Hi guys,
I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, but I’ve managed to work within the limitations so far .. but, i do wish it was easier to resize my plot after building a first draft of a spec.
Here’s a quick overview of what I expect to happen:
1. Make a plot 1280×1024
2. Build your cool prototype with drop downs, windows, panels .. but, be sure to contain your prototype within an 800×600 region
3. Add multiple pages that have different elements in exactly the same 800×600 region
3. Decide that you really meant your prototype to be 800×600
4. Change the plot size to 800×600.
5. Try to get all of your elements on all of your pages to fit properly into your new plot size.
What Happens:
It really depends on where you put your elements, and, once elements are off-screen, you can’t get them back (or, at least, it’s really hard)
While you can select all elements one one page at the same time and then nudge them into the correct location, this is not manageable when you have multiple pages of elements that all need to line up.
What Should Happen Instead:
I propose two solutions, one that’s potentially easier to implement, but the other which would provide better usability:
Option 1:
Allow a Select All Elements on All pages.
At the very least, that would allow us to select all objects and move everything at th same time to we can respect their alignments ..
But, that’s still a backwards way to redefine a plot size.
Option 2
What would be cool would be to have a Photoshop-like crop tool instead, so that you could draw a bounding box around the objects you want to include in the new plot size and litterally crop your existing plot to the new coordinates. That way, you wouldn’t have to move anythng, because you’ve already defined the offset with the crop box.
I didn’t mention this earlier, because I figured it would be an “edge-case” .. but, it’s actually burned me lots of times now, so while it might not be common for other users, it’s become a common issue for my workflow, so i wanted to raise the problem ..
EDIT: sorry for the formatting, i created this post from the browser in Lotus Notes, which aparently is a piece of garbage … i tried to fix it by editing it from Firefox, but it kept the additional markup ..
4 answers
Thanks for the detailed description. I just submitted the “crop tool” as a feature request.
Although allowing select all elements in all pages will be quite easy to implement, we will not consider that way as it is not neat at all 🙂
Awesome! great to hear. and, if you say it’s easy to implement a “select all elements on all pages” i would also find a use for that too .. i just wouldn’t want to have to use that to resolve this specific issue .. i think, in general, being able to select ‘all’ elements would be quite handy .. or, even being able to select some elements from other pages .. if you know you want to keep them aligned (or, maybe allowing grouping across pages? .. heh .. not so easy any more eh?? …
Hi Jeremy, actually it is not for technical reasons that we don’t consider supporting selection cross pages.
Manipulating elements (select, group etc.) cross pages is really confusing to users because it kills the “page” concept.
To align elements in different pages, you can set one page as the master page for others, then its content will be painted in all page background.
Hi Xavier.
I agree that this would introduce some confusion, and does break the concept of pages.
Still, I would be happy with a “select all elements” button inside the Select Elements dialog, even if you disabled other features like group, etc.
I can still see use-cases where i might want to nudge everything at the same time, and if i have many pages, that’s painful, even if i’m using a base as my master page ..
anyway, not a show stopper .. just something i run into semi-frequently ..
(i’ve learned to set my plot-sizes first so that this is less of an issue 😉
This question is now closed