[Pharan]

In other programs, I pan by holding the spacebar and dragging the canvas several times to the direction I want.

The recent view manipulation widget when you hold spacebar in Animation Paper is a really welcome feature.

But in the current setup, I often pan and then accidentally zoom when I drag several times because the pan control stays in the same place. This scheme kind of asks the user to unnecessarily focus on two things: hitting the small click target, and looking for the place they want on the canvas.

• I think a good solution might be to make the widget follow the cursor when the user uses pan.
• Or maybe the zoom and rotate targets should be more specific while the pan command should be easy to do by default (drag anywhere else to spacebar-pan).
• Or maybe when the user pans once, all subsequent commands while the spacebar is still held should also be interpreted as panning until you lift and press the spacebar again. The same for if you zoomed first or rotated first.

 

The more I think about it, I feel like this third solution will work best. But I recognize that it’s the sort of thing that I can’t be really sure of unless people actually test it.

I feel like, for panning, it’s another one of those super common muscle-memory things that other programs build on that when it doesn’t respond expectedly, makes the program more frustrating to use and switch to. Animation Paper has enough of these already and I feel like if some of them could be eliminated at no cost to innovating legitimately better controls, it would make the program that much better for adoption.

• This topic was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by Pharan.

[Niels]

Hi Pharan,

Thank you so much for this. I totally follow.

I agree that your option 3 seems to be the way to go. I like that idea very much. Thank you!

I’ll put it on our todo-list to be done soon.

In the meantime, you could use H (Hand) as the shortcut for dragging the canvas. This works all over the view. Though I do understand the muscle memory thing using the Space bar. 🙂 So we’ll get it updated!

Thanks,
Niels