Designer Pro + / UI colour scheme and shortcut key reference

It may be possible that I'm missing some things here, but in case I'm not...

- I haven't used Designer Pro+ in a while, and I opened it up today to see that the UI has gone full emo - no colour except the lower palette. Wow, who hurt you? lol. I hope the person who's in charge of the interface has found new happiness since making that artistic decision but for those of us not into self-harm, can we please have an option (a supported one) that returns the UI to a standardized UI colour scheme? Perhaps something along the lines of the MS Windows UI specs? Maybe there already is one akin to Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S, but it brings me to my second point...

- Why is it that none of the tooltips on the main icon toolbars offer hints to their respective shortcut key (i.e. Save/New/Paste/Zoom)?

- Although it may exist I cannot find any hint in the UI that tells me what key combination will let me perform a basic zoom in/out. I get that there is 'zoom to item', etc. (on a toolbar with no keystroke hints) but I mean just a basic "in". I open help, go to the support website, search for 'zoom in' and have to go through the results to find the 1/2/3/4 for 100/200/300/400% zoom, but it's not quite the same thing.

Anyway, just throwing stuff out there. I get that you might want to 'modernize' the user experience but it might be nice to offer people the option to do things they way they're already accustomed.

personally I don't care if the icons are colour or monochrome, the UI is not the work of art I am concentrating on when I use the program [and no I am not into self-harm ;)]

perhaps xara considers that those who actually use the program will not need to be reminded of the s/cs for Save/New/Paste/Zoom ? they are sort of hardwired into my brain...

I use the mouse wheel to zoom - it still zooms in steps; I think these can be tweaked in the registry but can't remember for sure

berklee, you get used to emo-mode.

You cannot get a Tooltip and an open action to a sub-toolset with a single hover. Those with a little white arrowhead bottom-right.

The other main ones and the sub-tools do display tooltips.
If there are no assigned shortcuts, you only get the Command hint.

You can achieve a Zoom In/Out with Ctrl+NumPad + / Ctrl+NumPad -.
This gives you 14 stepped zoom points.
Ctrl+Wheelie gives you 39 zoom points.

My go-to shortcuts are Shift+Ctrl+P (Zoom to Page width) & Shift+Ctrl+Z (Zoom to selection).

You probably need to spend a day scrolling through Utilities > Customise key shortcuts.
I did an age back for v16: http://acorn.xara.hosting. I might get round to XPro+ sometime.

Acorn

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Originally Posted by handrawn

personally I don't care if the icons are colour or monochrome, the UI is not the work of art I am concentrating on when I use the program [and no I am not into self-harm ;)]

perhaps xara considers that those who actually use the program will not need to be reminded of the s/cs for Save/New/Paste/Zoom ? they are sort of hardwired into my brain...

I use the mouse wheel to zoom - it still zooms in steps; I think these can be tweaked in the registry but can't remember for sure

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The assumption of what people do and don't know can get dicey - I would think that new users could find some things confusing and/or frustrating if they're non-standardized...

I do use the mouse wheel most of the time, but the wheel on my mouse has been a bit wonky of late... in most apps I would use CTRL and the +/- on the alpha keyboard, which are pretty common, but those don't work - that's what started me down this rabbit hole (while I wait for the new mouse). :)

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Originally Posted by Acorn

berklee, you get used to emo-mode.

You cannot get a Tooltip and an open action to a sub-toolset with a single hover. Those with a little white arrowhead bottom-right.

The other main ones and the sub-tools do display tooltips.
If there are no assigned shortcuts, you only get the Command hint.

You can achieve a Zoom In/Out with Ctrl+NumPad + / Ctrl+NumPad -.
This gives you 14 stepped zoom points.
Ctrl+Wheelie gives you 39 zoom points.

My go-to shortcuts are Shift+Ctrl+P (Zoom to Page width) & Shift+Ctrl+Z (Zoom to selection).

You probably need to spend a day scrolling through Utilities > Customise key shortcuts.
I did an age back for v16: http://acorn.xara.hosting. I might get round to XPro+ sometime.

Acorn

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Thanks for this!

