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[Mikeclx]

I have spent the last few weeks working on screens and have a lot more to do yet. I am finding VG.Net great and have a few suggestions to make life a little bit easier and quicker.

1/ when you double click on a group it makes it the active group rather than right click and then selecting 'make active group' I use a lot of groups and find this frustrating and slow.

2/ when you use the + to zoom in it would be good that if something is selected it centres on it, so that you don’t then have to go looking for the item you had selected after zooming in. at the moment I am finding zoom to selection and then zooming out the best workaround, but slow when working on large screens all day

These would be minor changes to your code but would be much appreciated.

Regards,

Mike

[Frank Hileman]

Hello Mike,

Thanks for the great suggestions.

1) sounds great and I see no problems with that. Please note the combo box, on the drawing toolbar, allows you to make any group active by selecting its name.

2) Good idea, but perhaps it should be a keyboard shortcut instead of changing the button behavior (or another button)? This one should be easy to implement as well.

Regards,

[Mikeclx]

Thanks for your reply,

1/ Yes I do use the combo box as well, just had some old software I used to use and it was double click to select a group and found that fast and intuitive. sometimes you don’t know what the name of the group is, with double click you don’t have to look it up or even think too hard about it, just double click and start editing.
If you clicked on an object outside the group it would automatically take you out of the group as well. Means you can navigate groups/ sub groups very quickly.

2/ On the software in question if something was selected then it operates as i am suggesting, if nothing is selected it operates as it does now.. just zooms in the visible window.

How do you add features like this in? Do you just put it in the next release, or can you add it in as a patch?

Regards,

Mike

[Frank Hileman]

Hello Mike,

1) Click outside the group to deactivate is a good idea except in one case. Sometimes I uses groups as layers. In that case when I click outside the group I don't want to select anything, I want to select the top Picture. It seems that would not be possible in this case, if you have overlapping layers, filling the screen. Similarly, to select several objects in the group, first making it active, then dragging works to select. If the button down to begin the drag deactivated the active group (because there is another layer behind) I could no longer drag to select objects in the active group.

2) What about a button or shortcut that centered the objects currently selected? Then you would press again to zoom in.

Features go in the next release but we also patch older releases if customers want or need something badly. In this case, the changes are minimal and the main work is the build process.

Regards,

[Mikeclx]

Hi Frank,

There is always a gotya!
1/ maybe just a toolbar button to unselect the current group. I realise that can be done by pulling down the combo box and then scrolling up and selecting the top option. But a toolbar button is much faster, you could add a 'make active group' and 'exit active group' toolbar button but I still like the double click to select as well.

2/ yes this would work fine, toolbar button would be best next to the zoom in

Thanks for your prompt replies, I would like to get it soon if possible as i still have a lot of screen work on a large project to do.

Is there a new release coming out? Personally I cannot think what you could add that could make it a better product for what I am doing. When I have been using it full time for 3 months and part time for a further 3 it says a lot about a product that I only want toolbar changes!!

I hope you don’t do a Microsoft on us and take a great product (XP) and make it a terrible product (Vista) for the sake of an upgrade

Regards,

Mike

[Frank Hileman]

Hello Mike,

Regarding #1, single click to deactivate would have the problem I described, but double click to deactivate would not have that problem. For example: Double click over an item in a different Group: become the active Group. Double click over an empty space (empty background): deactivates any active Group. That would not present any new problems when working with layers.

Some people are not aware but there is also a document outline you can use to view a Picture structure. Open a Picture in the designer. In Visual Studio select View, Other Windows, Document Outline.

There is not a new release coming out probably until the fall. We will not be adding superfluous features. We want to keep VG.net small and easy to understand.

We may add an alternative rendering layer instead of GDI+. In this case, it may be a different product, possibly still called VG.net, but we would have to remove all System.Drawing references, so it would not be 100% source code compatible. With a conversion script it would be mostly compatible. The System.Drawing based version would still be available.

Regards,