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[Steve B]

Ah, a man after my own heart-- you know Rimbaud. A wonderful, eccentric poet. So many are. I know most fans of his love "A Season in Hell" but "Illuminations" is really my favorite collection.

That's exciting news about the Hover Button. !!! Hee hee! Does it stay closed if the cursor passes over it while drawing-- i.e. when contact with the screen is occurring? The hope is that it would only drop down the full palette if you hovered over the shrunken icon.

Re: the color- I don't know if it helps, but Sai does have a little color icon with the active color at the top of the Tool Palette. I thought that might help key the appropriate info for the Color Wheel icon in some way. ?? It would be useful, but is less important than the ability to have the Palette drop down with the cursor hovering.

Finally, yes, the 123 buttons seem to be working perfectly. I still like the idea of highlighting the active mini button, as well as the active Tool, at the same time, as I described in an earlier post. Beyond that, the more paintings I do the clearer it becomes which tools I would like to be using more commonly, so I'll probably have the need for some 456 stuff in the next week or two. My guess is just that one tool will have 4, one 456, one 45, etc. that kind of thing, depending on the number of variants I would commonly use. It also occurred to me that I could just change the shortcut key temporarily if I was doing a certain style of painting that I knew I was going to be using a certain set of tools a lot for.

I want to keep the setup small, and it is growing a bit. Of course, I have other cool ideas, but I'll wait until we see if you can get the "Hover-Drop-Down-Palette" thing working first. I also know you still have a few older bugs to iron out. Sorry to hear that tests are going on forever! When does the tidal wave look like it'll end?

[lblb]

You cracked me up today! First the “god” thing in the Samsung forum... laughed all day... and when I stopped laughing, I got home and read "Ah, a man after my own heart"! Still laughing!

I am from Quebec (i.e. I speak French) and there is a strong connection to French literature. As a teenager, I naturally went through Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine. At that age, "A season in hell" was, just like "The Flowers of Evil", a source of marvel and a really revolutionary read (because it instilled ideas of revolution, and also because it completely changed my relationship to poetry). But today, I don't find that these works really speak to me anymore. Except for (strange connection here!) "Illuminations" which I still find myself going to on a semi-regular basis. Let's call it a more mature revolutionary read! Indeed, a wonderful poet. Maybe it's because I'm very involved in science right now (my girlfriend will surely say "too much"!), but I find that poetry that is more concerned with the physical world, and less toward "sensations", affects me more. In that sense, in the last few years, nothing has made my mind more happy, confused, satisfied and angered than Neruda. He's quickly become essential to my sanity.

Anyways... Below is a first primitive try at the hover-show thing. Just extract the two files into the main folder for the toolbar. Then you have to start the file separately from the toolbar by double-clicking Hover_Color_2.ahk. (You will also have to close the file separately by right-clicking its tray icon).

What this is supposed to do:
The Sai color window will be replaced by a small colorpicker icon. If the pen hovers over this icon, it disappears, and the Color window appears. If the pen leaves the Color window, the window disappears and the icon reappears.
I've set the icon to be exactly in the middle of the Color window. This means that if the Color window is set to show only the color wheel, the icon will be smack in the middle. If the Color window has some of the bottom panels open, then it will be off center. Note that the icon can be placed anywhere in relation to the Color window (relative or absolute position), we just need to decide where (and its size can also be changed).

This is very much a first try and I really just want to see if this basic concept is indeed helpful like you thought it would be. There is a lot of place for improvement. Among the current limitations:
- You can’t drag or draw through the icon without having the Color window pop up
- For some reason, when you move very quickly the windows in Sai by dragging their titlebar, sometimes the cursor moves off of the titlebar very briefly. This means that if your pen is on the Color Window’s toolbar and you move it too fast, the pen can slip off the titlebar and then the colorpicker icon will be shown while you’re still dragging the Color window. This means: when you drag the Color window by its titlebar, don’t go too fast!
- In Sai full screen, it works great. It also works well when not in Sai fullscreen but for some reason when not in fullscreen the colorpicker icon steals the focus when it appears when you leave the Color window (so you have to reclick on the canvas to give it the focus). Not sure why it doesn’t behave this way in fullscreen mode.
- I haven’t at all tried to integrate it with the toggle button on the AHK toolbar. Also the X close button won’t be visible anymore on the Color window.

