Customise Toolbar - add 'export to PDF' option, and a general rant about the interface

[LondonSquirrel]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

All of the spelling options can be assigned custom keyboard shortcuts. Most of the more awkward keyboard shortcuts, including the one for File > Export, can be reassigned to less awkward ones. 

On my 27" iMac I have about 12" of free space in the toolbar area. Why can I not add a button instead of yet-another-keyboard-shortcut-that-I-have-to-remember? 

[LondonSquirrel]

1 hour ago, Wosven said:

For now, I found the toolbar and some panels need more work to be more ergonomic (how come we need to click on an arrow to look at/access hidden buttons/parameters???).

Exactly. If you refer back to my earlier point about finding 'Noise' you will see how this thing is hidden. Hidden! You have to click on a small circle to find it. 

[LondonSquirrel]

1 hour ago, Wosven said:

Perhaps not with the display you shows (looks like Win 98 for me

It is Windows 98. My point is certainly not that Windows 98 is better, but the level of UI customisation in a third party app from 25 years ago puts Publisher to shame. Meanwhile on my 27" iMac in the toolbar area, I have about 12" of unused space.

[LondonSquirrel]

35 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I suspect that it is more about room on the toolbars than anything else.

I have a 27" iMac. The toolbar has about 12" of free space. 

35 minutes ago, R C-R said:

As it is, there are more items available for customizing the main toolbar than will all fit on it at once.

But not the things that I want, nor the things that should be available.

[LondonSquirrel]

On 4/2/2019 at 8:04 AM, Pšenda said:

Why don't you use Export Persona?

In Publisher beta there is no Export Persona. In Designer it doesn't get me much closer. 

[R C-R]

13 minutes ago, LondonSquirrel said:

But not the things that I want, nor the things that should be available.

The problem with that is everybody seems to have different ideas about what they want and/or what should be available. As it is, there already about 40 items available in Affinity Photo's Photo Persona customize toolbar window, but to make everybody happy there would need to be several dozen more, & that still would not include quite a few that some users would want, like individual buttons for preset export options or just about anything that appears on a menu somewhere in the UI.

Every one of those toolbar items also needs a name in every supported language, ideally ones that are short enough so that most of them can be used in workspace windows of any size, both in the Mac & Windows versions, and with any supported display size, not just the large ones like with 27" iMacs.

Every item also needs an icon distinctive enough to avoid confusing it with others, plus as many as 4 different versions for the light & dark UI & for the monochromatic iconography option.

Many it is just me, but taking all this into account, I don't find it at all surprising that the developers are less than enthusiastic about adding more items.

[MikeW]

17 minutes ago, R C-R said:

... I don't find it at all surprising that the developers are less than enthusiastic about adding more items.

That's just it. The developers don't need to specifically add anything. They just need to allow customization and provide the assets (icons) and failing that, they could just do what Corel allows for CorelDraw. That is, with CD one can create their own icons for added buttons on the toolbar, the ability to create one's own toolbars...or whatever.

Affinity applications have the singular distinction of having a lot of wasted toolbar space of any application I have used ever. It could be user-utilized if they wanted to make it so. Then a user could make the decision(s) as to what they want on their toolbar. 

[LondonSquirrel]

34 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Many it is just me, but taking all this into account, I don't find it at all surprising that the developers are less than enthusiastic about adding more items.

Yet it could be done 25 years ago. It isn't hard. It really isn't. 

[LondonSquirrel]

12 minutes ago, MikeW said:

They just need to allow customization and provide the assets (icons)

Eureka! Somebody understands! These things already exist (hidden away in menus). Just make them available as buttons (if people want to use them).

[LondonSquirrel]

15 minutes ago, MikeW said:

Affinity applications have the singular distinction of having a lot of wasted toolbar space of any application I have used ever.

Amen. At least 12" of empty space on my toolbar.

[R C-R]

25 minutes ago, MikeW said:

That's just it. The developers don't need to specifically add anything. They just need to allow customization and provide the assets (icons) and failing that, they could just do what Corel allows for CorelDraw. That is, with CD one can create their own icons for added buttons on the toolbar, the ability to create one's own toolbars...or whatever.

Maybe I have misunderstood what you mean but it sounds to me like they would need to add a great deal to the apps to allow that amount of customization. If nothing else, they would have to add what could be hundreds of new icon assets (for up to 4 different UI display modes) or at least provide a way for users to add their own custom sets & have the app choose the correct one for the current display mode. On the Mac side, they would also have to provide some way for this to work properly with the new Mojave 'Dark Mode.'

And obviously, there has to be some reasonably user friendly way provided to choose which ones to add. I doubt many users would be happy with the current customize toolbar window method when there could be dozens of custom ones added to it. As it is, a lot of users don't know that window may need to be scrolled to see all the available ones.

[casterle]

57 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Many it is just me, but taking all this into account, I don't find it at all surprising that the developers are less than enthusiastic about adding more items.

Redoing the Shortcuts system would help alleviate the problem. If every function of every tool and every menu item were assignable to any combination of keys (and all modifiers), mouse buttons & scroll wheel and drag directions there would be less pressure for more toolbar items. Bonus points for named configuration sets.

[R C-R]

14 minutes ago, LondonSquirrel said:

Yet it could be done 25 years ago. It isn't hard. It really isn't. 

Without knowing any of the details of the Affinity core code, how could you possibly know how hard it would be?

Aside from that, 25 years ago operating systems were far less complex than they are now, the security features that guard against increasingly more sophisticated modern malware attacks were practically non-existent, the apps themselves were far less capable & did not need to support standards that have since been invented or refined, multitasking support was so crude that app crashes took down the whole system & required restarting the computer to recover, & so on.

