Suggestions for the new Pinned Bar feature in the Editor

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  • Ashley, Tom Since Pinned Bars are a new beta feature I wasn't sure whether to submit these as bugs, feature requests, or just give feedback in the forums so I chose the latter. These are written in the first person but were made in collaboration with TackerTacker.

  • +1

    Initial impressions is that it felt like they stayed open too long, and even when I click on something on the other side of the screen it still stayed open.

  • +1 the responsive of the bar closing is too slow, when the mouse is no longer hovering the panel.

  • Allow me to pin bars to other docked bars

    This looks like a pretty complicated change, is potentially confusing (in your example, do the tabs conceptually attach to the pane on the left, or the pane on the right? What if you close the associated pane, do the tabs just disappear?), doesn't seem to have that good a use case as it more or less just moves where the tab is, so I don't think it is likely we will make this change.

    Allow me to collapse the pinned bar by moving mouse off the bar

    This is more or less already how it works. If you click inside the bar to focus it (so the caption lights up), the bar remains visible even if you move the mouse off the bar, as in this case the assumption is you are still working with that bar. However if the bar is not focused, moving the mouse off the bar will collapse it. This is also how it worked in C2.

    Allow me to choose the order of the pin tabs

    The order is the order in which you pinned the bars. I guess we could add an option to drag the tabs to reorder them though? However we first need a solution for the tab visibility issue (see below).

    Allow me to change the text/background colors

    I'll look in to doing this, hopefully it will be straightforward.

    Limit the size of the tabs

    This is an easy change so it's done for the next beta.

    Allow me to see all pin tabs on a bar edge

    If the pin tabs show on top of the bar that appears, it ends up covering parts of the bar interface in an annoying way - for example it can overlap text making it harder to read, overlap tree expand/collapse buttons so you can't click them, etc. So I don't think the tabs should overlap the bar that appears. In C2 this was solved by reserving space in the user interface for the tabs, effectively indenting the rest of the UI. Perhaps we could do something similar.

    Allow me to make the bars expand/collapse twice as fast

    The timer is just 0.5 seconds, and feels quick for me. I think you might have been confused by the way focused bars stay visible, as described previously. Typically hover actions like this do not act instantly, or too quickly, as it makes for a fiddly or "slippery" feeling user interface that instantly punishes mistakes like briefly moving the mouse in the wrong position. Construct's context menus use timers when hovering submenus for a similar reason, which are currently set at 0.3 seconds to show and 0.5 seconds to hide, so the pane hide timeout currently matches the submenu hide timeout which seems appropriate. I can't tell exactly but it also feels about the same as the behavior in C2.

    Allow me to keep my open bars even after logging out

    This is a separate issue really. I'd say the solution is don't log out. If you need to switch accounts frequently for some reason while also keeping your UI intact, which sounds to me like an edge case, you can try using features like browser user profiles to more easily manage that, as you can change account by switching browser profile rather than logging out and back in. If you are being auto-logged-out frequently, it's probably your own browser clearing cookies, so you should probably look at changing your browser settings or making an exception for Construct.

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  • Ashley Thanks for taking the time to read and respond. I look forward to the changes that that you can make easily for the next beta. My issues with losing the bars and getting logged out was solved by others in the discord, I was installing the PWA from a stable release, and then installing beta releases from the startup prompt which caused my login to drop whenever I restarted the editor, and I had to click to update each time I restarted. Once I installed the PWA direct from the beta release the issues resolved. Also, I turned off editor animations in the settings and for myself at least that effectively sped up the pin transitions to where I was comfortable. The one issue I still have is that clicking off the pinned onto the workspace does not instantly close the pinned tab. I follow your points about stickiness when just moving the mouse off the pinned tab, but if I am clicking on an event sheet I am indicating that I wish to start working on it, which I can’t do until the pinned bar collapses because its covering up either the left side or right side of the event sheet. I feel like clicking on the workspace should immediately cause the pinned bar to start to collapse (or collapse it instantly with editor animations disabled). Currently if I click on the event sheet there is good 1/4 to 1/3 second delay before that happens. It’s just long enough to be annoying. Anyways, overall great new (returning) feature!

  • FWIW I think the ability to export/import editor view settings would be a nice insurance policy against being logged out for one reason or another. I find myself using the export/import feature with palettes often as I sometimes run into bugs that require me to clear my cache and restart C3 (which triggers a relog).

  • I find VS Code's panel pinning feature very convenient. There's a fixed sidebar that, when collapsed, becomes a small icon within that sidebar. It only reappears when I click it again.

  • Just to note there's quite a wide range of improvements in r462 - hopefully that covers a lot more of what people wanted.

  • Here's a small suggestion:

    Auto hide when the width is very small

    when I adjust the width of a bar to a certain threshold, the bar can hide and unpin it. This would be similar to the experience of dragging a panel to hide it in VS Code.

    Use click-to-show bar instead of auto display mouse hover

    Mouse hover is very counterintuitive to me, because most of the time I just want to hide it, not use it. If I do use it frequently, I usually pin it instead of unpin. it would be more friendly if I could decide whether or not to show.

    Or force it to hide when I click on other places, instead of hide auto after a timer. Otherwise, I really want to just press X to close the bar and force it to be disabled.

    or Support click the close to hide

    Allows move position in the context menu

    hope to allow move to the left/right side of the screen.

    Allows drag the bar to the sidebar to hide it

    Hode I could drag a floating bar to Unpin and merge them.

  • This overlapping situation is driving me crazy and making me very uncomfortable. I don't know what to do, I don't know what I can do. All I can do is stretch the bar behind me and waste 2-3 seconds waiting for it to hide automatically.

  • The hide timer is 0.5 seconds for an inactive bar (if focused it will stay visible). If it takes longer than 0.5 seconds for an inactive bar to hide, that might be a bug. Do you have steps to reproduce a longer hide time?

  • Ashley First of all, thanks for taking our feedback. I'm really excited about the new screen setup and workflow possibilities of the pinned bars. Second, there is some sort of bug. I haven't nailed it down yet but I've gotten the bar to stay open after clicking off of it onto the workspace. I've gotten from 2 seconds as measured by a video screen capture I took and at least five when I wasn't recording. I don't have it nailed down yet but it has something to do with clicking off of the pinned bar more than once within some time period. I'll try to get exact repro then post a bug with video in Github.

  • Found it. Ironically the more you try to click off the pinned bar to get it to close the longer it stays open! Posting to github now.

  • Feels like clicking somewhere else should hide the pin too?

    Because it means you no longer have focus on it.

  • Suggest using the same feature as Photoshop, allowing the press of 'Tab'(or other keys) to display or hide all bars.

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