Brush spacing percentage

Manu · Post by **Manu** » Sat Aug 28, 2004 9:33 pm

Moho 5 is looking good. I'm not too keen on the separate windows, but I assume it makes Lost Marbles life a bit easier.

I love the brush-lines feature, one thing though, and maybe I should be posting this in the feature requests. The brush spacing doesn't change with the line-thickness. When I set the brush space percentage high, the brush-line looks good where it's thicker, but breaks up in dots where it's thinner. If I set the brush space percentage low, the breaking up stops, but the texture turns completely black (=dissapears) in the thicker parts. Looks to me like the brush spacing should change according to the line thickness.

Post by **Lost Marble** » Sat Aug 28, 2004 11:12 pm

Actually, the separate windows are quite a bit more work. It seemed to be a popular feature request during the 4.x series, but now I get the feeling people don't like it too much. Ah, well...

The brush spacing issue is on the todo list of things to finish off for version 5.

Barliesque · Post by **Barliesque** » Sun Aug 29, 2004 5:21 am

but now I get the feeling people don't like it too much. Ah, well...

Actually, I really like the flexibility of the seperate windows. Though it would be nice if there were some docking options.

A couple small problems I've found--

If you've got the tool palette in front of your main window, menu drop downs appear behind it. I can see how this would be a pain to get around, which is why I thought it might be easier to allow the tool palette to be docked (and thus part of the same window).

Also, the palettes don't get restored to their correct positions when restarting the program, if I spread them across my two displays. I like the timeline on one monitor, with the main window on the other.

One other thing that might make people feel irritated with the seperate windows is that the desktop shows through underneath. Mac users ought to be used to that.

I solve this by arranging my windows as well as possible so they fit together to cover up the display.

Manu · Post by **Manu** » Sun Aug 29, 2004 8:25 am

Lost Marble wrote:Actually, the separate windows are quite a bit more work. It seemed to be a popular feature request during the 4.x series, but now I get the feeling people don't like it too much. Ah, well...

Weird, I don't remember seeing a lot of these requests in the Yahoo forums

I suppose it's better for people with multiple monitors. Also, when you're used to interfaces with floating windows, a single window interface will feel restrictive at first. My guess is that a lot of these requests come from people who are still getting used to it.

I remember looking over the shoulder of an Amiga user who was using a Mac for the first time, this was before OSX and multi-tasking. He was copying something to a floppy-disk and wanted to drag one of the windows around and got very frustrated he couldn't do it. The only reason he wanted to drag the window around is to kill time while waiting, a bit like doodling. I call it window-doodling.

The only other reason I can think of why you would want to drag lots of windows around is because they're constantly obscuring each other, which is exactly why I don't like floating windows interfaces.

Phew, I'll get off my soapbox now.

Armaani · Post by **Armaani** » Sun Aug 29, 2004 5:33 pm

I love the floating windows. To me, they make the Moho 5 interface feel so much more free and dynamic than Moho 4. Plus, since I'm a Mac user, I'm used to playing with multiple floating windows. The single window of Moho 4 just felt weird.

I reckon which interface you prefer depends on what operating system you use most often. Windows apps tend to have only one window, whereas Mac apps tend to have floating palettes, so Windows users would prefer the old Moho 4 interface, while Mac users would prefer the new Moho 5 one. Maybe there's a way to satisfy both preferences?

nobudget · Post by **nobudget** » Sun Aug 29, 2004 9:15 pm

"Maybe there's a way to satisfy both preferences?"
Making the windows dockable would be the solution I guess, don't know how much work that would be though. But if other programs can do it Lost Marble should be able to do it too...right?

I'm definately of the one-window camp, maybe a poll would help out?

Reindert.
www.nobudgetvideo.com

Manu · Post by **Manu** » Sun Aug 29, 2004 10:06 pm

Armaani wrote:I love the floating windows. To me, they make the Moho 5 interface feel so much more free and dynamic than Moho 4. Plus, since I'm a Mac user, I'm used to playing with multiple floating windows. The single window of Moho 4 just felt weird.

I reckon which interface you prefer depends on what operating system you use most often. Windows apps tend to have only one window, whereas Mac apps tend to have floating palettes, so Windows users would prefer the old Moho 4 interface, while Mac users would prefer the new Moho 5 one. Maybe there's a way to satisfy both preferences?

Actually, I'm a mac user myself. I just think that a single window interface much more suits an app like Moho where you're concentrating on one task and one task only: animating. The type of interface you stick on an app should be designed for the type of work that app does, not what operating system you're using. In fact Apple themselves sell apps like Final Cut Pro, Motion and Shake, all of them have very much single window type of interfaces or at least windows that are so magnetic that they pretty much behave like a single window app.

spasmodic_cheese · Post by **spasmodic_cheese** » Mon Aug 30, 2004 2:53 am

when i first saw the multiwindow screen i wasnt too sure about it. but its REALLY great if your using a shell that allows multiple desktops, and even better with two monitors(which i dont have), That way i have flash and moho
open on two different workspaces which is groovy, no mess, no worries

The thing with one window interfaces is that you sometimes have to work with alot of windows open, because usually im too focused doing what im doing that I'd rather put the time in trying to close the panels into workin with whatever im doing.

with moho i can simply click and drag them out of the way.
the only thing that sorta bothers me , is that moho's windows remind me alot of gimp , and gimps interface sucks.
whereas photoshop lets you have multiwindows but they are usually constrained by a "background window" but you can still move windows out onto a diff monitor

well thats my two cents

Barliesque · Post by **Barliesque** » Tue Aug 31, 2004 2:16 am

Things that would help make the floating panels work better...

- Docking options

- Snapping as you drag or resize a window near to the edge of another

- A main window with a large background area, like Photoshop...
Actually, the new interface is almost like that already. There's just the problem of the menu panels dropping down behind, instead of in front of everything else.