Zap Studio UI tweaks / QoL list

Feature Requests
#1

Offloading some post-it notes. Some are niggles, some are Quality of Life things:

  1. Could you have Studio save the panel layout, either globally, or per-project? Every time I open it I have to resize the panels the way I like 'em, and it never remembers
  2. Could you correct the button text on the Export >> “Would you like to commit before exporting?” dialog - it should be Yes / No, not OK / Cancel
  3. After renaming an item in the media library, please exclude the item’s original name when checking the name’s not already in use. If you leave the name unchanged (say, for instance, you accidentally double-clicked an item and then click away to cancel the rename) it pops up a dialog saying “Name in use!”… which is silly, because it’s in use only by itself. Note this doesn’t happen in the Hierarchy, just in the Media Library
  4. A time-saver for us: could you re-use Preview and Publish dialogs, rather than instanciating a new one each time? For some reason I seem to regularly end up with a stack of Preview dialogs after doing lots of quick edits / iterations. Sometimes you don’t want to immediately close the dialog before editing, as you may want to scan the Zap code again to check something. Once you hit Preview again, there’s no need for that previous dialog - if you could either close or re-use it that’d save us a click :wink:
  5. Could you add up the download sizes for us in the Zap_menu > Analyse dialogs please? Seems like that’d be something a computer ought to be doing for us (!). Totals, please :slight_smile:

Mentioned in a couple of other posts, notably by @marks:

  1. Being able to select multiple objects and drag them around [whether that’s moving nodes in the hierarchy, or moving visible objects on the canvas]
  2. Being able to do ctrl+c ctrl+v to duplicate objects
  3. Being able to change multiple objects’ properties at once by selecting them and changing the property [for example, you may have a bunch of nodes that need their relativeTo setting]

These are almost more important than my list: being able to select multiple nodes simultaneously is so important for workflow, and the missing Cut/Copy/Paste functionality is very frustrating.

4 Likes
#2

Seconding the panel layout. But I want to add on that it would be nice to have two columns of panels (or just be able to swap places of some of them) sometimes. Having the controllers, hierarchy, and properties panel all on the left side means I’m contantly resizing them to make easily find what I’m looking for in each one. If I could swap it to the right hand side while I’m not using the media library panel or symbol definitions panel, that would make things a little easier :slight_smile:

I come from an Adobe Creative Cloud background so I’m just spoiled and used to having my panels all around the screen (and some living on a second monitor while I work) :sweat_smile:

3 Likes
#3

Gosh, yep. I do that left-column resizing dance a fair bit, too. Got plenty of width on my monitor but not enough height. [insert joke about my stature here]

(Always found it interesting that the first prototype for Blender 3D was basically a clever configurable panel system for the window: splitting/joining/resizing panes, with any pane able to show any UI panel. Barely any 3D functionality working, but the window/UI system was the business, right from the get-go)

3 Likes
#4

I would like to detachable panels. When my lists get long it’s a pain to keep resetting it each time I move from symbol to sub-symbol.

Steve

PS. one more to add. More a bug I think. You can not drag and drop items to a scrips past 75-100 lines of code. I get long scrips and try to drag in items and they just stop at a point.

2 Likes
#5

I’m going to link my suggestions here as well.

2 Likes
#6

Well that’s a little depressing: I’m not sure the response to your suggestions (multiple object selection / cut’n’paste etc) was very helpful. Moving objects into a group in order to control them all together is not the same as allowing multiple nodes to be selected and then setting attributes directly.

I hope you don’t mind: I’m going to copy your suggestions into the OP.

3 Likes