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Matt

Joined: 13 Apr 2004
Posts: 534
Location: Sterling, Virginia

Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 12:09 pm Post subject: Wild Tools Development -- situation update?

Back in November, in another thread, Alfred posted the following at

http://powercadd.designcommunity.com/viewtopic.php?p=3282225#3282225

(emphasis added)

Quote:

Unfortunately, all this talk about PowerCADD and WildTools on the iPhone is a moot point, at least for WildTools.

About six months ago I completely shut down all development work in WildTools and plan only to maintain the existing software in the future.

I know this comes as a surprise to many of you, so let me explain my decision.

I write software because I wake up in the morning thinking of something to do in WildTools, but for the last two years all my motivation has been sapped because of ES’s lack of cooperation and support.

The reason for my frustration is dealing with two things. One is the accelerated scroll wheel zooming (which I’ve discussed here in detail, see http://www.designcommunity.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=21632) and the other (exporting Z height) is equally simple.

Despite my many years of making contributions to ES and the world of PowerCADD, such as creating the Drawing Room or doing promotional writing for new versions or difficult situations (creating the PowerCADD and Intel statement), ES has been unwilling to make these two simple changes which benefit the PowerCADD world. I’ve concluded it’s pointless for me to make the effort to create world-class software if I cannot get their reciprocal cooperation.

On one hand, you could say that these are incredibly tiny things, and they are, but like any creative field, programming is all about your inner fire and passion. The inaction on these two issues is demoralizing and has broken my spirit. I’ve thrown in the towel, and I’m going on down the road to spend my time on other things.

If you guys want to make a fuss with ES to get some action on this, I will certainly welcome it. I hope you have better luck than I have.

Alfred

I'm distressed by this situation, which seems to me to be one that reasonable minds could find an accommodation that satisfied them both.

Alfred discussed scroll wheel zooming here:

http://powercadd.designcommunity.com/viewtopic.php?t=12162&highlight=scroll+wheel+zoom

Quote:

I never stop being amazed at the different way you look at PowerCADD and WildTools when you spend a lot of time working with it. I know what happens to me is that I suddenly see things that never bothered me before, or which seemed right, and which suddenly look all wrong. (And at times like this, I wish I could be a normal person, like everyone else!)

First, the 'history' of the feature.

Clayton Hayes first contacted me about this a number of years ago. It was something that they had in AutoCAD, and he thought it was a great idea and would be a great addition to the PowerCADD world. I thought so too, and also that this was the best idea I had heard from a user in five years. I still think it's a fantastic idea.

So I started out by buying a Microsoft Mouse with a scrolling wheel, and implemented something called Zoom in Now, which required that you assign command keys in a very awkward way. But it worked. It's obviously something that belonged in PowerCADD, so ES did it, and it's great.

What I did was to implement it so that you zoomed in when you rolled the scroll wheel forward, and zoomed out when you rolled the scroll wheel toward you. And that's the same way that it's done in PowerCADD. At the time, it seemed to be the only sensible way, so you roll the scroll wheel forward for "I go in" and back for "I go back". In other words, you are thinking of the zooming in terms of yourself.

But I've now been using a scrolling mouse for quite a while, and I use it both for scrolling a page, say on the Internet using a browser, or when programming, and then when I start drawing in PowerCADD, suddenly it all seems 'wrong'. It took me a while to realize what is going on.

When scrolling a page, I think it terms of the page, so I roll the wheel toward me to pull the page down, and roll it forward to push the page up. So when you think in terms of the page, and not yourself, then when you switch to PowerCADD, when I want to zoom in, I roll the wheel toward me to pull the page toward me, and roll it away from me to push the page away from me.

Someone mentioned that Google Earth had the zooming 'backwards' and I just checked it and it does work exactly the opposite way it does in PowerCADD. Or, said another way, Google Earth works the way I now think it should work.

Clayton Hayes says the way it works now in PowerCADD is the same way it works in AutoCAD and Adobe Acrobat. I can understand that, but I also think making something work one way because AutoCAD does it is getting your thinking backwards. If we all thought like that, we'd all be using AutoCAD.

If we had to do it all over again, I certainly would have done it the way it's now done in Google Earth, and I'd like to advocate that PowerCADD give the user the option of 'saying' which way the zooming works.

Alfred

and here

http://www.designcommunity.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=3280245#3280245

Quote:

Let’s be fair about this. What Damon is talking about is the idea that you can zoom in on a part of the drawing and that will be your new page size, maybe for a while at least. I know other programs have the ability to rotate a view of the drawing. While this is all an understandable thing to want, it is an extremely difficult thing to accomplish and might take several years. It’s a fundamental change and these are very difficult and involved.

There’s also the issue of design. Believe it or not, ES gets questions from new users like “tell me again how to draw a rectangle.” What we all love about PowerCADD is the elegant simplicity, and the elegantly simple solution is always the most difficult thing in any design. AutoCAD has something called View Ports, which I think may be this idea, but I don’t understand this stuff and often hear from people how awful it is.

I can, however, echo your frustration on the scroll wheel zooming. So let me tell you the history of this feature and what is involved.

