Hello All,
This is my first time posting to the forum but I have been reading it for several years now and so I’ll start by saying thank you to the developers, all the regulars and everyone else who is so generous with their knowledge and ideas (not to mention all the incredible modules and music).
I’ve only just been playing with V4 for a few days now, but there are a couple basic UI details that seem like they would really speed up patch creation and might be fairly easy to implement even in an incremental update (I’m not a programer though so I could very easily be wrong about that). Also, these are desktop specific requests, seems like they wouldn’t necessarily be as relevant on iPad. Most of these suggestions would mirror functionality of other desktop apps.
Tool Tips for the main navigation icons (Midi, Edit Modules, etc…) I eventually memorized these, but I think they would be really helpful to a beginner on the first few tries.
Plain “Esc” instead of (or in addition to) “Command Esc” to navigate up levels in a module (the reverse of double clicking to enter a module). Just one less key to press and more a common convention. This would also be a nice additional way to close the inspector window.
“Add Module” Library Navigation:
Escape to exit library (even though “Command Return” toggles in and out I think escape is a more natural to exit if you decide not to place a module.
“Search Modules” field selected automatically when you enter the library so you can just start typing without first clicking into the field.
Tab, and then arrow keys to navigate the module library without the mouse, and then enter to place the selected module.
I kind of miss being able to get to the module library from the contextual “Add Node” menu like you could in V3.
Spacebar to toggle the “Run Patch” button on and off.
Center (Scroll Wheel) click to toggle panning. This would be the same as holding down the “option” key but you could do it one handed with just the mouse.
Double clicking an expression or text node automatically opens the inspector and selects the text field so you can start typing without clicking into the field first. Seems like this would be a natural extension of the awesome way that an expression node is created when you double click on a patch point.
As I said, I’m obviously not a programmer or any kind of expert in anything really, so I apologize if any of these suggestions is nonsensical.
Thanks for all your hard work on such an amazing piece of software!
Cheers,
Josh
We are eventually going to implement these as a sort of pop up window in a help section in the inspector panel for nodes, but can you explain or sketch exactly what kind of tooltip you’re describing if not something like this?
I will check about this and update it with an answer.
Gotcha.
Good point!
This would be nice, but with the limited knowledge I have of how the file browser works, I don’t think things can be highlighted like that. I’ll look into it though.
I doubt that will change just because this is a Universal app now and the idea is that the UX is as similar as possible between iPad and Mac. Mac adds the right click menu for nodes which is a lot faster while building.
This is a cool idea.
I literally did not know my mouse had this feature until this comment, lol. Will throw it up on suggestions, that seems nice especially for people who might only have one hand.
Also good feedback.
These are all very well-considered UX improvements. We really love and welcome thoughtful feedback like this. As always, I can’t guarantee all or any of this will be implemented and on what timeline, but I will add these to our internal feature suggestion tracker so Taylor will see them.
If you have any ideas about the module library that come up as well, please let me know also! I can do more to make changes in that arena myself - these other things are things that have to happen in the backend of Audulus.
Thanks for responding so quickly and completely to the suggestions!
The node documentation is fantastic, thanks for the link.
This is what I meant for the tool tips, basically just says the name of an interface button when you hover over it.
The center click to pan thing is a future of the app “Miro” which I use all the time at work. It has a similar feel to Audulus in that it is an open-ended whiteboard / virtual workspace and it is really great to be able to both zoom in and out and pan with the same finger.
I will definitely send any module library ideas your way as they occur to me, but I will say I love your attention to detail making the modules line up inputs and outputs by type and having the heights be modular and even number multiples of the tiles.
That makes sense thanks for the explanation! I’m sure I’ll get used to command esc quickly, I just have a lot of muscle memory to overcome on that one.
Amazing work on V4 by the way, really impressive achievement. This software is really unique in the way it acts as a tool, a playground and an education environment all at the same time.
