Style panel breaks resizing of main window (mac)

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Lúthien
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Style panel breaks resizing of main window (mac)

Post by Lúthien »

Hi,

I wonder if anyone else noticed this?
I found that I cannot vertically resize ASP's application window as soon as the Styles panel is visible and docked.
This goes for dragging the upper or lower edge of the window.

If I undock the Styles panel / make it invisible, then resize the application window, and then enable the Styles panel again, it initially keeps that size.
But as soon as I grab either the upper or lower edge of the window, it jumps to the maximum vertical size that you can otherwise make it by dragging the borders (not the fullscreen size). It's not necessarily centred in relation to the screen: sometimes the window shifts off-screen above, making the upper part unreachable.

As long as it is undocked or invisible, there is no problem.

ASP v. 11.1
Macbook pro, OSX 10.11
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synthsin75
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Re: Style panel breaks resizing of main window (mac)

Post by synthsin75 »

Does your screen have the minimum required resolution for AS (1024x768 display (1280x800 recommended))?
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Lúthien
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Re: Style panel breaks resizing of main window (mac)

Post by Lúthien »

I would think so, it's 2880 x 1800.
Because it's a retina screen it might, for the application internally, work as as 1440 x 900. But that would still be enough, it seems.
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Lúthien
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Re: Style panel breaks resizing of main window (mac)

Post by Lúthien »

Here's a screencast of the problem.

http://screencast.com/t/9jvaE7TdOTI

In it I'm resizing the window with the Styles panel disabled, and trying to do so with it enabled.
It's a bit more complex than I described yesterday: the window indeed occasionally jumps when the upper edge is dragged, sometimes hiding itself behind the top menu bar of OSX. But if I drag the bottom edge, it is initially possible to make the window vertically larger just after having enabled the Styles panel.
But it cannot to be made smaller again afterwards; neither by dragging the top or bottom edge.
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Brooke
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Re: Style panel breaks resizing of main window (mac)

Post by Brooke »

Hi Lúthien

Sorry, I don't have an answer to your question :( But I do have a question myself :)

I'm nosey and so took a look at your screencast image....... What are all those extra tools that you have?
They look very interesting :)
Brooke
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synthsin75
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Re: Style panel breaks resizing of main window (mac)

Post by synthsin75 »

I don't see the problem. The AS window is never bigger than your screen. If you want to make the window smaller, you need to disable the advanced checkbox of the style window, but if you continually try to resize the AS window, it will try to accommodate everything you need to see in the window. Most programs do this.
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Lúthien
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Re: Style panel breaks resizing of main window (mac)

Post by Lúthien »

synthsin75 wrote:I don't see the problem. The AS window is never bigger than your screen. If you want to make the window smaller, you need to disable the advanced checkbox of the style window, but if you continually try to resize the AS window, it will try to accommodate everything you need to see in the window. Most programs do this.
Hi synthsin75,

disabling the advanced checkbox hadn't occurred to me yet, thanks!

However, I disagree with what you say that most programs should do that. Both from my experience as a developer having worked with window layout managers and as a user I'd say that the way that ASP forces the with of the window at the maximum screen height is not common window layout behaviour.

As you can see on the screencast here I tried the behaviour of some other applications: Idea's PyCharm, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Blender and Apple Pages. Not one of them does this: some let you resize it to the bare title bar; some impose a minimal window height - but here (as is generally my experience) that's less than half of the screen height.

There are other ways to accommodate the contents of a panel, as can also be seen in the other apps. Take Blender with its notoriously complex GUI: it just adds a scroll bar to the panel, that adapts dynamically to changing window and panel sizes.

Furthermore, the way that ticking the Advanced checkbox makes the window jump to a greater height is simply erroneous. It shouldn't do that: it would be acceptable it the application would re-arrange its inner layout, but not to change it overall dimensions.

On top of that - as I also mentioned above - this behaviour easily leads to the application window top edge to get stuck under the main menu bar of OSX.

Of course there is a way to work around all that. So, in that sense you're right - it's not a problem that prevents me from using the application. But I'm pretty sure that it's not as it should be either.
It's just a bug, and I'm trying to help by reporting it.
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Lúthien
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Re: Style panel breaks resizing of main window (mac)

Post by Lúthien »

Brooke wrote:Hi Lúthien

Sorry, I don't have an answer to your question :( But I do have a question myself :)

I'm nosey and so took a look at your screencast image....... What are all those extra tools that you have?
They look very interesting :)
Hi Brooke!

Those are some helpful scripts that I found on this forum (the keyframe ones) and on Mike Kelley's Animators forum (the rest).
In reading order they are:

add a keyframe for everything on screen
add a keyframe for all bones
a bone rotate tool
a bone resize tool
a bone translate tool
randomize switch layers
pad Papagayo file
create random face
Swiss Army bones tool
walk assist script
keyframe clear tool

I haven't used them all yet, I'm currently trying to wrap my hear around the Swiss army bones tool :)
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Re: Style panel breaks resizing of main window (mac)

Post by synthsin75 »

Lúthien, maybe you are not aware that AS has, through most of its life, had only a single developer, and only relatively recently added a few more. With development resources scarce, the users almost unanimously prefer functionality prioritized over huge GUI overhauls. So niceties like scrolling toolbars and dynamic layout, while desired, are not what drives AS sales. And frankly, it makes little sense to animate in a smaller workspace than available, where constant manual window resizing is necessary to access full functionality. Like your video shows, most smaller sized windows are completely unusable, so that freedom over window dimension is largely useless (and definitely not worth a huge development expenditure, regardless of how "standard" this useless feature may seem).

Have you tried using undocked windows (perhaps with the show/hide shortcuts)?

But if this is a deal-breaker, perhaps AS isn't the software for you. To each his own.
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