Publisher 2.4 States panel: which button used?

[anto]

It is impossible to determine which button is pressed. If there are several states. You need to look at the layers panel.

[bbrother]

36 minutes ago, anto said:

It is impossible to determine which button is pressed. If there are several states. You need to look at the layers panel.

I think it's by design and that it's not an bug.

It's because those buttons are designed to be so called "call to action" buttons.
In simple, let say you click on the hide button. When you do it, he "calls an action", wchich in this case is:
[hide layers within the selected scope that meet the query criteria]

This action is perforemed and that's it. Similar for the select and show buttons. That's how this type of buttons work. They do not have states such as <active> and do not provide the user with additional information through these states, e.g. the one you are talking about, i.e. what is the current state of layer visibility (hided/visible).

If you want, you can always submit a request to improve how they work so that they have states that reflect their current visibility status in the Layers panel.

 

[Hangman]

3 hours ago, anto said:

It is impossible to determine which button is pressed. If there are several states. You need to look at the layers panel.

I think the show/hide buttons should at the very least indicate the selection, currently there is no visual feedback as to which state is shown or hidden... A simple visual change would make a world of difference.

[bbrother]

1 hour ago, Hangman said:

I think the show/hide buttons should at the very least indicate the selection..

What do you mean by that? What selection? 
 

1 hour ago, Hangman said:

currently there is no visual feedback as to which state is shown or hidden... A simple visual change would make a world of difference.

If by this you mean that these buttons by using a state aplied to them should reflect the current status of the layers in the Layers panel (hidden or not) that meet the query criteria, then this is not their role and job. And that's why they were designed that way.

@Hangman They are used to perform actions (hide/show) on layers, and not to reflect the state of these attributes, according to what is currently on the Layers panel. And from what i know "action buttons", sometime also called  "call to action" buttons doesn't have states, and doesn't toggle between states.

 

 

[DWright]

I have logged this as a bug with our developers.

[Bryan Rieger]

Dumb UX question? Are two eye buttons for show and hide really necessary? It's a simple toggle?

Also, if we're using the eye icon for visibility here, any chance we can get some consistency throughout the apps (ahem, the layers panel •). We have dots in someplace that toggle visibility (Layers panel in main persona, Slices panel in Export persona), that do nothing (the Appearance panel), and we have now have eye icons used in the States panel and the Layers Export panel.

A little consistency in the visual language would be wonderful, and don't get me started on the location of panel action bars — bottom or top, pick one please.

[Hangman]

On 3/15/2024 at 12:52 PM, Bryan Rieger said:

Dumb UX question? Are two eye buttons for show and hide really necessary? It's a simple toggle?

I raised the same question in the original thread but thinking about it further I can see why there is a need for both eye buttons...

[anto]

A few more thoughts.

Since all the options in the Queries panel work as a logical AND, that is, "Layer tag is" AND "Layer type is" AND.... otherwise, the selection will not occur. So you have to make a lot of queries. And this makes it difficult to see what's going on.

[Hangman]

5 minutes ago, anto said:

Since all the options in the Queries panel work as a logical AND, that is, "Layer tag is" AND "Layer type is" AND.... otherwise, the selection will not occur. So you have to make a lot of queries. And this makes it difficult to see what's going on.

Could you cite an example scenario...

[anto]

Just now, Hangman said:

Could you cite an example scenario...

For example, you want to select all layers that have an orange tag, and text and image frames. (Text and image frames have no tags at all). You can't do this in a single query.

[Hangman]

22 minutes ago, anto said:

For example, you want to select all layers that have an orange tag, and text and image frames. (Text and image frames have no tags at all). You can't do this in a single query.

With you... yes, that could certainly be improved, it's achievable with careful layer naming and RegEx but I appreciate that may not always be the most practical option, the ability to use logical connectives with Layer State queries would be great...

[bbrother]

17 hours ago, Bryan Rieger said:

Dumb UX question? Are two eye buttons for show and hide really necessary? It's a simple toggle?

17 hours ago, Hangman said:

I raised the same question in the original thread...

@Bryan Rieger@Hangman I think so, because change is not made by toggling the visibility.
We are not dealing with toggling visibility here, we just perform a specific action (hide or show) on layers.

The following things happen behind the scenes:

1. Application loops through layers one by one, verifying whether the query criteria have been met and whether an action can be performed on the layer.
2. When the criteria match, the application in the current loop compares whether the current visibility state of the layer is consistent with the action you want to perform on the layer (hide or show).
3. Now the most important thing. If the layer's visibility status is consistent with what you clicked (hide or show) in the States panel, no action is performed because there is no need for it and the program moves to the next layer. And so everything is repeated until all layers are checked.

Therefore, we do not have an operation based on toggling visibility, only verification and applying the appropriate action on the layer.
For this reason, two buttons (hide and show) are necessary because you can choose what type of action you want to perform, regardless of whether some of the layers matching your query are already hidden or visible.

 

17 hours ago, anto said:

For example, you want to select all layers that have an orange tag, and text and image frames. (Text and image frames have no tags at all). You can't do this in a single query.

@anto For this type of functionality, it would be necessary to introduce subqueries - child queries that could have different criteria and would be invoked together with the parent query.  From what Ash mentioned, they plan to introduce such an option in the future.

Quote

Ash - Layer states added to Designer and Publisher plus changes to functionality:

For those who used the States panel in Affinity Photo you will notice we have changed the name of what were previously called "Smart States" to "Queries". This reason for this is in the future we anticipate adding a new feature to this which would be better described as a Smart State (this will be something you can build from multiple queries). This will be something which we add in a future update.

