We released some significant changes in the last few days:
- Improved shape recognition engine: We’ve made the algorithms smarter, so you should find Dabbleboard detecting the right shapes more often, hopefully always. Let us know if you still find wrong shapes being detected (e.g. triangle when you wanted a rectangle).
- New selection system: It was always a pain to hold down the Shift key when needing to select multiple objects. Now when you click in any empty space, you’ll find a tool that you can click to select a rectangular area. And just click objects to add or remove them from the selection. To deselect everything, just click in any empty space.
Background: We never liked having to hold down the Shift key, but couldn’t figure out the right solution to the multi-selection problem. We really didn’t want to add a Select tool to the toolbar like all other drawing apps (we almost gave up and gave in though!), because it’s annoying to keep returning to the toolbar when switching between drawing and selecting. After literally months of going back-and-forth with various ideas, we had a Eureka moment with this one. It seems obvious now, and we feel stupid for not finding this solution sooner, but we’re glad we finally did. - Save button: This is for all of you that need to push the button to feel safe. Right now, we’re still saving the drawing continuously as well (when it says “Saving… Saved”), but soon we’ll stop doing that. We’ll still auto-save every-so-often (like Gmail or Microsoft Word) but not every second like now.
February 2, 2009 at 8:25 pm
nice features…
I have 2 problems after the changes…
-Working on a Background picture.
As far as I remember, the pics were being moved by using the icon at their corner to eliminate selecting and moving around by mistake. Well it does not work anymore. We find ourselves selecting, moving, deleting the backgroung picture we are drawing pics on. If you allow us to upload something as background, I guess this would be solved.
-Second is auto select.
It is a bit hard to work with/on background pics as it is hard to deselect and find ourselves doing strange things that we do not want to do like moving icons, deleting them etc…
Al least shift gave the freedom when to activate multiselection. Now you have to disable it everytime you draw an object.
hope it is constructive feedback. Thanks for working on improving the tool.
GJ
Cross
February 2, 2009 at 9:41 pm
Cross, thanks for the feedback. We unintentionally changed the way selection of pics works (thanks for catching it!). We just released the fix to revert it to how it was before. I.e. for pics you need to either drag the blue border or the move-button to move it; click-and-drag right in the middle and it’ll draw. Let me know if you still have trouble with selection etc.
February 3, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Works fine now..
Thanks.
February 3, 2009 at 2:57 pm
one more… with the new version of smart recognition, it is harder to draw “arc arrow”. It seems that the arc is much more frequently recognized as rectangle or equalateral.
February 3, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Cross, try doing a swift stroke for the curved line. We basically shifted the balance in favor of rectangles a bit. It’s possible we went too far and we should dial it back a little.
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