The latest redesign with Designs, Tutorials, Workflows, Stories, Manual, Forums, and Settings on the left side of the screen appears to be yet another step in the wrong direction. It doesn’t enable me to do anything I could not do before, but it does consume valuable screen space, even when minimized, and there is no obvious way to customize the screen to circumvent this design mistake.
I initially presumed the long, empty gap beneath Designs would be a good space to display folders — a crucial need that hasn’t yet appeared in Shapr3D — but there is, once again, no obvious way to create such folders.
Yet another problem with this redesign is that it is, characteristic for Shapr3D, sprung on us without explanation, which should always be provided.
Also essential: giving users the option to accept, reject, or modify new features or behaviors. Importantly, users “voting” for or against them would provide Shapr3D decision-makers with feedback; they seem overly enamored with their ideas and presume users will always welcome them. Hardly.
Instead of investing time into revising what isn’t broken, how about addressing some of the many glaring deficiencies in Shapr3D?
I don’t think that product design should be run as a democracy. It would slow down progress drastically. I am quite happy with the speed of development of the S3D software. There are many ways we, the users can voice our acceptance of or disagreement with new features and the S3D team is always quite responsive on that.
Such a redesign of something what does not appear to be broken might be a first step to new features to be introduced in the near future.
First, everyone who pays for Shapr3D has the right to give feedback on it.
Second, advocating for user customization — as I’ve done — would improve this product and broaden its appeal.
Third, computer technology makes it easy to offer customizable software.
Fourth, while you are “quite happy with the speed of development of the S3D software,” I and many other users are not. This is evident by searching for help attempting to circumvent various Shapr3D bugs, limitations, roadblocks, and quirks, finding that others complained about them several years ago, often with promises from Shapr3D staff that they are working on it — then years go by, with those problems often persisting. Not always, as in this case: as Istvan mentioned above, the empty gap beneath Designs evidently is the destination to display folders, a long overdue feature. Parenthetically, I hope that it includes subfolders, not only folders.
I fully agree with you! Customization is, for me, the core issue with Shapr3D right now. One tremendous problem, which consumes large amount of time and energy, is that some functions I often use have no hotkey. Why can’t we map all our hotkeys? For example, replace face and midplane.
Hotkey customization is a reasonable request, but are you using the Command Search? It’s extremely powerful. As you can see in the video below, you can super quickly access any command, because you can search with not only the full expression but parts of it.
Eg.
midplane → just enter mpl, or midpl, or mdl
Add plane - 3 Points → just enter pl3, or plpts
etc.
You can super quickly find any command. You can open the search panel with X.
Yes, when I’m on my computer I do use Command Search. However, most of the time I use my Ipad (with pen) and with a keyboard to the left. So I sketch with my right arm and use my left arm for hotkeys / mappings and such.
This setup is very powerful, but could be even more so. The issue is that with one arm it simply takes to much energy to use Command Search for it to be efficient. Just clicking a key, or combination for each tool would increase my efficiency a lot. For my woodworking projects I use midplane and replace face “Alot”, and so just being able to click say shift+m, shift+r or something as hotkey would be tremendous.
Tldr: Could we please have “any” hotkey for all tools?
Ok, but could we not just have any hotkey for all of the tools? Why do some tools like “Offset Edge” have a hotkey, whilst midplane and replace face don’t?
I would be completely satisfied if all tools where mapped to some key. It’s not like Shapr3D have enough tools to justify not having them mapped?
Hey – Peter here, I work on the team responsible for shortcuts (amongst many other things). As Istvan said, fully customizable keyboard shortcuts are on our roadmap, but I indeed cannot commit to a release date.
I am afraid I can’t provide you with a good workaround either. On desktop platforms, there are many alternatives: on macOS you can assign custom shortcuts to any items in the menu bar and most of the tools are available from there. On Windows, AutoHotkey can be used to trigger actions through command search quite easily. Tools are also exposed to the 3Dconnexion driver on macOS and Windows, so if you use a device from them, mapping a button to your preferred actions is also easy. Unfortunately, iPadOS is more limited from this point of view – I am not aware of any solution that would allow you to define macros for custom keyboard shortcuts (but let me know if you are aware of any!).
