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Fantastic program, Niels. Really love the alpha so far. It’s very fast, simple and useful.
Got a few ideas, and I’ll drop them in different topics.
How about springloading the tools? What I mean by this is some apps, including Photoshop, allow you to hold down a key to access another tool only until you lift that key up, then the program immediately springs back to whatever other tool you were using. In Photoshop, if you hold the ‘e’ key and draw, you get an eraser until you lift up, however If you just tap the ‘e” key it does a traditional tool switch.
You end up with fewer keypresses this way.
Actually this springloading is all over the place in Animation Paper already!
Hold Space, Hold Alt and Ctrl (or Cmd on Mac). Hold E to get to eraser settings. Hold D for draw settings. Hold S for the Speed Dial, hold H, R or Z for Hand tool, Rotate or Zoom to name what springs to mind.
Did you know about these?
Thanks guys. I understand this, but I want it to pop back when I let go of the button.
Otherwise I’m moving my hand setup from the left where everything else is, and have to return to the “.” on the opposite side every time I want to toggle which makes it less practical than just switching with the buttons on the left.
Mostly what I’m trying to say though is I’d like erase to behave more as an exception that I hold a button for and it expects me to pop back to my current tool rather than a tool I hang out on. Maybe I’m an edge case on this, but it’s one of those things that maximizes speed of use which seems to be what the app is doing elsewhere.
I recognize if it always does the springloaded return, it can be less intuitive for new people, but my argument goes if something as ubiquitously accepted as Photoshop can get away with this conditional logic (a long press is springloaded, vs a tap is a tool switch), then Animation Paper could too.
Your call, naturally!
I totally follow you Dave. We need this. I do think the functionality we already have for holding E (and holding D) is good and fits Animation Paper as it is. But we could do this temporary change to an eraser using another key instead.
Actually, the three erasers and the three drawing tools are on keys 1,2,3,4,5,6. We could make them work as you say. So hitting, say 2, changes the tool to rubber eraser. But holding 2 changes it temporarily to rubber eraser and springs back to the tool you had before when you release the 2 key. All 1 – 6 could work perfectly this way.
What do you think about that?
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