Separated mode: Window zoom behaviour

[JGD]

Hi guys!

 

First off: congratulations on finally getting this baby out! Even though I am not a photographer or illustrator and won't spend most of my time on Affinity Photo, I do have to do some photo editing every now and then and, for my use cases, it's probably the best tool available around. I've always found Photoshop convoluted anyway and, never having gotten around to fully master it, I'm not really all too bothered by the APhoto “learning curve” I've read about on the forums… But I digress.

 

Anyway, me being the nitpicker I am, I already have a little nit to pick, and that is window zooming behaviour, specifically in separated mode.

 

I should begin with a pre-rant rant, a repost of sorts, as an introduction: I don't really like Serif's approach to a free-floating, non-dockable separated mode UI (in other words, I mean I'd rather have a fully dockable, auto-stretching, edge-to-edge panels *and toolbars*) and much prefer Adobe's approach, which not only allows you to fit all UI chrome to the screen's edges, it also restricts zooming of your windows all the way to the edges of said *UI chrome* and not of the screen itself. Serif's approach seems clumsy at best, as windows zoom all the way to the scren edges and, thus, both the toolbars and panels end up getting in the way.

 

One of the few reasons that up until recently made me use the “separated mode” (a.k.a. classic, multi-window mode) in CS6 was being able to use Application Exposé to switch between open windows; nowadays, since I've quickly adhered to tabs (how could I not, with the number of files I must have open at any time now that I'm a proper professional?), I only use it for saving some precious vertical space (the sheer waste of space caused by that stupid, nearly useless and empty Adobe “Application Bar” is dumbfounding… As for Affinity, the top title bar also wastes some space but at least we can get around it by using fullscreen mode)… That is, except for Photoshop, where I live and die by the Classic Mac OS-like windowed approach and would never even consider using Adobe's windowed mode. I mean, it just *makes sense*, as image proportions and resolutions can be wildly variable, I sometimes have to process considerable numbers of mid- to small web/screen-ready images (and I'm sure I am not alone in that), and that also has the added benefit of allowing you to drag layers and effects between different windows/files…

 

As for Affinity Photo… Even though I don't really like the current “Separated mode” approach, as I said, I was willing to put up with its [current, I hope] limitations if that meant I would get the same functional benefits as in Photoshop (I haven't put APhoto through its paces yet, but I'm willing to bet that I will). There is one choice on your part, however, that I find inexcusable, which is the zoom button behaviour. Since the separated mode and full-sized windows (not to be confused with fullscreen windows) are, as I said, mutually incompatible (or, at best, clumsy), shouldn't the zoom button (under Mavericks and below; I obviously also mean the classic behaviour still achievable in Yosemite by option-clicking the fullscreen button) adhere to the lifelong Classic Mac OS/OS X/Adobe standard of zooming to fit content instead of zooming to fit the screen size? I know this “zoom/shrink-to-fit content vs. zoom-to-fit screen” debate is as old and tired as OS X and its more proeminent full-screen apps (like, say, Mail – which goes far back into the NeXTSTEP days –, iTunes and iPhoto), but please bear with me and my rational for this suggestion:

 

If I wanted to use the screen to the max for one particular project I could (and very likely would/will) just toggle the unified mode temporarily, plus the fullscreen mode if I *really* wanted to kick it up a notch… As it stands and as far as I could find it, there isn't a way to achieve that “zoom/shrink window to fit content” function, am I right? Ironically enough, you *can* zoom the content to fit the window size, so it stands to reason that, much happens already with content boxes in InDesign/QuarkXPress/Affinity Publisher (which I'm salivating for and will obviously feature such functionality), the opposite should be possible, too…

 

All in all, I believe the current trend towards unified-window approaches and, concurrently and helathily, allowing for its classic counterpart (hey, choice is good, even if I find the implementation lacking a bit of polish and flexibility as I said), could finally put that debate to rest, at least in document types that have well-defined content boundaries. This default behaviour would, of course, make absolutely no sense in Affinity Publisher layouts or in a future version of Affinity Designer featuring multiple pages/artboards (AFAIK, that is still in the pipeline, right?), but it would fit in perfectly with many Affinity Photo use cases, IMHO… If you don't think they are enough to warrant it as a default, non-customizable behaviour, well, you could at least make it a toggeable preference on the User Interface tab.