We’ve been chewing over the ins and outs of Shapr3D’s app experience. So this release, 3.58, is completely devoted to weeding out annoying bugs and mishaps and making every interaction buttery smooth.
First of all, it’s downright frustrating when you accidentally start drawing a line—by tapping or clicking that small space between another sketching tool’s button and label. Good news, this won’t happen anymore.
Next up… It’ll be easier to grab and drag canvas controls (those arrows you can use to move and rotate sketches and bodies), and when you hover over any hidden edge in your design with your mouse or trackpad, the edge will become bolder so it’s easier to spot.
On the video front, we shaped up our refresher tutorials:
You can now practice snapping your lines and other sketches to the design space’s grid. And we made sure the app won’t crash anymore when you quit the tutorial while extruding a sketch filling.
I love, love, love the new “hover” capability when using the trackpad or mouse. But, I love using the Apple Pencil even more. I wish there was some way to implement the same type of functionality with the Pencil
I seem to recall that some people had issues several years ago (when the pencil was first introduced) where “hovering” above the screen could trigger touch events. Presumably, Apple “fixed” that behavior, and I’m not sure there is even an API to access “hover” coordinates, although it seems at least feasible for a Bluetooth device.
In any event, I came up with a thought experiment for you to consider. Obviously, “pressure” data is available for use (see the “Spline” command). As an OPTION, would it be possible to use very light pencil pressure to simulate the mouse cursor movement and highlighting. Then, increased pressure could act the same as a mouse “click” to select or act upon the highlighted area.
You already differentiate between “screen contact”, light, and heavy pressure (spline command), so perhaps heavy pressure could initiate a secondary mouse button function. As always, ease of use and efficiency must be the guiding principals, but moving a mouse and “clicking” is not very different from moving a pencil and “pressing”. I think the increased usability (many other CAD systems seem to offer “hover” functionality because it is very helpful) would probably outweigh any short term “re-learning” issues.
Something to think about anyway. I’m guessing that since you already rewrote the input system to handle mouse and trackpad input that this might not be that hard to implement since much of the logic would be similar (LOL, as a retired software geek, I do know that things are ALWAYS more difficult than they appear to an outsider).