Despite all the current limitations:
- Does it actually work for you?
- Is this the kind of thing you had in mind?
- Apart from the stuff above, any ideas for improvement?
- Any major bug that I didn’t list?
- Is it worth pursuing this idea? Or maybe go for a different aim?

[Steve B]

Hey, lblb, what's your name, btw? I keep talking about you to my wife, and I just call you "LB". Seems about time to pull back the curtain, and who reveal who Oz really is.....!!

As for Neruda, he's probably my favorite poet, bar none. He has a fantastic sense of the physical about him, and quite an interesting range topically. Love poems, poems for the people, problematic Stalinist poems (!!), nature poems, etc. I love his "Odes to Common Things" and his "Twenty Songs of Love...". "Extravagaria" is a great, full throated collection, and, despite the terribly "bagginess" of it all, I rather love his "Canto General", terrible Stalinist politics and all. The first section in that, the "Heights of Macchu Pichu" is a fantastic creation story for South America. A fantastic blending of metaphysical and the physical. He's clearly the 20th century's retort to Whitman, IMO.

As for the AHK bar..... LOL! Back on topic.

The idea of the Color Palette shrinking/expanding seems fantastic. Right now, though, I'm having some major glitches going on even toying with it. Each time I use it and then go back to Sai, it does indeed shift dominance away from it. It's not just requiring a double-tap though. My computer is actually freezing each time I use it. It then seems to pause, then out pops and error message that "the edit has been canceled." Then I can use the new color to paint with. This happens each time. So, for now, it's a no go on testing it much.

Of course, I'd like to be able to draw a stroke under it without opening the palette, that's a given. But something that's simple and would make it more functional is to have the icon be located upper left corner in the header of the palette. This would allow me to put the icon right at the top of the of the picture- thus, less likelihood of inadvertently scrolling over it, and it also is less in the way of the image.

edit-- Ah, it's working a bit better now. Yes, this thing is awesome. Would it be nice if it seemlessly went back and forth between the icon and the canvas? Yes. But its still very cool and functional. If this could be done for the Layers Palette too, that would be very cool as well-- perhaps a mini-Layers icon?

[lblb]

Ah someone who appreciates Neruda... that's why you sound like a decent being! I love your description of him. Indeed Stalinist poems! His range is absolutely mind-boggling. And when in the right mood, not much can beat the one-two-three punch of a few days with the Heights of Macchu Pichu, 100 Years of Solitude, and a nice bottle of wine!

"He's clearly the 20th century's retort to Whitman." Because I'm French-speaking, I've only recently started to read English-language poetry (I know: tragic!). Fortunately, Neruda and some of the other greats have some of the best translators you could hope for... so I (blindly) trust the translations. While I can appreciate Whitman's importance and his contributions, I still need more time with him to fully grasp (is that ever possible?) who he is and how he fits and doesn't fit in my world.

Alright, on to reality:

I finally was able to obtain the error message you got (it's really not common on my EP121). In trying to come up with a solution, I think I may have come up with something like the home run I needed. At least it behaves very well on my computer, but I haven't tested it extensively.

Delete the two files from yesterday and extract in the main folder for the toolbar the files in the zip file below (now for both the Layer and Color windows). Also: for this to work well, it is better (at least for now) to not have the X buttons on these two windows. So replace the file ToolbarSubroutines.ahk with the one in the zip file: this new file is the same as before except that the X buttons for the Color and Layer windows won't show up.

Since I haven't integrated the functions into the AHK toolbar yet, it's better if you launch the two "hover" scripts (i.e. Hover_Color_3.ahk and Hover_Layer_3.ahk) before you launch the toolbar (note that you don't need to launch the toolbar for the two hover scripts to work). Once you do that, both the Color and Layer windows should have a hover/show/hide icon.

Changes from previous try:
- I think it actually works now!
- Shouldn't have any of the error messages seen before (hopefully!)
- The focus shouldn't be stolen anymore
- You should be able to draw or right-click pan straight through both of the icons: they should "react" only if you hover over them.
- Icons are at the top left corner of the windows

As before, you can move the Color and Layer windows wherever you want, but don't do it super fast.

