Cleaning up sticky lines

Friday, February 23, 2007

Here's another teaser about what's coming in Curio 4.

A long while back we added sticky lines to Curio: drag a line endpoint over another figure and it'll stick to that figure or even to a specific position on the figure. Move that figure and the line will remain stuck to it. Pretty handy.

You can toggle this off on-the-fly by holding down the Option key, or turn it off permanently via the Preferences window.

Unfortunately, we never got around to showing any true feedback to the user so they knew what was happening. No glows. No tooltips. Bad Zengobi.

So, to make everyone super happy, while adding support for connection points (described below) I got the following working over the past couple of days:

Drag a line towards a figure, just get inside the figure's outline, and you'll see this:
Those purple targets are the connection points on that figure. As you resize, move, or rotate the figure or move around the opposite line end point, Curio will automatically find the new closest connection point and snap to it. Each type of shape has its own logical connection points, meaning that the triangle has different connection points than the rounded rectangle, for example.

Drag that line endpoint a bit more, past the outline, and you'll see this:
Hold the Command key down and you'll see this:
Hold down the Option key, to turn off sticky lines, and you'll see this as you drag:
Hopefully that makes it very obvious when you are or aren't sticking to a figure.

Another cool thing: after placing a sticky endpoint, if you later click on the line with the select tool, Curio will automatically show the glow on the connected figure so you'll see what it's stuck to:
Stay tuned for more teasers! Have a great weekend everyone. :-)

3 Comments:

  • looks very cool. I'm looking forward to seeing all the cool stuff I'm sure you have in store for the next version.
    Thanks,
    Rich

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 8:08 PM  

  • Very cool! Can't wait to play with v4. Curio's pretty much become the central document/idea/project note repository for all my work now.

    Is it too late to put in a feature request? I very much like OmniGraffle's 'Stencil' feature, especially the ability to create one's own stencil libraries and drag-dropping them into place. It would be nice if you could do something similar in Curio. I use the drawing tools a lot for making quick designs or flowcharts. Be nice if I could maintain a library of commonly used symbols.

    Thanks!

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 2:08 PM  

  • We appreciate and track all feature requests although it's a bit late to change too much going into Curio 4. We've got to get it out the door sometime! :-)

    Thanks for the feedback!

    By Blogger George, at 2:08 PM  

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