Poll: Preview Feedback

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on November 11, 2009 at 10:55am

The canvas redraw time already gets slow when it's displaying many components. I usually have most of the component's preview disabled, so semi-transparency will probably make it much worse. Desaturation will probably make icons more difficult to distinguish.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 11, 2009 at 11:07am

Unfortunately it's very difficult to draw images at varying levels of transparancy, so the icon would still be fully opaque. Since these visual objects are composed of many overlapping items (fills, borders, background shapes, text, images etc. etc.) it's not possible to draw the whole thing at a fixed transparency without drawing it to a separate bitmap first. The idea is good, but the implementation will be too costly (in terms of speed).


@Vicente, transparency doesn't affect drawing speed that much. I'm currently working on display speed as well but so far my findings regarding what takes a long time to draw have all been very unintuitive.

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on November 11, 2009 at 11:22am

I stand corrected on speed, but I wouldn't like to try to follow a definition where most of the components are semi-transparent. Maybe the default icon should be for the preview off and something should light up when the icon's preview is on. This could help on reminding people to disable the preview of geometry they don't want to display.

Permalink Reply by Jacek Jaskólski on November 11, 2009 at 11:24am

Thanks for the explanation, I get it now.

I still agree with Theunis on the "white standing out" issue, though. If you made the unpreviewed components more "canvas-like" it would be more intuitive, I think.

Since I woudn't want to trash this thread with my images, you'll find the next set attached to the post :)

Attachments:

• flat_preview.jpg, 47 KB
• flat_preview_def.jpg, 189 KB

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 11, 2009 at 12:16pm

That, to me, screams "Disabled" much more than "Preview Off".
I actually like Vicente's suggestion best so far to simply add a small widget to each object which has preview switched off and not change the colours at all.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Theunis du Toit on November 11, 2009 at 12:28pm

"to simply add a small widget"

Will this be easily recognizable from a slightly more zoomed out view of the definition? I find I do this often, is zoom out and look for the say 3-5 components that have preview off, or on, so the I can manipulate just one or two of those. When I say zoomed out, I mean I only see small lighter blocks and darker blocks.

Was this situation not part of the original problem as well that When more zoomed out how easy is to recognize which components are off or on simultaneously recognizing the component type?

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 11, 2009 at 12:39pm

Depends. If the Widget is defined in canvas coordinates then it would scale along with the component itself and thus become hard to see when zoomed out. If on the other hand it's defined in screen coordinates (like the Compass and the Alignment Widgets), they are zoom-independant and they would always be visible.

Since I wrote a bunch of colour and display changes, I'll just release it the way it is and we'll see if it goes down well or not.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by to] on November 11, 2009 at 12:29pm

david i don't think another widget is the right way i a am more for your white black solution because its shows more the 0 1 logic so on off
i would also prefer black for active also for screenshots it is much better this way

- to]

Permalink Reply by kleerkoat on November 11, 2009 at 12:16pm

OOhhhh, this gets my vote.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 11, 2009 at 3:28pm

Here's another screen shot of the colours in the new scheme. Normal on the left, selected on the right:

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by taz on November 11, 2009 at 3:38pm

I don't know if someone mentioned this (I can't remember if I just read it...) but what about a halo of some sort around the component when preview is on. Like lightbulbs and layers.

Then the selection color wouldn't have to be varied.

Is this the same as the widget concept that's being discussed?

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 11, 2009 at 3:45pm

Hi Taz,

no, halos are not the same as widgets.

It's an interesting idea, (even though I have no idea how to draw a Halo quickly). How would it work for objects that are nearby? Would the halo of one object be on top of another? Or are halos always drawn underneath all objects?

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

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