Misc editor feature requests

[willmeyer]

Cool product, some standard visio/omnigraffle type features that would make editing a ton easier:

 - grid lines
 - an easy setting to set start and end points aligned on either axis (aka make vertical or horizontal)
 - ability to align shapes to lines, edge or center
 - ability to make real circles for whatever the aspect ratio is (aka h != v radius)
 - ability to go to the props for an object by highlighting/selecting it in the visual, rather than the tree

W

[BrianP]

As a not-very-experienced Visio/Omnigraffe user, I have some questions:

- grid lines

Ok.

- an easy setting to set start and end points aligned on either axis (aka make vertical or horizontal)

How do you envision this working? Like how do we provide a user interface to facilitate this?

- ability to align shapes to lines, edge or center

Again, how do we provide a user interface to facilitate this?

- ability to make real circles for whatever the aspect ratio is (aka h != v radius)

Would this be just for the ellipse objects? Or would you want this for other object types also?

- ability to go to the props for an object by highlighting/selecting it in the visual, rather than the tree

This one will not be easy. I can see that it would be a nice feature to have, and I would like to implement it. However, it will likely take some time.

[willmeyer]

Some ideas:

 - have some kind of "auto adjust" option/button in the props editor any time there is a start and end point pair, or a radius pair.  Have options come up when you click it to make it vertical, horizontal (in the case of two points making a line) or a circle (in the case of the two radii).

 - the way most drawing tools like this handle the alignment is that you can select a group of objects, then you have both an "alignment" and "spacing" option (from a menu or whatever).  You then get a popup asking if you what to do next.  For aligngment, you can usually say to align on top, left, bottom, right, or center, in which case all the shapes get the same X, Y, or X/2, or whatever.  For spacing, it spaces out the shapes so there is the same distance between them, in whatever dimension, including doing it on center points so that even if the shapes are different sizes they can still align.  Grab a copy of visio (the MS drawing tool), or OmniGraffle (the Mac one), or some open source equivalent (I am sure there is one), and you can see how most of this works.  Word may even do it if you do Shapes drawing, or Powerpoint...

 - the object selection would be a big win, both for convenience as well as being able to do some of the stuff above

 - kind of related to this and the aspect ratio discussion we've been having in another thread is that it would be nice to have a global thing like where the X/Y positioning info control is now to let you set the actual pixel dimensions of the editor (so you can match it to the display you are actually designing for).  So, you could set the window to be 540 x 800 for common carpc centrafuse design.  So you could design exactly what you'll see on the screen, even though everything would still be saved in percentages.  Related, having the actual pixel values displayed in addition to the percentages, if you set your design window to have specific dimensions, would be helpful.  In other words, if I could tell the editor that I want to design for 540x800, then I could see the pixel values so I could easily make circles, that would be cool.

 - drag and drop in the object tree viewer, as well as ctrl-c/v/x support, for moving stuff around a lot

Hope that helps on some background.  Obv this isn't a generalized drawing program, but a few of these things could make this a lot easier if you get to it.

W

[BrianP]

I'll look into adding these features sometime after DashCommand v2.0 is released.