On 4/25/07, bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...> wrote:
On 4/24/07, Derek Hinchliffe <derek@...1264...> wrote:
The idea: allow the view of the canvas to be rotated (around the current mouse cursor position) using keystrokes. I see three keystrokes being required: rotate anti-clockwise, rotate clockwise, and reset to normal.
That's a very good idea and something I always wanted to do, eventually. The only problem is to find a free keyboard shortcut for this :)
That would be excellent. I implemented that in a little vector drawing app of my own. It really does make a free hand things much easier to do.
I say go for it!
As for the input control, there's that little flow wheel on the Wacom airbrush stylus. :-) Or sooner or later I suspect these nifty multi-finger touch panels are going to make it out of the research labs and into the marketplace. Then the problem's solve.
Actually I think the way to go for the UI is not keys for rotate left and right, but key to go into rotate mode then drag to rotate around the current center of the screen. I'm fond of dual-action toggle keys where a long press gives you the mode only while the key is down, and goes back to the previous mode on release, or full switch if you just tap the key. But that doesn't seem to be a very popular sort of UI for some reason.
In general I don't think current apps take maximal advantage of keys. Every key is a button. With mice buttons we make a distinction between click and double-click. Why not with keys on the keyboard? And any key has the potential to serve as a modifier when you think about it. Why should Ctrl-alt-shift-meta-option get all the fun? If you make 'z' act like a modifier key too then you've almost just doubled the number of keys at your disposal. Clearly you can go overboard, but i believe there are creative ways to get more bang for the buck out of the keys we have.
--bb