Thoughts on snapping

[yar]

@gregsn

But I guess for such a change we need to have some longer internal discussions. There are for sure different ideas and opinions. It’s just not completely trivial.

This has been a long time coming.
We need to think hard about UX.
I talked about this in the other post:

Improved user experience when creating IOBoxes and Pads (including hotkeying)

I want to address an issue that affects all of us working with VVVV. One of the most typical and frequently encountered tasks is creating pads and boxes—essentially, our variables and input fields that we often use as intermediate nodes for connections. The problem is that their creation requires too many clicks and doesn’t take into account our natural hand movements. Consider the typical scenario: start link → Shift+Click → Delete → Enter This sequence happens so often that every time you m…

And we all need to be aware that this all needs to be integrated into a larger task of improving the experience.

At the moment there is a ‘zoo’ of different approaches and technologies. For example, I have started to actively use ‘drag and drop links’ and ‘connectable nodes’, although I used to do things differently. At the same time, there are a lot of ‘old style’ and ‘new style’ ways of doing the same thing. Usually the ‘new style’ is better, but there’s a group of people who have a hard time accepting that, for example.

We need to sort out this ‘zoo’ and make a strong decision to restructure some of the approaches.

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@ajitid

That certainly will! Magnet strength is certainly high in vvvv and there’s also the fact that both Affinity Designer and Figma dynamically reduce the magnetic strength the more you zoom onto the canvas.

Right, I didn’t notice it at first, but the strength of the pull should depend on the zoom!

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@sebescudie

The default behavior should be smarter

That’s where I started the conversation!

The rules need to be much smarter than that. It’s cool that we can spell them all out, but we also have to realise that it might take quite a bit of effort to create the ‘engine’ of these rules.

This ‘engine’ should take into account the environment and probably be able to do checks for reach to objects, intersections with other nodes, active connections, maybe some kind of fine-tuning based on object type.