Like almost all good ideas, this one comes entirely from other people and programs. I first heard of scroll wheel zooming from Clayton Hayes, and I think it was something he saw in AutoCAD. So I did this a long time ago, in PowerCADD 2000 I think, and I did it in the only way possible at the time, as a miscellaneous command and you had to program the mouse so it would send a fake key-press event to PowerCADD. I went out and bought a Microsoft Mouse, which I couldn’t stand, to get this working. And I did it in the way that seemed, at the time, as the logical approach. That is, I zoomed in and out by a factor of 2 with each movement of the mouse wheel, and you rolled the wheel forward to zoom in.

I’ve always maintained that the First Law of Macintosh Programming is that whatever you’re proud of today will embarrass you in a month. So I sat back, dumb, stupid and happy that I had done a great thing, and people loved it. In the development of PowerCADD 6, Todd Stanley and I worked together. The feature really belonged in PowerCADD, I sent him what I had done, Todd put it in PowerCADD, and I pulled my method out.

Then later I bought a Logitech wireless mouse, and I now use a MX Revolution which is easily the best mouse I ever used. Everyone said the Logitech mouse-driver software sucked, but as someone who writes software, I felt duty-bound to try it. It really does suck big time.

So I used USB Overdrive which everyone raved about. This is created by an Italian, Allesandro Levi Montalcini, and I’ll call him a genius for the accelerated scrolling feature he created (or maybe he stole the idea from someone else—good designers borrow, great designers steal). He describes the feature as taking one minute to get used to and two minutes to become addicted. I think that’s a perfect description.

The idea is that the faster you move the mouse wheel, the farther you scroll in the document. It’s exactly the same concept that Apple has used with the movement of the mouse, where faster movements of the mouse jump ahead farther. The standard mouse wheel scrolling is the same as tablet mode with the mouse—try that to see the difference!

When I began to use this mouse, I could see that the idea could be used in scroll wheel zooming in PowerCADD, and I also realized that it felt completely wrong to roll the mouse toward you to pull a page down and then have zooming work the opposite way. Sheesh, I got it backwards. The same action should pull the image in the drawing toward you. However other people feel the opposite about this, so this decision should obviously be left to the user, the way Google Earth and now PowerCADD handle it.

So two years ago, I implemented accelerated scroll wheel zooming in WildTools, and you can use it while in the process of drawing with any of the tools in WildTools.

There are two types of mouse wheel events in the Mac OS. The earlier devices, like the Microsoft Mouse simply report a single movement of the mouse wheel in a direction. When Apple introduced the Mighty Mouse, they created a new type of mouse wheel event, where the movement is reported as a change in the X and Y direction (‘delta y’ and ‘delta x’). This produced a smoother scrolling action and allowed for horizontal scrolling by rolling the ball to the left or right.

It was obvious to me from the very beginning that you could not use the delta y because USB Overdrive and other mouse drivers were exaggerating the amount. So I based the scroll wheel zooming on the time between the movements of the wheel, not the delta y. And this means that it works with the older Microsoft Mouse type of devices.

Contrary to what you might expect, the time between mouse wheel movements is not the smooth, infinitely variable amount you would expect. It’s rough and slightly unreliable. So I broke the zooming down to three speeds. Slow zooms by 1.25 and it’s what you are mainly doing when you scroll-zoom. It feels very smooth. Medium scrolls by 1.5 and fast by 2.0.

As a practical matter, zooming in and out by 1.25 feels smooth and gets rid of the jerky feeling we are now experiencing. I’ve tried lower numbers, and it’s just terrible. You just roll and roll and roll the wheel. Even though we all call it ‘accelerated scroll wheel zooming’, it is just a variable-speed method of operation. And 95% of the time when you’re using it in WildTools, you’re only using the slow/1.25 setting. The faster settings happen very quickly, and it’s over before you know it or have time to think about it.

I also did two other things. One is that the zoom is ‘gridded’ so that it will round off the zoom level to a sensible level, say 1.0, 1.25 or 1.5, rather than .9998, 1.1899 or 1.4888. And lastly I put a stop in it so it would not overshoot on zoom out and go beyond the Reduce to Fit view.

When accelerated scroll wheel zooming was put into PowerCADD last December, the job was assigned to an inexperienced and not particularly talented programmer (who has since moved on). He tried using the delta y approach, and this is why it simply does not work at all for most of us.

He also put in a slider control for the sensitivity of the acceleration. To this day I don’t know what this means, but I did put something in WildTools to do something sensible. Put the slider in the middle for the best action in WildTools.

The programmer who did this had a copy of my routines, and in a few minutes he could have just used it, and it would have worked. I certainly understand that everyone has their own programming style and since you have to maintain the programming, you want to do it in your own way.

Software development also requires that you give things priorities, so fixing crashes always has to take precedence over a nuance-feel issue. But this thing doesn’t work, and I’m hoping everyone can chime in to get this moved up the priority list.

Alfred's interest in providing plug-ins for PowerCADD has given us extraordinary tools. In the case of scroll wheel zooming and Z-height information, in order for his efforts to be implemented, some work is necessary in the base code of the program.

I'm setting up this thread because I'd like to go on record as being in favor of the implementations Alfred is requesting, especially if the changes have the side benefit of ending the moratorium on WildTools development.

I certainly don't want to see a moratorium on PowerCADD purchasing.

Matt

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