So does it work? In my limited tests, it doesn't seem to interfere at all with the toolbar (except the toggle buttons for the Color and Layer windows) or the pan function, but maybe more extensive testing will show differently.

Cheers!

lblb,
otherwise known as Luc B!

[Steve B]

Wow, Luc, this is awesome. Really smooth and simple interface, and yet super functional. Why is this not the way things are done in all pen-based art programs? Can we do this with Artrage too?

I guess the next issue, besides fixing some of the bugs from a few pages ago, is how do you think we should integrate it into the interface?

One thought was that you could press the side roll-out arrow (for the palettes), and up would pop up the Palettes subpanel like normal, which except it would include the newly designed buttons instead of the old ones. You could then hover over each of them in turn (while they're still in the palette subpanel "home"), and out would pop up the full-sized Palette, which you could then drag to where ever you wanted them to be placed (or not drag them, for that matter, if you didn't plan on using them)-- with the new full functionality of the mini-icon being in tow. Then drop them were you want, and voila! the mini-icon is back in action in its new location, and there's now a missing icon in the "home" of the palette subpanel. I guess, then, if you re-opened the toolbar for that program from the main menu for some reason, then the locations of all the drop-down palettes would revert, presumably, back to their home locations. ??

The only issue with this method that I see is what would happen if you "rolled-up" the Palettes subpanel? Would all the palette icons roll-up too, even if I had moved them and wanted to use them? Because what usually happens is that I don't regularly open up and use all the palettes. Thus, I don't really want to have to keep all the mini-icons around if I don't need to. I'd rather just roll up the unused ones. But it would seem like I couldn't do that with this method.... assuming one can even do this method. I can't tell if it'd be worth it anyways. The usage would be very streamlined if you could just grab the basic icon and move it from the palette subpanel. Still, I like how tiny the little drop-down icons are right now. Very unobtrusive. I don't really want them to get bigger. I also just thought of the fact that it might be rather difficult to pick out just the palette you wanted to open up and drag, if they all opened up just by having you hover over them. I could see a person accidentally dropping down a palette pretty regularly, which would then cover up the palette they were hoping to drop down and grab. ???

The other idea is to keep the Palette subpanel as a home base in some way, where you launch the functionality of the floating/moving icon. In this version, the subpanel is the dashboard where all you do is activate things, much as it is now. The icons there never change, nor could they ever be moved, but instead launch the new functions, with their scroll-over/drop-down functionality. What this might allow one to do, as a different option, would be that you could launch the drop-down floating icons from there, then roll back up the palette subpanel with the right-most arrow, and the floating icons would be left out there. This is sort of what happens right now, because currently if I launch a palette from the palette subpanel, and then rollup the entire palette subpanel, the palette I have launched remains available visually (even though the palette subpanel is closed). This is nice for launching those things you want, then shrinking the "launching" interface (the palette subpanel) back down. If you applied this to the current functionality, I could then be left with whatever floating mini-icons I want, but with the Palette subpanel totally closed (and all the palettes I don't want open off the screen). That's a cool idea. The issue? You wouldn't be able to close the Palettes without re-opening the Palette Subpanel, because they'd all be toggles, right?

I understand, from your previous description that you've had to remove the closing "X" from the palettes to get good responsivity from the "Hover-Dropdown" functionality. I could live with that though, I think, if we could get this far more powerful ability to work smoothly for all the palettes. Who needs to close a palette when it reduces itself automatically to something so tiny just by not hovering over it? I know we keep making things (closing "X"s, right-click on buttons) and then removing them, but the things we're getting (right-click to pan, hover-dropdown) are so much more powerful and functional that I don't really mind.

I don't know if either of those ideas seem like they have value to you. I'm mostly just trying to figure how we would integrate this amazing feature into the normal setup. Got ideas?

[lblb]

Yeah, I thought it came out pretty well! I can definitely see how this kind of function could increase your work flow. But I have to tell you, that stuff really tested the limits of my knowledge and understanding of AHK. So that was really good! I had to use all kinds of tricks that are still "advanced" for what I can do (and I don't fully understand everything of how it works, but it works!). It says version 3 in the name, but it's much more like version 10 000...

I'll read your post more carefully later, but you've thrown some great ideas as to how this could be integrated in the toolbar. Will ponder that carefully...

