I’ve now added some more functionality to the view drawing tools, adding a new polygon tool and a simple line tool. In addition to this the tools now also have a toolbar space for configuration of the tools (like fill and stroke that will be used for the new shape).
This new toolbar area also houses a separate selection area to the right where you can see information about the current selection and buttons to align, group and ungroup selected layers.
First tester feedback
I’ve now also had my very first round of testing with some designer friends to get some early feedback on the base structure and concepts of the application. While there isn’t all that much there yet, I wanted to do this as early as possible to avoid getting too invested in ideas that end up not working. So I made a first test build and sent it off to the testers and had them share their screen while trying it out to see how they’d do with different tasks.
Thankfully the general response was good, but more importantly I also got some good initial feedback on some things that were difficult to understand that I’ll need to try and clarify. For example the fact that the layer node panels displayed in the inspector represent a sequence with a specific top to bottom order that matters. This is something I’ll need to make clear in some way as similar panels in most other design software usually just represent different properties, while the order of them doesn’t matter.
Other additions and improvements
Here are some more additions and changes I’ve been working on since the last update:
- New document tab bar for working multiple documents open at the same time.
- Separated out the old fill and stroke properties of shape nodes into separate fill and stroke nodes.
- Many large and small UI component tweaks.
- New layer context menu with support for reordering, deleting and renaming layers accessible from both the layers list and right-clicking on layers in the main view.
- Layer re-ordering improvements, including reordering multiple selected layer and moving to top/bottom.