Hey gang. Really love how far you’ve brought the macOS version along. You guys should take great credit in what you do, you’ve successfully invented basically the first ever great CAD program for novice and flexible-role users which is a commendation worthy of its own praise. With that said, I think the software is mature enough now to start applying critique to some of the detail points that are big force multipliers for power users. One such detail I’d like to touch today is the capability to quickly mass hide/show objects sketches etc. This breaks down into two things really:
A: Currently, if I want to clear away the clutter of all the sketches that I’m wantonly creating from as I go along, I might have to click up to ~20 individual hide buttons to clear away the noise and cobwebs of sketches to get a clear view of my piece. We can already select multiple objects easily with taps or clicks, we just need the last step of a “hide/show selected” keyboard shortcut or UI button.
B: In line with this, the second issue with manipulating objects in mass comes from working around the folder structure and the existing body/sketch/etc filter system. Right now when filtering by say, sketches, and selecting results, I can only select the entire folder a sketch sits in. Trying to filter by type, then selectively hiding things sitting within folders should not hide the folder itself (and everything else inside of it). If the user is taking these steps to filter by kind, at that point they’re clearly beyond the idea of actually wanting an entire folder hidden when they select the “hide” action. Long story short, actions like “show/hide” and perhaps others like selection should respect the filter rules set by the user in the slideout section. If a user is invoking this filter in the first place, it is improbable that they are wanting to play by standard selection/action rules.
That’s really it. Love the software, keep at it you guys!
Thank you Ivan. I have one or two other ideas in this vein, small but important force-multipliers for intermediate to power users. Should I share them here, or separate by topic as I come up with them?
More Granular Selection Rules. Really, this is an extension of what I was talking about earlier in point B, but having switches similar to the ones in the sidebar that dictate what the cursor can actually interact with on-screen would be a big deal for everyday ergonomics. For instance, setting selection rules to “body” would only allow the selection of bodies, letting you directly edit a given body under the veil of sketches and planes you may have resting atop it, saving you from needing to either rotate your view away from where you were or from having to hunt down and hide the offending obstacles one by one. Think of it as the logical evolution of the “Snap to” menu, where you can already selectively enable and disable what your sketch points might interact with on the sketching surface.
Being able to discriminate selections by the existing filters of “bodies, sketches, planes etc” would be great, but if you really want to get buck-wild take that idea one step further and construct actual granular selection controls like edges-only, faces-only etc. Have however many radio-button style switches sitting in a radial menu in the upper-right corner right next to the existing section view/snap to menus. Or just incorporate directly into the snap-to menu and expand its role to include overall selection rules and not just sketch snapping.
Tutorial videos. I would love to see a master switch implemented in settings to hide their existence entirely. I know this has to have been brought up somewhere else, but I’ll echo it. They were fantastic when I was starting out, but with respect I’ve used your program for a while now. I’m quite familiar with how to operate the line tool at this point, and I need back every inch of real estate on my 11” screen that I can get for daily use.
Some kind of measure tool. The info-text that pops up at the bottom when you select lines/faces is the proto version of this, but it’s quite limited in its current incarnation for serious information gathering, and it takes practice to interpret some of the distances it spits out and learning which features you need to select to get the answers you want. A dedicated “measure” tool would mean:
When I’m trying to manually align/maneuver objects with precise micro-movements, I don’t have to go through the legwork of selecting exactly the right edge/face and manually interpreting my translation distances based on what the info-text has to say
I no longer have to use my other workaround of using lots of disposable sketches as bootleg “measure” tools. This works, and often gives me the feedback I’m looking for more quickly and with a lot less guesswork than the first method, but the problem with this is that now I’ve cluttered my workspace with lots of superfluous “measuring” sketches that I have to go back through and cull so the ones I want to keep don’t get lost among them. A measurement tool that could draw ghostly “reference” sketches would be a great boon to those among us with terrible memories who can’t remember if that table leg was supposed to be 33.25” or 33.5", and like to construct little “reminder” dimensions to help us sculpt.
Text tool. Any text tool. Even if it’s as cobbled-together as a built-in library of pre-drawn sketches or bodies for now. Even the crudest feature for letter embossing/engraving would be a godsend for so many different applications like tagging parts and models. I promise you, you could bolt this feature into your software in the kludgiest fashion possible and as long as it generates one alphabet of resizable characters it would be an overnight hit for you to polish up as you go along. Text is one of those things that sounds incredibly basic and unnecessary until you actually have to sit down and engrave a 12-character alphanumeric serial number into a part using sticks and stones and lines and arcs.
That’s what I’ve collected for now. I’ll write up more as they come to me!
One more thing that popped into my head from a little while back. This is more of a wishlist item, aesthetics come behind features, but I stumbled across this pallete and I’ve really been blown away at how well it fits into Shapr’s UI and how big a difference it makes in dim environments so I figure it’s worth sharing. An official low light alternate scheme would be incredibly well received by the userbase I should think. Struggle to think of many professional programs that offer a “dark” mode where it isn’t almost exclusively used by everyone who works with it
For anecdotal experience, I can personally vouch that this is a 0-to-1 difference maker when designing in places like airplanes. Before, I couldn’t use Shapr on night flights, as even the dimmest settings seared my and my neighbors eyeballs with screaming white light. With my T-800 goggles engaged though, I design all night on a red-eye flight with no eye strain while my neighbors beside me snooze peacefully and undisturbed. When you guys get the resources and time to look at something like this, I think it would be really welcomed by all.
