Smart Handles

[A_B_C]

Hi everybody,

 

I don’t know how you feel about this matter, but there is one annoying aspect when drawing shapes that become very small in one dimension, for instance, rectangles having at least one very short side. And this is the disappearing of the middle handle at small zoom levels. You will have to zoom to make this handle appear again, but by doing so, you will often lose the overview of your design. So you will have to stretch your shape a bit, zoom out, look at the entire canvas, zoom in, make further adjustments, zoom out … well, this is somewhat annoying.

 

So what about adding “smart shape handles” that would provide a solution to this problem? I imagine them working like so: when the middle handle of a shape’s bounding box disappears at a certain zoom level and you approach this bounding box with the cursor at the respective side, an additional control area, as shown in my mockup, will pop out, presenting all three handles. As long as the cursor is inside that control area, the three handles would be visible, and the area would collapse, as soon as the cursor would leave it.

 

What do you think?

Alex 

 

 

 

[dominik]

14 minutes ago, A_B_C said:

I don’t know how you feel about this matter, but there is one annoying aspect when drawing geometric shapes that become very small in one dimension, for instance, rectangles having at least one very short side. And this is the disappearing of the middle handle at small zoom levels. You will have to zoom to make this handle appear again, but by doing so, you will often lose the overview of your design. So you will have to stretch your shape a bit, zoom out, look at the entire canvas, zoom in, make further adjustments, zoom out … well, this is somewhat annoying.

 

Hello @A_B_C,

 

I came across this, too, from time to time and hope fore an improvement of this behaviour.

Thankyou for bringing this up.

 

d.

[Wikinger]

Good morning. 

in the meantime, have you tried: Display ->New view.?

You Zoom in on one view and the other overview is accessible.

Moving from a close-up view to an overview with a single click

[A_B_C]

Hi Wikinger,

 

yes, that’s a good idea! But I believe it works better in Separate Mode. When you are using the Single Window Mode or consolidate all windows as tabs in Separate Mode, you will lose much of the benefit that comes with creating a New View.

 

Nonetheless, a great idea. 

Alex

[dominik]

38 minutes ago, Wikinger said:

Good morning. 

in the meantime, have you tried: Display ->New view.?

You Zoom in on one view and the other overview is accessible.

Moving from a close-up view to an overview with a single click

 

Thank you @Wikinger for this idea. It works if one view is floated and the other one is in a Tab. I have to play around with it to see if this is a good workaround.

 

Cheers,

d.

[Pšenda]

2 hours ago, A_B_C said:

As long as the cursor is inside that control area, the three handles would be visible, and the area would collapse, as soon as the cursor would leave it.

 

Perhaps it would be a good magnifying glass (it should be more universal).

Pressing the hotkey (toggling) would increase/decrease area under the cursor.

Image is for illustrative purposes only - it magnifies only displayed pixels.

Correct magnifying glass would redraw the displayed content with the corresponding details - that is with the middle handle.

 

[Wikinger]

Je procède ainsi.

 

Fenêtre..mp4

[A_B_C]

Thank you, everybody … really good ideas … 

 

Yes, a magnifying glass would work as well, with a hot key assigned. There is actually a quite smart magnifying glass solution in Affinity Photo on the iPad. I wonder if something like this could be ported to Designer … 

[Fatih19]

Yeah, really annoying when you want to move a shape but instead you accidentally resize it.