How to add menu items to the toolbar?

[ilmiont]

Hi all,

I'm trying to use AD on my Surface Pro to design UI wireframes. I almost have a good workflow in place, but it's falling apart because I can't see any way to add arbitrary menu items to the top toolbar.

Specifically, I need to be able to add options like "Toggle UI" and "Hide Studio" to the toolbar, so they are just a button press away.

Consider AD in the following scenario:

• I'm working on my Surface with the pen, in "studio mode" (kickstand flat) and no keyboard connected
• I'm wireframing, so I'm in the brainstorming stage, and I really, really don't want any disruption caused by UI friction
• On Surface at 200% scaling, the AD interface feels a little cramped, so I work mostly with the UI off
• However, without keyboard shortcuts, there is no easy way to quickly toggle the UI or hide/show studio panels... so I have to keep digging through the menus using touch/the pen and break my creative flow

It's annoying, because I'm so close to having an end-to-end AD workflow that works for me. I want to wireframe in AD with the Surface, because then I can just pick up those designs and layer actual objects on top once I'm with my desktop.

A few other annoyances while trying to use AD without a keyboard:

• Why can't you pan around using a single finger on the background (behind artboards)?
• You cannot deselect objects just by tapping somewhere else; you have to explicitly deselect or choose a new tool
• I really, really wish AD could behave like Windows Ink Workspace, and automatically select the paint brush tool whenever I put my Pen to the screen (and eraser when the pen is inverted), then automatically switch back to select/last used tool etc. when I'm interacting with touch

So really I just have a series of issues which individually are minor but together mean working with AD is unexpectedly frustrating when just using pen and touch, which is when I want to have the minimal UI friction possible. On my 3440x1440 desktop, I never have any issues with the AD interface... but then I have keyboard shortcuts and I'm not trying to use my pen.

 

Proposal:

- Allow adding arbitrary menu items to the toolbar (e.g. View > Studio > Hide Studio, Select > Deselect etc.) so they are one tap away

- Add a "Toggle UI" button to the application titlebar (maybe with a fullscreen diagonal arrow icon); this would allow single-tap toggling including when the toolbar is hidden

 

Just solving these two problems would go a long way to making AD more usable as a tablet app to dump brainstorming ideas to follow up on and properly design later!

 

ilmiont

[v_kyr]

Quote

... but it's falling apart because I can't see any way to add arbitrary menu items to the top toolbar.

Well the top toolbar is a button bar and no menu bar per se, so the widgets/components used for that are different and button related and thus not the same as the top menu items. - So since there aren't actually any equivalent button representations of those menu items, you can't customize or add these there.