So yeah, if you are willing to put up with all that, maybe it would not be hard, but I doubt very many users would find that acceptable.

[walt.farrell]

18 hours ago, Wosven said:

I don't see the need for an extra button, but being able to add it can be helpfull for some if they don't want to use shift+ctrl+alt+s shortcut.

Or, if they don't like shift+ctrl+alt+s, and they're on Windows, they can use alt+F, then E.

(I've no idea if MacOS also supports that function.)

[LondonSquirrel]

14 hours ago, R C-R said:

14 hours ago, R C-R said:

Aside from that, 25 years ago operating systems were far less complex than they are now, the security features that guard against...

This is nothing to do with the operating system. This is an application. Adding a toolbar button for something which exists hidden away in menus has nothing to do with security. Absolutely nothing whatsoever. 

 

14 hours ago, R C-R said:

Without knowing any of the details of the Affinity core code, how could you possibly know how hard it would be?

Because I have about 30 years of programming experience. Even without seeing the code I know it is not a hard thing to do. If it was hard, why have toolbars at all? Adding toolbar buttons has been around since the innovation of the toolbar.

[LondonSquirrel]

It's time to put this nonsense to rest. I fired up a copy of PagePlus 11. And guess what...

Yes, I can add buttons to any tool bar.  Including EXACTLY what I wanted at the top of this post.

So not being able to add buttons to a tool bar is a design decision by Affinity/Serif. There is no technical barrier to doing so.

[casterle]

3 hours ago, LondonSquirrel said:

Even without seeing the code I know it is not a hard thing to do.

30 years of programming experience or not, without knowing how things are architected you can't know what is involved. 

[LondonSquirrel]

3 minutes ago, casterle said:

30 years of programming experience or not, without knowing how things are architected you can't know what is involved. 

Hi,

Never apply for a job with my company. I know what I am writing about. Clearly it is beyond your abilities.

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, LondonSquirrel said:

Even without seeing the code I know it is not a hard thing to do. If it was hard, why have toolbars at all? Adding toolbar buttons has been around since the innovation of the toolbar.

By that logic, it should not be hard to add anything to any app if it is or has ever been a feature of any other app.

[casterle]

31 minutes ago, LondonSquirrel said:

Hi,

Never apply for a job with my company. I know what I am writing about. Clearly it is beyond your abilities.

Fortunately I'm not in search of employment, but if I were I'd want to avoid a shop that estimates a job without understanding what's involved.

[MikeW]

7 minutes ago, R C-R said:

By that logic, it should not be hard to add anything to any app if it is or has ever been a feature of any other app.

Involved is not equal to hard, hard is not equal to involved. Which version of that statement (or anywhere between) that applies here only Serif knows.

Affinity applications do have toolbars.. Affinity applications do have a limited amount of being customized. All that is being requested (hammered on til death) is that Serif extends that customization that is already in place. This is completely different than rolling in a new feature.

That said, should Serif plan on this—or perhaps they already have in the bigger picture only they know about—I cannot imagine it would be but an enhancement that is down the road that only time will tell if it happens during the 2.x development cycle or not.

[LondonSquirrel]

12 minutes ago, R C-R said:

By that logic, it should not be hard to add anything to any app if it is or has ever been a feature of any other app.

Wrong. By my logic it should be possible (and is possible) to make use of a feature which already exists in an app. Clearly there are people posting here who either just don't understand or are being obtuse. It isn't hard. It's been around for decades. It existed in Serif versions of apps. Yet still people umm and arr about it. 

This is not hard. It really isn't. Adding buttons to tool bars. That is what tool bars are designed for. 

I won't respond any more. 

[casterle]

29 minutes ago, MikeW said:

Involved is not equal to hard, hard is not equal to involved.

The bottom line is hours to implement. It doesn't matter why it takes that many hours. Affinity has to decide how to allocate their resources to best meet their corporate goals. 

I doubt that any of us here has access to Affinity design documents or code, so we have no insight into what resources might be required to implement any feature.

[kaffeeundsalz]

44 minutes ago, MikeW said:

All that is being requested (hammered on til death) is that Serif extends that customization that is already in place.

Then the right thing to do for the OP would be to create a new topic with that feature request in the appropriate forum (I didn't check whether such a topic already exists in this case). I'll never understand why people would instead throw their hands up in disbelief about why the feature isn't there, make the same points over and over again and finally rant about the software and/or the developers because what the hell could be so hard and I won't respond any more. If that particular feature is really such a dealbreaker, why don't they just use another application that can do what they so desperately need?

41 minutes ago, LondonSquirrel said:

It's been around for decades. It existed in Serif versions of apps.

What you may not know is that Serif started from scratch with the Affinity line so there might be no line of code that they borrowed from the legacy product range. You don't have any insights into the development process, neither do I, so we just can't estimate the difficulty of any particular implementation. Also, have you considered that what you want is maybe not so hard to do, but just low on the developers' priority list? Because maybe this feature is really not so important for the rest of the user base?

41 minutes ago, LondonSquirrel said:

That is what tool bars are designed for.  

That is your opinion about what toolbars are designed for. I can think of many other definitions that don't involve the level of customisation you suggest.

[MikeW]

7 minutes ago, casterle said:

The bottom line is hours to implement. It doesn't matter why it takes that many hours. Affinity has to decide how to allocate their resources to best meet their corporate goals. 

I doubt that any of us here has access to Affinity design documents or code, so we have no insight into what resources might be required to implement any feature.

I agree. It all takes time whether it is a new feature or enhancement of an existing feature. I don't think I wrote otherwise.