We also can’t just blindly assign shortcuts to all tools – let me share some background on why that is. Mapping keyboard shortcuts is a surprisingly complex task. First, we do have well over 100 tools & actions available in the app that are all be candidates to get shortcuts. There are also dozens of keyboard shortcuts already taken by the OS or common practice (in our case, the situation is even worse as we want to be somewhat consistent across platforms so there are even more OS shortcuts to consider). They need to be possible to learn and recall, so they need to follow a high level logic and the key mapping should be somewhat connected to the name of the tool. Hotkeys associations are painful to change or unlearn, so we need to be conservative about introducing them and leave room for future functionality that we know is coming. All in all, we carefully investigated all these constraints, looked at top list of tools based on usage and chose the subset of shortcuts that are available in the app. While we know it’s not a perfect match for all users & workflows and we’ll certainly extend it in the future, we still believe it’s a good foundation that serves the majority of our users well.
I understand that addressing this issue might be complex. However, I would like to propose the implementation of a ‘last used tool’ hotkey. This feature could significantly streamline workflows, as users often perform repetitive tasks and require quick access to their most recently utilized tools. By providing a dedicated hotkey for this purpose, users would experience increased efficiency and productivity. Is it possible to consider this valuable addition, or would it be deemed too niche?
When it comes to Ipad+pen, perhaps double tap on the pencil could bring up the latest three tools used as a list, much like you see a list in the command search but only providing the last x tools?
That’s an interesting idea, we’ll consider it! We were thinking about adding a similar section to the right-click context menu on desktop platforms, but it can indeed be a good candidate for a pencil tap as well.
But you brought up an interesting point: what’s not sufficient in the “Recents” part of the command search as it exists currently? Is the list simply too short?
For me it is! Right now, it’s 3 tools correct? I understand that the number of recent tools can’t exceed a certain amount as that would decrease visibility. But perhaps 5-6 recent tools would fit in the list? Would solve a lot of problems for me tbh!
Got it, thanks for all the information. Again, I can’t give you any ETA on improvements around this (keyboard + pen usage on iPads is quite rare so we can’t afford to prioritize development for those use cases), but we’ll spend some more time on keyboard shortcuts and the context menu in a few months and keep these suggestions in mind.
I’m really happy to see custom shortcuts on the roadmap! I would appreciate if they can be context based. As an arbitrary example, pressing “P” while sketching could apply a parallel constraint, but pressing “P” while in the model view would initiate a projection (as it currently does).
I would also love the ability to customize buttons on the screen, I tend to do a lot of subtracts or other things that are always two levels deep, and I’d love to have the option to just show every action on-screen. I have a huge PC screen and don’t need such large icons/buttons for a few actions, when I could easily fit 2 or 3x the buttons, usably.
Perhaps also a separate, pin-able “tool” window, I could put it on a small touchscreen to the side (on PC) and have all my buttons in one place.
Anyway, I know development is hard, I appreciate this app so much, having tried a dozen or so before deciding on Shapr3D. I love how stable your solver seems to be!
Oh also the autohotkey tip may be put to good use on my end, thank you!
A relevant quote from Thomas Edison: “Restlessness is discontent — and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man, and I will show you a failure.”
Many people are satisfied with flawed products and systems. There’s a name for this phenomenon: it’s called “system justification.” Those of us not affected by it spot and discuss problems to highlight the need to solve them. That is a crucial aspect of innovation and progress.
In my opinion, Shapr3D is very impressive in some ways and surprisingly flawed in several others, whether because of poor implementation or inscrutable omissions, such as years going by with still no way to organize files in folders and subfolders. If I had a week or two to spare, I could mention and document several others. The point isn’t to tear Shapr3D down; the point is to build it into a better product. Complacency doesn’t advance that; discontent does.
And some people can’t write a polite message. Everyone hides behind the face of social media, and criticizes in a manner that they wouldn’t say in person, face to face. It’s not what you say, it how you say it.
You initiated the personal fusillade by an utterly unhelpful suggestion that “We need to add this icon to the choices” followed by a thumbs down sign, implying either that I have no right to complain or you are somehow qualified to determine which Shapr3D complaints are legitimate and which are not. I’ve witnessed you — or someone who bears a remarkable similarity to you — similarly criticize others who had valid complaints about Shapr3D, a very good product that could be even better if its developers were more receptive to criticism.
