An unexpected improvement

[Peter Severin Carlsen]

I just observed that when a rectangle is rotated 90 degrees, PC-7 doesn't know the width and height have been swapped.

A rectangle 1unit wide by five units high when rotated sill reads in the edit box 1 unit wide by five units high instead of what it is on the screen 5 x 1. This is a basic issue of making a program suitable for its purpose.

I'm sorry if this is a rehash of an old, now accepted bug in the program, but it is something they should be corrected before moving on to 8. If you can't manage to get the basic's right with an upgrade, forget about the eye candy.

[huc]

[Peter Severin Carlsen]

I call it a bug becasue it is unexpected. In versions 1 through 5 of Power Cadd when a rectangle was rotated it its length and width are switched.

Who but a programmer would care if the object on the screen is a "new object" or an old object rotated? What I need to know is how high and wide something is on the screen. The idea that you'd think it "user friendly" to have to be able to remember the original orientation of an object, or ten such objects in a drawing is absurd.

I discoved this duplicating a pin, on a drawing. It was long and skinny. I duplicated it to put a pin in another part of the drawing but 90 degrees from the original orientation, But if I want to modify the width of the new object I have to modify it's height. That just seems backwards, wrong headed if you will just plain bad design.

Finally version 2000 did things directly, elegantly that are missing in the latter version. For example, why can't you zoom in based on where you click in a drawing, as in version 2000, instead of only zooming in around the origin. I don't see this as a program improvement.

I know. It's a programer's choice of "either or". But whatever happened to "both and." that was a strength of the old versions of PowerCadd?

[lavardera]

April fools?

No - this works the way it should.

[Derek]

It is interesting that you can't "reset the zero" of a rotated rectangle when it is at 90°, 180° or 270°.

Perhaps the Arrange->Rotate sub-menu could offer this so that you could convert a rotated rectangle to a plain old rectangle if and only when the angle of rotation was one of the orthogonal angles?

[JohnMorse]

I'm finding it easier to follow Peter's logic that a rotated rectangle is just a rectangle and that having an object's "height" go off to the side is unexpected.

One's expectations regarding "width" and "height" get complicated when you're talking about things rotated 45°. But maybe in those cases one expects complications.

[Peter Severin Carlsen]

Thank you John.

In previous versions, up to PC-6 what is displayed in the edit window I suspect is the size of the bounding box of the shape on the screen. Yes a rectangle rotated to an angle now displays height and width that are diagonal measures of the original shape.

I can see that for rotaition of some objets, in the new method, it allows the modification of the rotated object in it's new oriention. But rectangles or elipses rotated 90 degrees is just confusing. The program should be smarter than that.

Ultimately what I'm arguing is why not give a method to let the user choose how the program reports information. Let me select whether I'm interested in a bounding box report, or rotationally cosistent edit.

Or put it another way, if groups do it, why can't rectangle and elipses do it?

[Steve Woolf]

I was really looking forward to this issue being handled in v8.

What I hoped for is that any rectangle that is rotated into alignment with the x and y axes would be automatically converted to a normal rectangle.

I don't know whether it's worth restating the problem one more time--I've done it already many times over many years. Somehow I believe that if I can state clearly the essence of the problem, it will make a difference. Here's one more try:

Reporting as rotated rectangles objects which, for all intents and purposes, are normal rectangles, leads to confusion and mistakes. The problem comes up when using the Edit window to copy or edit height and width. "Height" is universally understood as vertical, and "width" as horizontal. For normal rectangles that are reported as rotated rectangles with angles of 90 and 270 degrees, "height" and "width" are reported incorrectly in the context of our universal understanding of those terms.

In order to avoid mistaking height for width and vice versa in PowerCadd's Edit window, for ALL RECTANGLES, we must first check object type and rotation angle. If the object is reported as a rotated rectangle of 90 or 270 degrees, we must then transpose height and width in our mind . To make such a rectangle taller, we tell PowerCadd to make it fatter. To make it fatter, we make it taller.

The advantages of going thru this extra effort, and especially of acting contrary to common knowledge and intuition, are not apparent. Rather, it makes us believe there is a mistake in the program.

If it is not a mistake but a "design decision", I can say only this: "design decision" is a contradiction in terms. The best designers avoid closing down their design process with decisions as long as possible. But the biggest influence on designers to make decisions is their client's budget. I presume ES's budget is being used up with other improvements perceived as more important, and I do not challenge that. Nevertheless, for those of us who have been using PowerCadd for a long time, enjoying its simple basic and elegant drawing tools and developing our personal subsets of features that we rely upon hundreds of times each day, some of the "old issues" are the most important ones to solve.

Best to all users and all our friends at ES,

Steve

[dwm]

I'm late seeing this post but here are my thoughts . . .

I agree that the coordinates shouldn't change relative to the drawing coordinates. I often forget this behavior and have to reset a size change. I don't look at the edit menu because I always expect it to automatically tab to the width first.

I like the rectangle change to a rotated rectangle, as such it resizes equally about the center point of the object. I use this feature often to place a rectangle centered on a point and then rotate it twice to bring the width and height back to the drawing coordinates, width first height second in the edit window.

The rotation solution could be automated with a macro using a program such as ControlllerMate or iKey or QuikKeys. In PowerCADD 8 we now have macros for custom key commands, a "Multiple Command Sequence" option. You gotta love this feature.


About PowerCADD 8
http://www.engsw.com/products/PowerCADDV8.pdf

[mnemesh]

You know if you convert that "rectangle" to a polygon all your problems will be solved in both PC7 and PC8. Just thought you might like to know.