Designer Pro + / UI colour scheme and shortcut key reference

[berklee]

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.

[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

[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

[berklee]

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

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).

[berklee]

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

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.

[handrawn]

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

[berklee]

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.

[handrawn]

There's a document floating around somewhere

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 ]

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

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...

reduce trips to the documentation

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

here is the corel painter 2023 UI:



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

[berklee]

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

[handrawn]

thank you