I have too many ideas, and too often, I do not share them. I refrain from sharing them for many possible reasons, but they all stem from one root emotion: fear. Fear of ridicule, fear of judgement, fear of being wrong, and most importantly, fear of not being heard.
The last fear is justified, I'm afraid, as I usually am not heard. I want to make a difference, I want things to happen, I want people to understand... and too often, no one hears what I say to begin with.
And, my opinions on certain matters (such as religious/philosophical matters) are so often changing, moving, and adjusting, that I am too afraid that I will express an incredibly stupid idea and believe it, and be judged for it for a long time later. This is why I will not express my religious or philosophical beliefs on this blog.
I'm afraid I might still do some damage to myself with some of these ideas - sometimes, when I get an idea in my head, I'll end up overextending myself... I once wrote a post on some Mac forums in which I pronounced that we (a group that included only myself) should "get Dugg" to bring about an end to a certain bug in Mac OS X.
Nevertheless, I will state my ideas here (you may insert your compliments on my bravery here), and today I will start with an idea that I almost forgot about. If you have any complains on my act of expressing myself, please direct them to my Humanities teacher, whose lecture today inspired me to start expressing my ideas. :)
The Idea: Rotate, Translate
Snapping to grid can be quite useful. Unfortunately, I sometimes do not like the increments which the grid uses. Likewise, snap rotating can be quite useful (I'm not sure if Adobe Illustrator allows it, but Autodesk Maya does), but again, you have to manually set the increment.
To help solve these problems, I've thought of a few ideas. First, I will list my ideas on translation (moving items, for those of you who don't know).
- The grid to snap to should be shown as a kind of heads-up display. This allows easy perception by the designer of how the object will be moved.
- If moving in one direction only, instead of a grid it should be a ruler.
- Better yet, there could be multiple rulers. If a designer was moving an object along the X axis, the rulers would be stacked on top of each other. As moving the mouse up and down would not change the position of the object itself, the action could instead be used to chose different rules (and therefore snapping grids) by hovering over them
- If moving in one or both directions, the mousewheel could be used to change grids/rulers. Each roll of the wheel would change the size slightly.
Rotation is a bit different, but the same concepts I list above can be utilized:
- The possible snapping rotations should be shown on circular rules.
- There should be multiple rulers. Some thought should be placed as to which rulers go at which radii.
- As the user moves their mouse outward, the program should automatically change snapping rulers, and then, once outside of snapping rulers, should not snap at all.
- The mousewheel could be used to "scroll" through other possible snapping orientations
And, during rotation/translation, to very quickly turn snapping on/off, the spacebar could be used. It would be simple, elegant, fast, and intuitive.
That's it for my idea, thank you for reading!