Also, I have to say that for now, the prospects of using this in Art Rage seem limited. The windows in Art Rage work very differently: I can think of one or two ways that this could potentially be applied to Art Rage but, if it at all worked, it wouldn't be as pretty. The basic problem is that AutiHotkey has some difficulty recognizing the different Art Rage palettes (hence why I still haven't been able to have the button for the Layer texture palette be a toggle.) We'll see!

[Steve B]

This is a long one. I'm sort of thinking "out loud."

Bugs-

Re: an existing bug-- the Colors Palette is affecting the usage of the current mini-palette icon setup. The old bug is that if I open up any of the other Colors Menus (sliders, swatches, etc) it suddenly makes all the Palettes for Sai open up, which I then have to manually close. I'm assuming this has to do with the fact that each Colors sub-palette is, in fact, a different kind of window or menu to Sai, and that it's therefor being recognized by Sai as such? You can open each one separately through a key command, so I imagine that's the issue. But it would be helpful if I could use those extra Color Palette tools with more abandon.

I am also having a minor bug with the drop down window stuff, in and of itself. If I drop down the Layers Palette, and then try and use one of its mini-drop down menus for Effects, Modes, or Textures the rest of the Layers Palette goes away, and I then have to "re-drop down" it after picking what I want from that little baby drop down menu. Does that make any sense? Is there a way to "link" these mini-menus to the main Layers Palette, so that it won't go away when I use these sub-menus? That would be very helpful.

If we end up applying the mini-palette icon system to the other palettes, this problem is going to rear its head up again, particularly in the Palette, where there are other sub-drop-down menus. Any ideas?


Newish Interface Thoughts-

Reducing Button Size in General-
This recent work with the relatively small mini-palette icons has got me thinking about the size of the buttons for the toolbar in general and and if they're bigger than they need to be. I've been pondering this for a while anyways, as the layout has continued to become larger and more sophisticated-- particularly as I'd like a row of 456 buttons, for example. I'm unconvinced we need to, or even should, make the main toolbar buttons as small as the mini-palette icons or the 123 buttons, but I think they could be significantly smaller and just as functional and easily tappable. Perhaps as small as the top row of three buttons in the AHK toolbar? They seem a good compromise size. Opinions?

Issues-
The problem? How to integrate smaller main buttons with the other different sized buttons we already have-- for example, how do you reduce the Tool buttons if you've already got these pretty small 123 buttons sort of attached to the current-sized main tool buttons?

Only have 1234 buttons for Tools?
I've pondered whether I should try and go for only 1234 buttons, instead of 1-6. I was looking at your top row of 3 icons, and I wondered if that size might not be a good size for the "normal" Sai icons in general. If we used that size, but kept the 123 buttons the same size, I think we could have a setup similar to what we've got now, but with 12 on one side and 34 on the other side of each shrunk-down tool button. If we did this, that would also mean we'd need to shrink the size of the top row of three buttons as well, of course.

Changing Shape of Tool Icons?
Perhaps, too, your idea earlier about having a smaller Tool icon for pencils and pens and such is worth exploring more. I don't know. Before, the icon looked sort of "stretched" or "deformed" in some way (probably because the panel was being shifted from a square?). But now that I look at the icons, I wonder if they almost all couldn't be placed in a more rectangular box without being deformed. Also, if the 123 numbers get highlighting, then perhaps we wouldn't need the number in the main tool button, as that info would be readily viewable and findable-- which might allow for smaller Tool windows as well.

Reducing Quantity of Buttons?
My mind also goes into the realm of "how do I simplify the existing setup (rollup arrows, 123 buttons, etc) to allow me more flexibility in regards to generalized button size?" That means things like "Could we remove those Palette Sub-panel buttons if we got these mini-palette icons for ALL the palettes?" Perhaps having the two sets of buttons would then be redundant, and we could just have AHK open in Sai with the mini-palette icons open and mobile right from the get-go (sort of like it is now, for Color and Layers, since I open them "ahead of time")? If we remove the Palettes subpanel, then we wouldn't need the arrow to open it. If we don't need that arrow, then perhaps we would/could just remove the arrow for the Tools subpanel too. If the AHK buttons in general, and the Tool subpanel specifically, are made smaller, then that removes a large part of why I wanted that subpanel to roll-out in the first place. Then perhaps we would remove all together the second row of top buttons that has the drop-down arrows, and integrate the Save button right at the top of the main pull down menu, or something like that? That sort of stuff.

