Photoshop toolbar

[lblb]

I'm pretty busy with exams this weekend so I won't have as much time as I would like to work on this. In any case, your comment about the tool panel not being affected by the Focus function made me think about something... and I finally found a way to have the toolbar always in no-focus mode without having to push a button. Pretty cool... will post it as soon as I can.

[Steve B]

Worked on a rough for a kids book idea today, and recorded some bugs. Just call me the bug man. I've uploaded the pic too, just to share what I'm doing with your toolbar-- had to screw with the res to make it work though. !! May try and fix that later.

Anyways, I have to say, despite the bugs, its very hard to work without it. I've gotten very used to having its functions at a touch.

I was also using a two-button pen today, which led to some interesting discoveries re: the AHK toolbar and its funky bugs, because using the Left-click button got me out of some jams. Essentially, I've been learning how to get out of situations where the toolbar stalls out (left-click, touching palette headers, using the Sai pull-down menus, etc.), and I thought that might be useful to you to know to better understand what's happening.

Can’t get Hand to engage? Press left-click. Sometimes that works.

Can’t get Hand to disengage? Press left-click which also sometimes
engages the hand as well. ??

Can’t get a Palette to close? Tap the panel header to re-engage the panel. Then you can close it.

Can’t get the AHK program to respond? Can’t even get the Windows Taskbar to respond? Use something from the Sai pull-down menus. Then you can use the AHK toolbar again.

Panels sometimes lose their “X”. You can still close them with the toggle on the Palette Subpanel though.

Can’t get a tool to switch properly? Or is the right-click switching to something like Eraser? Open the Tools Palette, and click through it. Then everything works better.

Thought that might be helpful.

edit- on the note of the Tools Palette- the "everything works better" definitely doesn't apply to the Pan on right-click. This is still very intermittent for me. I can't figure out what is causing it to stall out, not engage, or not disengage, but its relatively frequent. I'm wondering if it has to do with often changing tools, or opening and closing palettes and supanels (like the tools subpanel).??

Today for the first time, I've also had some odd stuff going on with resize tool not disengaging. I hit it, use it, and then can't get it to stop working, even if I pull the pen out of range. I have to either use a Palette, or switch a tool or some such thing, then it lets go. Odd.

Oh, and I redid the pic at a higher ratio, if you care to look again. There should be a lot more detail. I was leaving the house last time, and couldn't be bothered to do it right. Spent a few minutes this time.

[lblb]

Wow, that's beautiful! Somewhat reminiscent of "Le Petit Prince" with the blond kid, the purple and green pastel color palette and the watercolor feel. It's just mind-blowing to me that you drew this digitally and not on a real canvas!

I'm glad that you find the toolbar to be useful despite all the bugs. We've both put a lot of effort in this and, with the essential contributions of thatcomicsguy, I think we've come up with something that is pretty cool. Obviously, it's going to be way way cooler when all the bugs are ironed out! I am just reminded of the discussions that we had at the beginning of this thread where we outlined what would be desirable for a tool like this... It's actually pretty satisfying to see that most of the main objectives have already been met! Probably the two most important that are left are the ability for the user to customize the toolbar (which may still be quite a long way off) and having the toolbar automatically change according to the active program (which, when I think about it, may not be so desirable now that switching the toolbar activates the corresponding program). I find it really amazing that through a community like this forum people with completely different interests can share ideas and "collaborate" on projects like this.

Anyway (if it's not clear: I'm bored to death with grading right now!), just keep on posting bugs and ideas, that's how we'll get this thing to run smoothly.

[Steve B]

Bugs-

Left-click-
As I used a two-button pen yesterday, I ran into some additional odd stuff.
The primary one is that left-click doesn't work as left-click with the AHK toolbar in use. For example, normally, you can left click on any tool in the Tool Palette, and drag it to a new position. You can do this with the mouse left click, as well as with a two button pen (set the 2nd button to left-click in the Sai settings (Other> Options> Sai Digitizer Support). But you can't do it with the AHK toolbar open (or minimized, or anything). The left-click button still creates input, as I discussed above in the earlier post, providing me "escapes" from the Pan tool locking up sometimes, it just doesn't give you a normalized input.