 

[anto]

45 minutes ago, bbrother said:

For this type of functionality, it would be necessary to introduce subqueries - child queries that could have different criteria and would be invoked together with the parent query.  From what Ash mentioned, they plan to introduce such an option in the future.

I did not write about this functionality. I described an example and what happens at this stage. When you create complex queries, it is impossible to know what is selected and what is not.

And the next update of this feature may be in a year, who knows.

[bbrother]

19 hours ago, anto said:

to select all layers that have an orange tag, and text and image frames. (Text and image frames have no tags at all)

To me the above, sounded like you were disappointed that you couldn't currently create an individual query that would allow you to do so and I replied that an option that would allow this is being considered in the future.

 

1 hour ago, anto said:

When you create complex queries, it is impossible to know what is selected and what is not.

I disagree here. As it stands for now, I find the queries quite simple to understand and it's easy to predict which layers will meet the criteria and be selected.

But maybe I misunderstood what you meant here.

 

2 hours ago, anto said:

And the next update of this feature may be in a year, who knows.

Yes you are right. But I hope they don't make us wait that long.🤔

 

19 hours ago, Hangman said:

the ability to use logical connectives with Layer State queries would be great...

Ahh, my imagination just went crazy.
Logical conditions, being able to chain the execution of several subqueries based on the parent (nesting), that would be crazy.

[anto]

3 minutes ago, bbrother said:

To me the above, sounded like you were disappointed that you couldn't currently create an individual query that would allow you to do so and I replied that an option that would allow this is being considered in the future.

You are not reading carefully. I was asked to give an example. I gave an example that demonstrates the problem I described in the topic title. If you have a hundred layers and create several queries, you can't see what happened in the query panel. You have to scroll through a hundred layers to see it.

[bbrother]

3 hours ago, anto said:

You are not reading carefully.

Quite the contrary. I read carefully what you wrote, compared it with what the documentation says on this subject and I don't see the problem you mention.

 

3 hours ago, anto said:

If you have a hundred layers and create several queries, you can't see what happened in the query panel. You have to scroll through a hundred layers to see it.

From what I understood, the main tasks of the "States" panel are:

• Capture the current visibility configuration and layer effects as layer states, at the time the state is added to a document.
• Creating queries that will have buttons that trigger actions such as hiding/showing/selecting on layers based on their tag color, type, name, and lock state.

There is no mention anywhere that the "query panel" is also supposed to provide feedback on what is happening in itself or in the "Layers" panel.

You should remember what button you just pressed. It's not the query panel job to remeber it.

Another thing to notice:
After using the query to hide layers, you can still manually change/override the visibility of just some of these in the Layers panel.
In such a case, how would the panel reflect this and remain credible in it.

It seems to me that you are expecting something that this panel was not designed for.

 

[Bryan Rieger]

On 3/16/2024 at 3:20 AM, bbrother said:

@Bryan Rieger@Hangman I think so, because change is not made by toggling the visibility.
We are not dealing with toggling visibility here, we just perform a specific action (hide or show) on layers.

The following things happen behind the scenes:

1. Application loops through layers one by one, verifying whether the query criteria have been met and whether an action can be performed on the layer.
2. When the criteria match, the application in the current loop compares whether the current visibility state of the layer is consistent with the action you want to perform on the layer (hide or show).
3. Now the most important thing. If the layer's visibility status is consistent with what you clicked (hide or show) in the States panel, no action is performed because there is no need for it and the program moves to the next layer. And so everything is repeated until all layers are checked.

Therefore, we do not have an operation based on toggling visibility, only verification and applying the appropriate action on the layer.
For this reason, two buttons (hide and show) are necessary because you can choose what type of action you want to perform, regardless of whether some of the layers matching your query are already hidden or visible.

While technically we're not necessarily toggling layer visibility directly through the states panel, that is realistically what happens when we 'toggle' the two eye symbols in the states panel. Each state has essentially two actions; selection and visibility. If I go through my document and turn some shape layers invisible, while leaving other shape layers visible, and then set a query to select all shapes, clicking the 'eyes' either toggles their visibility all on or all off via the query—which should be the expected behaviour, and hence, it's a toggle—and only requires one button, which should also reflect whether it's active or not. 

If I toggle a query and then go look in the layers panel, the selected layers are either toggled on, or off depending on what I've selected in the query.

Even the 'What's New In Affinity?' calls it a toggle:

Quote

• Capture the current layer visibility across your document
• Create queries based on various criteria to make a selection or toggle visibility of layers
• …
• As well as toggling visibility of queries, there is an additional button to select all layers that fulfil the criteria specified in the query. This is also a new function now available in Affinity Photo.

Maybe I'm missing something, or I'm not seeing the full potential of states, or maybe I'm holding it wrong, but the UI/UX for the states panel sorely needs some work—the 'And show/hide others' option is baffling. Is that meant to be something equivalent to a 'solo' toggle where only the selected query is show when it's active, and shown in full context with everything else when not (aka. everything visible).

Lastly, in the 'Capture States' having the 'update' (strange icon choice) beside the 'apply' (another very strange icon choice) make it far to easy to update that captured state when you wanted to apply it. Consider moving the update into the gear menu, with a separator from the changes options already in that menu.

[bbrother]

@Bryan Rieger,

Do you know why two separate buttons are needed? One for "Hide", the other for "Show".
Well, because when you only use one, it's impossible to tell whether you're currently clicking with the intent to hide or show layers.
Switching does not provide this option. You will either switch from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 0.
With two separate buttons you can decide to hide the layers, then make some changes and show some of them, and then hide the layers again.
This is the difference and I think it was designed with this intention in mind.