How Mini-Palette Icons Are Changing the Game-
Also, with the palettes potentially readily available and yet virtually hidden otherwise, certain kinds of functionality, to me, doesn't necessarily need to be worked into the main AHK toolbar anymore. This ability you've created is amazing powerful and useful in terms of workflow, IMO. For example, I'd been pondering asking you to put the Rotate button back, now that there's no need for a hand button, but with the Navigator potentially now almost instantly available with a hover-button, that's a function that could be just as accessible (or even more accessible) than having a button in the main AHK toolbar. We can then save that AHK toolbar space for those really needed functions that 1) we want super-readily available (Tools subpanel0, or 2) aren't part of Sai in the first place anyways (like an easily reachable undo and redo button-- or even the abillity to have it automatically undo a bunch of time when its held down), or 3) are part of Sai, but are inconveniently placed in its setup (the Horizontal Flip button, for instance).

Integrating New Mini-Palette Icons into General AHK Interface-
Assuming that the mini-palette icons work out, I guess they would be upsized a bit, to be equal to, perhaps, the size of the current top row of three buttons in AHK? That would create some consistency in interface. On that note, I've wondered where the mini-Palette icons are going to open. They have to open somewhere, right? Perhaps they could open where the current Palettes Subpanel is, just as a sort of "home" that makes it feel more like part of the AHK setup.??

Wrap Up-
Mostly, as you can see, I'm interested in shrinking down and streamlining this interface a bit. I don't think its bloated, but it's clearly bigger and far more powerful (the second part of which is awesome!!!). I also think there's a certain amount of redundancy, if we do, indeed, truly have this very powerful mini-Palette Icon stuff worked out-- the issues with which are the two bugs at the top of this post. In my mind though, besides the older unresolved bugs I have only a few more functions that I'd like to discuss getting into the toolbar (Free Deform, for instance). Once that's done, I guess we'd be moving into User Setup stuff, right? With that in mind, I was thinking that it would probably be good to address this button size/reduction in complexity issue before hand.

Of course, all of this is dependant on the fact that hopefully the code is written in some way that makes changing the size and potentially the shape of all the buttons an easy matter. I don't really know how you've worked that out-- if it's like "Here are the parameters for all buttons for all the programs" at the beginning of all the code, with the details and specifics per program done later, or if the basic shape and size of each button is done button by button for all the programs.

Actually, some little post sort of about how you've set up this code would be both interesting and helpful.

edit--
of course, some sort of mockup might help. !! LOL. I'll see what I can do on that, but I suppose the first point in question is whether or not you think the mini-palette icons can be implemented more fully or not, in re: the its bugs, etc.

[lblb]

Good stuff. I haven't had time to work on this at all since I posted the hover stuff, but will get back to it soon.

I have actually been thinking about reducing the button size for a while now, especially since I saw that even the mini 123 buttons are somewhat easy to hit. I guess the main issue is that we don't want the icon size to affect your work flow: if you have to stop to align your pen on the button before hitting it, then the toolbar is working against you. For this, you will be the better judge. In the current toolbar, the buttons are 50x50 pixels, the buttons on the top two rows are 33x33, the 123 switches are 16x16 and the hover icons are 20x20.

Yes it would be a lot of work to change the button size, but I'm ready to do it. In fact, I eventually will need to do a clean-up of the code when everything is said and done, so reducing the button size at this point would get me started in that direction. (By clean-up I mainly mean that many of the repetitious codes can be put into subroutines that are called up: that will save a lot of coding lines, which means it will make everything faster).