In the same vein, I was using Sai and Artrage simultaneously last night, and found out that you can't use right-click any more in Artrage to pan. You can right-click while not moving the cursor to engage Tab, but you can't drag. Right-click and put pen to paper and you'll just draw. It doesn't matter if I have Artrage AHK toolbar open or the Sai AHK toolbar open. I can still use the right-click + modifier commands though, like Rotate and Zoom, for example, so clearly right-click is being recognized when it's paired with a key stroke. But its a no-go if you want to just right-click and pan.

Of course, on both of these accounts-- the left-click not working in Sai, and the right-click not working in Artrage- if you just exit the AHK toolbar everything works the way it normally does.

Thought those might provide some clues to the odd right and left click experiences we're getting right now.

edit-
Uploaded a pic I was working on today. I did the inks with natural media, but did all the watercolor work in Paint Tool Sai while using the toolbar.

I am having regular occurences of certain tool functions not turning off once used. I frequently tap the resize button now, and then need to tap the Redo key to get the resize tool to unpress itself. Same goes for panning. If its not responding, I can tap the actual Hand button, but it sometimes won't let go. So, I tap the Undo button and I can then move forward. It reminds me of the experience I was having with the normal Pan tool, but it seemed to be an experience I was having with other tools too.

I can't tell if it has much to do with having many Palettes open or not, but I do that a lot. Opening and closing them. On that note, I am getting some occurences where I get Palettes without an "X". It still closes with the toggle, but I can't close it with the "X" since it's not there. Odd stuff.

[lblb]

Just a quick one to say that I'm actively working on some of the bugs you mentioned and will try to post an updated version as soon as I can.

Makes me wonder: did the monster/dragon appear under the bed? Or has it been growing there for a while? Or did the bed land on it? Can't wait to eventually read the whole thing!

[Steve B]

Good news. I hope the bug hunt is useful, and that you're making progress on them.

As for the dragon, that's its own mischevious tale....

[lblb]

I'll try to upload something soon (unfortunately it's exam week for my students so that's keeping me pretty busy). Hopefully the right-click functions will now behave better (and I think the strange left-click stuff that you described should be eliminated at the same time).

I've added all the 123 buttons and set all the tools to Shift+letter. However I am wondering where in Sai can you set the shortcuts for the tools to Shift+letter? If I double-click a tool on the tool window, I can set the shortcut to a letter in "Shortcut Key" but it doesn't seem to allow modifiers like Shift. Or am I wrong?

Also, I'll change the icon fro the transparency button (and take a look at its code) and was wondering if you want to keep it at the top of the Sai tool subtoolbar or if you would prefer to put it on the left of the eraser button (as it's the only button that doesn't have 123 buttons to its left)?

[Steve B]

If you go into Other>Keyboard Shortcuts, you can pull up a window with all the shortcuts. Click the Shift box, and it will pull up all the Shift combo shortcuts, then.... Sh*t, I see you're right. I hadn't actually tried to do this yet, but had just done it hypothetically. Hmmmmm...

I can't quite think of a organized option, because you're right, it does seem like it needs to be a single key for these. You can press the #s when assigning a key to a tool, and it'll work, but it is already assigned to various Brush Density settings. From the Keyboard Shortcuts chart, it looks like you can't delete the pre-existing shortcuts for those and assign it only to a tool instead-- if you assign a # to a key both commands appear red in the chart. But when I tested it out, the # key shortcuts did seem to work as shortcuts for the tools. That's only 10 keys though.

You can also assign random other keys ( \ / ; ' . , etc) on the keyboard; it'll let you. But when I went to test it, no command seemed to be going through.

I guess that means, in the mean time, that I'd like to assign the shortcut keys back to letters. I've done them in an order of sorts, but I don't want to reassign normal key commands.

