Hi friends,
Quick status update on Subform development:
HUD
We've finished up the HUD functionality for now. The HUD can be toggled on-and-off to provide contextual information about the layout while you're working.
For example, here's what a basic stack layout looks like with the HUD enabled:
And here's the HUD on a "freeform" element. Fun little detail: if you constrain the movement of the element to horizontal or vertical (by holding down shift), you'll just see the relevant HUD info for that axis:
Performance
It's important to us that Subform be fast and stable, because professional tools should be reliable. To get there, we have to first understand how to profile the application's performance and track that over time, especially as we add and change things in the code base.
In simpler terms, we have to know why things are slow or buggy before we can fix them. Kevin's spending time in perf-world right now establishing this profiling infrastructure and tests.
More polished UI
With a lot of the core functionality in the next release frozen, it's time for UI cleanup. Ryan's been working to clean up and standardize the user-interface, design all the specific controls, icons, and so forth. We'll be grafting that on to the current build shortly.
Contextual help
Tutorials are important, but we also want Subform to provide help in-context. This is particularly important for the layout engine, which has a bit of a learning curve for designers coming from direct manipulation drawing tools.
As we've mentioned previously, we like the advanced tooltips that to Autodesk Inventor provides. So we're building a similar system of tooltips that provide examples and error resolution at the point of need.
Thanks for reading; have a great week!
Ryan + Kevin