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Hot spot behaviour

Paul King
Advisor
Here is one very easy opportunity to improve ArchiCAD efficiency

Hotspots are projected by default when user has a wall selected and Ctrl-clicks to extend it, unless wall tool was also pre-selected

You can confirm all the wasted time & mouse clicks from this default behaviour for yourself - how many unintended hotspots do you find in your project at the end of each day?


While designing & placing walls, user is typically also rapidly swapping between door & window placement, checking dimensions and stopping to think, answer the phone etc - and so very likely does NOT happen to have wall tool active when spotting a wall that needs extending.

And is very unlikely to notice this until too late. (on a standard 30" monitor, tracking your eye right across to the tool pallet & then back, just to check the right tool happens to have been left active every time is just plain stupid, inefficient and wasteful. ArchiCAD has all the cues it needs to know which tool is required.

ArchiCAD should be smart enough to know that if you have a thing selected, and you invoke an editing command applicable to that thing, you are very likely intending to edit that thing!

No pedantic pre planning to select the corresponding tool for any object already placed and currently highlighted should be required.

Should user want to project hotspots rather than using guidelines, the hotspot tool is still there - but without question the default ArchiCAD behaviour confers absolutely NO benefit - and is demonstrably counter-productive.
PAUL KING | https://www.prime.net.nz
ArchiCAD 8-27 | Twinmotion 2023
Windoze 11 PC | Intel Core i9 10900K | Nvidia Gforce RTX 3080 | 32 Gb DDR3 | 2x4K monitor extended desktop
16 REPLIES 16
Brett Brown
Advocate
Agree 100% just having that exact same problem.
Imac, Big Sur AC 20 NZ, AC 25 Solo UKI,
Barry Kelly
Moderator
Paul wrote:
how many unintended hotspots do you find in your project at the end of each day?
Next to none - but then I don't use that method of trimming a wall very often.
I only find that quicker to use when I have more than one wall I want to trim to the same element all at the same time.

Generally I make walls too long and just CTRL click them back or use the intersect command for corners or just drag the end of the wall along a guideline to where I want it to go.
These work regardless of what tool you have selected.

I guess it is just different courses for different horses.
Barry.
One of the forum moderators.
Versions 6.5 to 27
Dell XPS- i7-6700 @ 3.4Ghz, 16GB ram, GeForce GTX 960 (2GB), Windows 10
Lenovo Thinkpad - i7-1270P 2.20 GHz, 32GB RAM, Nvidia T550, Windows 11
Anonymous
Not applicable
Paul wrote:
Here is one very easy opportunity to improve ArchiCAD efficiency

Hotspots are projected by default when user has a wall selected and Ctrl-clicks to extend it, unless wall tool was also pre-selected

You can confirm all the wasted time & mouse clicks from this default behaviour for yourself - how many unintended hotspots do you find in your project at the end of each day?
I hate hotspots. Agree whole-heartedly with editing the object rather than creating these pesky things.

Paul wrote:
on a standard 30" monitor, tracking your eye right across to the tool pallet & then back, just to check the right tool happens to have been left active every time is just plain stupid, inefficient and wasteful.
It serves you right for working in a movie theatre.
Paul King
Advisor
Barry wrote:
Next to none - but then I don't use that method of trimming a wall very often
Fair enough - but I think there may be a strong broader benefit beyond just this scenario if ArchiCAD by default automatically activated the correct tool for whatever object is selected.

If nothing else, an entirely redundant mouse click could be eliminated every time user changes to editing something different

Even in the wall editing scenario, the default hotspot behaviour is quite inconsistent - Ctrl-Click will still trim a wall perfectly well even when the slab tool is still active, but arbitrarily looses its extend wall capability when slab tool is still active.

Ctrl Clicking roofs is another area where hotspots are an unwelcome default when another tool was last used.


No longer justifiable
PAUL KING | https://www.prime.net.nz
ArchiCAD 8-27 | Twinmotion 2023
Windoze 11 PC | Intel Core i9 10900K | Nvidia Gforce RTX 3080 | 32 Gb DDR3 | 2x4K monitor extended desktop
Anonymous
Not applicable
Since I know the tricks I hardly ever get any unwanted hotspots. This function is a legacy feature from a time when you had to click to get the hotspots to show the intersecting points and then manually adjust things to them. I guess the only question is whether anyone is still using this feature for mission critical purposes (I kind of doubt it).
Erika Epstein
Booster
I agree with Matthew; it's been a long time since I had views cluttered with hotspots.
Improve your modleing and editing skills and you'll soon forget you ever had the problem
Erika
Architect, Consultant
MacBook Pro Retina, 15-inch Yosemite 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Mac OSX 10.11.1
AC5-18
Onuma System

"Implementing Successful Building Information Modeling"
Link
Graphisoft Partner
Graphisoft Partner
I agree with the concept wholeheartedly. To avoid hotspots appearing all over the joint I lock my default hotspot layer in every combo. That way AC will prompt you to unlock the layer before placing the hotspot, at which point you cancel. Nice little safety.

Cheers,
Link.
Paul King
Advisor
Erika wrote:
I agree with Matthew; it's been a long time since I had views cluttered with hotspots.
Improve your modleing and editing skills and you'll soon forget you ever had the problem

My skills are fine!

The problem is that when editing a large complex project, you don't just edit walls - you need to tweak many things as you move around, and this is interspersed with frequent interruptions by phone or other things - meaning the odds are high whenever resuming that you will not have memorized the last tool used 5 minutes earlier, so will discover, after happily stretching walls, trimming walls and intersecting walls with the "wrong" tool active, that you cannot extend walls, and only discover this by hotspot appearing.

On a standard 30" monitor, it takes TIME for your eye to track right across the screen to tool pallet, to determine the what tool was used last, to change it if required, then to track back to the area you are working in - to adjust a single wall .

An entirely pointless waste of time & energy! Even using Alt-Click to ensure right tool is active every time (as "insurance") is wasteful.

ArchiCAD has all the clues it needs to determine the correct tool when you select the wall!

And as I previously pointed out, the Ctrl click trim function and other editing functions work just fine even when another tool is active - so it makes no sense at all for just the Ctrl click extend function to be disabled.

Nobody needs to project hotspots any more, and if they actually ever did, the hotspot tool is still available for this - so the rational for keeping hotspot projection as a default when other tools were last used is simply non existent.
PAUL KING | https://www.prime.net.nz
ArchiCAD 8-27 | Twinmotion 2023
Windoze 11 PC | Intel Core i9 10900K | Nvidia Gforce RTX 3080 | 32 Gb DDR3 | 2x4K monitor extended desktop
Erika Epstein
Booster
Paul wrote:
My skills are fine!
On the rare occasions I see hotspots, a quick cmd+Z gets rid of them.

On a lighter note, this reminds me of the difference in the kitchen after a meal between people who clean up as they are cooking and those who don't.

No matter what our skill level, we always have room for improvement.
Erika
Architect, Consultant
MacBook Pro Retina, 15-inch Yosemite 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Mac OSX 10.11.1
AC5-18
Onuma System

"Implementing Successful Building Information Modeling"