I can tough out the UI, of course. But why not have even a basic light/dark theme? Something like that tends to be optional in many programs.

Thanks for the zoom tip as well. This one (numpad key shortcuts) seems like a rather basic menu/toolbar item to have...

I'll work around all this stuff of course, I just figured I'd mention them as I may not be the only one that had those impressions.

ok; not sure though what standardisation you are referring to as you have not defined any

confusion usually results from not having read the manual, watched the videos, or sought out available references - if something appears totally different it should prompt you to do all that up-front, which has to be a good thing ;)

Apologies, I thought I had already specified - I mean the Microsoft UI standards for Windows. There's a document floating around somewhere that serves as a guide for developers to help them set their UI to behave as users would normally expect, to help make it intuitive and reduce trips to the documentation.

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There's a document floating around somewhere

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yes you mentioned it exists... but you have not referenced it, ie you have not linked to where it is, so that we can read for ourselves what you are alluding to [tso as to avoid confusion ;)]

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a guide for developers to help them set their UI to behave as users would normally expect, to help make it intuitive

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the developers of the programs I use most, such as corel painter and toon boom harmony, know very well what it is their core users want and expect, not sure xara is any different...

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reduce trips to the documentation

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best way to do this is to use the program; a lot....

here is the corel painter 2023 UI:

Attachment 133107

one of the best I know - no colour except for brushes, colour palette, and buttons that turn orange when active

it is incredibly easy to get round - does it conform to some notional MS UI standards? I don't know, nor am I bothered because it does it's job

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...ace-principles

thank you ;)

interesting... but these suggestions are surely for OS oriented apps that integrate into windows...

if you wanted to follow a standard in a graphic app it would be adobe [apple not MS] would it not?

and when the coloured icons for tools that are still present in ver 19 first appeared in xara they were decried as 'toytown'

never going to please everyone....

and I am still not into self harm, though I will admit to a fondness of hyperbole ;)

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Originally Posted by handrawn

interesting... but these suggestions are surely for OS oriented apps that integrate into windows...

if you wanted to follow a standard in a graphic app it would be adobe [apple not MS] would it not?

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The document itself is a guide for Windows, yes. But really the point of it is to create a relatively familiar interface for most users when using their application. Whether MS chooses to observe the ideas of others or vice versa, there's enough similarity between OSes that most 'normal' app behaviours are at least similar across all platforms. (Unless you wanna talk Microsoft Bob or one of those gawd-awful exceptions. lol) The point is, it's a long-established set of guidelines because these types of application behaviours are what the user anticipates. Fair point about Adobe though... although I don't know if I would expect Xara's users to be people coming from a much more expensive offering... it would likely be the opposite I would think.

I'm clearly an outlier here, and yeah - you can't please everyone... but I'm a firm believer in at least stating the impression I got so that it's known. They can ignore it if they so choose of course, but they won't have the chance to consider it if they don't know it exists.

standardisation is useful, but functionality beats it every time for me

what I would not like is all apps to be exactly the same in all respects, because then choice goes out the window...

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Originally Posted by handrawn

standardisation is useful, but functionality beats it every time for me

what I would not like is all apps to be exactly the same in all respects, because then choice goes out the window...

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I agree. In addition, some variation among the apps' UIs helps in remembering where the different tools, panels etc. are located and how each app actually works.

If I compare the UIs of XDP 19 with the Affinity apps, the different layouts and looks visualize in one fell swoop their unique workflow. However, it requires fairly frequent use of each of the apps or else I have to reacquaint myself with their underlying logic again.

take the function PAN

I can think of at least three ways to do this:

hold down spacebar and move mouse
hold down middle mouse button and move mouse
hold down right mouse button and move mouse

they all have their pros and cons depending what you are doing and what the program might do instead, eg context menu in xara for the third example which you may prefer; software companies look at their packages holistically in terms of functioality [well the good ones do anyway]

and that is the crux - some of the time it's best one way and some of the time another way; it's not practical to have it all ways...

there are aspects of xara's UI that 'get in my way' frequently, but I understand why they are there - double click to switch tool, and the ability to add an object to a layer that is locked [!] to name but two