The most intense work involved in changing the icon size would be in making smaller images for the buttons. The code for a given button looks something like this (this is the lasso in Sai):

Gui 1: Add, Picture, x0 y116 w50 h50 vState3211 gSAI21, png/lasso.bmp

What that means:
- "Gui, 1:" means that the button is on toolbar 1, which is the Sai toolbar
- "Add, Picture" means that it's a picture button (by contrast, it could be, for example, a menu, a drop-down list, a checkbox, etc)
- the next four are the x/y coordinates on toolbar 1 of the button and the width/height of the button (this is where the size of the button would need to be changed)
- "vState3211" is a handle that is used to manipulate the button (for example, when you're done with the lasso, the code says "make State3211 (i.e. lasso) disappear and make State3213 (i.e. transform) appear")
- the last parameter is the image that is used for the button (if the image size isn't the same as that from the width/height parameters, the image will be shrunk to w/h, which makes it look not so good; hence the fact that each image needs to be the same size as w/h)

The most important issue at this point would be to settle on a button size and to provide an exact mockup of the new toolbar. So go ahead and draw something up and I'll see what I can do.

I also had an idea about the hover panel thing, but I'm not sure it's better than what you mentioned before:
Maybe we could leave the toolbar as it is with subpanels so that if you don't need to have the hover icons, they won't be there. And then you would just unroll a subtoolbar if you need anything on it.
But then there could be an item in the main menu that, when selected, would open a selection window. In this window, you could choose which subtoolbars and which Sai palettes you want to activate/deactivate as hover icons. Then you click OK, and here they appear as hover icons. That would be easy because it's just a matter of launching/closing the individual hover scripts. When doing this, I don't see the now-hover-to-show AHK subtoolbars as being detached from the main toolbar (they would still be attached and toggable) but we could just launch replicas of the subtoolbars.

As I see it, the selection window (where you would select which windows you want to enable/disable as hover icons) would be a window where we could actually start to include different settings that can be changed by the user. To give you an idea of what it could look like, see the files below (extract the files anywhere, and double-click on Search_ACS.ahk). This is another project I am working on right now (i.e. I had this in mind when I decided to start learning AHK). While it's irrelevant here (i.e. it's used to navigate quickly to chemistry journals! so don't click on the images as they will take you to their website), this can maybe give you an idea of the kind of interface and functions that can easily be constructed in AHK.

[Steve B]

It would seem like I might be able to help with some of the grunt work on this....??? My feeling is that we should make one toolbar (lets say for Sai) with these changes, and I should then try it out. If you could provide the icons that are altered in size, I could do some of the "number crunching" if need be. I don't know how helpful that would be, but I'm game.

My feeling is 33 x 33 for the typical new AHK button. 22 x 22 for the 3 buttons on top. 33 x 33 for the Tool buttons (unless you've got a better rectangular idea), and 16 x 16 for the 1234 buttons. Floating Palette buttons would be 33 x 33 (the only ones of the set to increase in size).

I think the idea of a sort of pop up window that you would engage through the drop down menu, which would essentially be another AHK subroutine to allow users to alter the interface is a fantastic idea. Of course, I think we need to iron out the pre-existing bugs that have yet to be squashed, and test the ironing out. I also think we should get the button size thing under control, as well as alterations to which buttons we'd like to keep, etc.

I do think, as before, some of the button stuff is a minor testing process. I need to have a mini-palette icon for the Navigator Palette to really test if I need zoom buttons anymore, or if I'll use it Rotate abilities, etc. Clearly, last time I tried using the Navigator regularly, I had issues with it. Those were mostly about taking up space though, and having to toggle it on and off. It'd be nice to know if the workflow is better with this new, more powerful system.

If you could provide AHK sub-scripts for the other Sai palettes, that would help me a great deal in better understanding how many buttons I'd like to keep/change/insert, etc. in the Sai toolbar. I think I could then make up a better mockup, etc.

On the note of having different pre-arranged setups for a program-- I think that's a great idea. It would be nice to have, say, a setup with floating mini-icons for the palettes, and one without, for example. I think that's putting the horse a bit before the cart, but if you're excited about it, I think you should go for it. It's clearly something we're both interested in, and keeping the interest up, instead of it becoming work, is the thing I'm interested in.

[lblb]

Very quickly:
That sounds good. I'll try to upload the hover files for the two remaining Sai windows as soon as I can. Indeed that should be more helpful in deciding which buttons to keep, add or remove. Also, I'll try to come up with a simplified toolbar with smaller icons for testing.
In the meantime, if you want to make the hover icons for the Color and Layer panels be 33x33, just open the Hover_Color/Layer_3.ahk files in a text editor and change all the 20's to 33's on lines 18 and 20.