Wishes
Post your wishes about Graphisoft products: Archicad, BIMx, BIMcloud, and DDScad.

Palettes Wishes

Anonymous
Not applicable
1. Magnetic Palettes. Palettes should 'snap' when they get close (to eachother, the screen edge, the drawing window, etc.) Adobe is the king of making Floating Palettes work.

2. Autohide for the Navigator Palette (and Preview). Similar to the Dock in OS X or the Taskbar Autohide fuinction in Windows.

3. Cocentric Pet Pallette. This is the most accessible point on the computer scren. Ingenereal, more should be mad of pet palettes. The pet pallette should surround the cursor (not get in the way). And it should go away once you select something. I feel I am always tripping on it. Maybe it ius only activated by a hot key like --> ` (just below the ESC key).

Here's a quote from an interesting article on GUIs:

"With the options displayed around you in a circle, you need only move a pixel or two to enter the "slice of pie" you want. Less travel, good target size. Good design.

They have a second advantage of feeding not only distance, but direction information into your motor memory. As long as the options are few enough, you will soon learn to move your mouse up and to the left to print, down and to the right to fax, etc. In fact, once these simple gestures are learned, you needn't even display the menu anymore, unless the user hesitates long enough to indicate they may be unsure. (This was borne out during the course of the Fabrik project at Apple in the late 1980s.)"

The rest of the article is here: http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html
12 REPLIES 12
Anonymous
Not applicable
I especially like the idea of snappable pallets. It seems as I try to arrange the pallets around the screen they are slightly different sizes. It would be nice if there was a modular size for the pallets so that they could line up. (Or even better allow me to size the pallet so that I can fit it to my screen)
Anonymous
Not applicable
A related wish which I think Adalbert already posted is for ArchiCAD to remember window and palette settings for different display resolutions. I am always switching between my PowerBook's LCD and my desktop Cinema Display, and I wish I didn't have to move the palettes and resize the windows everytime.
Anonymous
Not applicable
1505Gough wrote:
3. Cocentric Pet Pallette. This is the most accessible point on the computer scren. Ingenereal, more should be mad of pet palettes. The pet pallette should surround the cursor (not get in the way). And it should go away once you select something. I feel I am always tripping on it. Maybe it ius only activated by a hot key like --> ` (just below the ESC key).
Anyone use Maya? It's really freaking cool. Press the spacebar and you get some shortcut commands right around the cursor.
Anonymous
Not applicable
Alex wrote:
Anyone use Maya? It's really freaking cool. Press the spacebar and you get some shortcut commands right around the cursor.
I downlaoded Maya PE just to check it out. Their GUI is awesome. I would have to say one of the most cuttig edge designs out there today. Graphisoft should definetely pay attention to what these guys are doing with the GUI.

The spacebar triggers all the pulldown menus surrounding your cursor . In in AC it could be a donought-shaped toolbox in surrounding your cursor.

Also, context menus work very smoothly. Everything surrounds the cursor.

Lastly, tear-off menus. Menus that have the striped lines at the top can be torn off and left open on your desktop until you don't need them again.
spacebar.jpg
Anonymous
Not applicable
Context Menu.
Anonymous
Not applicable
Tear-off Menus.
Anonymous
Not applicable
Torn off.
Anonymous
Not applicable
Same functionnality exists for Mozilla and Firebird : see the screenshots @ http://www.radialthinking.de/radialcontext/screenshots.html

Mouse gesture are also really useful (but screenshots are impossible to get 😉)
Anonymous
Not applicable
"1505Gough" wrote:
1. Magnetic Palettes. Palettes should 'snap' when they get close (to eachother, the screen edge, the drawing window, etc.) Adobe is the king of making Floating Palettes work.

Yes, - let’s have dockable toolbars, - just like in any Microsoft application

Håkon Alm
ArchiCAD 8.1 R1 (Int) on Win XP SP1 (us)