So, I've got something like this instead now--

Pencil
1= B
2= C
3= G

Ink (Pen)
1= I
2= J
3= K

Watercolor
1= M
2= N
3= O

Brush
1= P
2= Q
3= R

Blur
1= T
2= U
3= V

Eraser= E


I actually had multiple setups in mind for the Eraser tool, but haven't gotten to it. If I do, I've got wyz available, so I'd go with that. If I work out other good variants, perhaps I'll reassign the # keys for them.

Re: the transparency button-- I'd say lets just leave it as is for now, in terms of placement. You're changing the color to red when its active though? That's what I understood from your comment.

[lblb]

Here is v. 2.4:

AR_PS_SAI_SP_FF_v_2_4.zip

Major changes:

1) The toolbar should now never take the focus away from the active application (i.e. the Focus button is always on). So I removed all the Focus buttons/right-clicks.

Note: The way that I was able to do this: I discovered that when a toolbar A is attached to another toolbar B (so that A moves when B is moved), toolbar A can be set to never take the focus and it will still move with B. So then I changed the code: the move button is now a toolbar in itself and the different toolbars/subtoolbars are now attached to the Move button/toolbar. Note that this means that the Move button is the only button that will actually steal the focus from the active program. (Also you will note that the focus is stolen very briefly when you open up the subtoolbars... I'll work on this).

2) To facilitate playing with the code, I split the file in two (there is now a file named ToolbarSubroutines.ahk which you should ignore). This is irrelevant to you but it may mean that some of the toolbar switching may be a little slower. Note that I just did this to make my life easier right now, but I will re-merge the two files together later on when the code is more "finalized".

3) I've set all the 123 buttons on the Sai tools panel to the letters you posted on your previous post. (I was actually working on the same assumption as you and thought that we could assign more than just letters to tools... well, we all learned something!) See how it works. (And the tool switches should all work when straight line is on.)

4) Contrary to what I said earlier, I haven't had time to work on the transparency button.

5) When the main menu was opening, I often accidentally selected an item because it opened too close to where the pen was. So I have now set it to open below the menu button.

About the right-click and left-click stuff:

I think most of the left-click problems you were getting were because of the right-click stuff that was interfering. Hopefully the erratic left-clicks will be solved now. (I couldn't reproduce them by the way... we'll see.)
I have made several changes to the right-click function in Sai. The first one is that I put the function to right-click pan in Sai in a separate file (it's the file named Right_Click_5.ahk in the main folder). And I have set this file to be launched when the Sai toolbar is selected, and to be closed when the other toolbars are selected. This means that the right-click stuff in Sai shouldn't "bleed into" the other programs anymore.
The code for right-click pan in Sai (i.e. in Right_Click_5.ahk) is significantly different from the previous one. It behaves much better for me. Is it the case for you also?
One of the main difficulties with the code seems to be that when the right-click pan works well, the right-clicks on the Sai toolbar become less reliable. Is that behaving better now? If not, a few suggestions:

- See how the right-click pan function works with this new code, but don't right-click on the Sai toolbar (Note that right-clicking on the other toolbars shouldn't be problematic).

- I've included a second file named Right_Click_2.ahk that contains a different code for the right-click pan. This code is very different from the one in Right_Click_5. While it would be good if you could test it to see which right-click pan code is better, this new code will actually make the right-clicks on the Sai toolbar (and only on that toolbar) more erratic.

- To use Right_Click_2.ahk instead of Right_Click_5.ahk, open the file ToolbarSubroutines.ahk in a text editor and change 5 to 2 on line 487.

- If you see that both of the right-click pan files make your work with the toolbar too difficult (hopefully not!), you can just delete line 487 to just get rid of the right-click pan function until I post something new!

So which of right-click pan codes (5 or 2) works better for you (if any)?

To do:

- A lot! But I've learned so much lately that I'm actually looking forward to having time to address all the previous posts! I'm very busy with exams this week so I didn't have time to work as much as I would want on this but I have written down everything you've noted in previous posts so I will hopefully take care of that soon. In particular, I haven't touched the different issues that you mentioned about the four Windows and their X buttons in Sai, but that should be one of the main priorities soon.

[Steve B]

Fun! I'm looking forward to playing with it and testing it out.