify us.