BikeHelmet

Rick just needs to add multi-level Repeat to the Effects menu. Rather than just repeating the last effect, have 3-5 listed there that you can pick from. Handy addon!

Hi, Not sure if there's a way built in, or in a plugin, but a clickable-by-point lasso tool would be really handy. Like lets say you want to take a picture of a home, then cut it out against the background. Dragging the lasso around by hand is pretty sloppy. If you can click one corner of the roof, then the next, then go along the straight walls (to get selection lines between/around all the points), you end up with a way cleaner crop/cut. If there's a way to do it already, do tell. :) Thanks.

Hi, I've been working on pixel art lately. Sometimes when doing pixel art, you want very precise changes, like tinting some rocks slightly green (without affecting all the details) to indicate that they are mossy. Things that are already green don't need to be even more green. (Neon!) I have been selecting colours with the wand and adding to the selection and then tinting it - but it can be tedious, and it occurred to me that there is an editing mode that would be naturally suitable for this. If you can adjust just one component of a pixel colour (The R, G, B or A), it'd be a huge productivity boost. Flood fill 255,255,255,255, with only R locked and that is the only component affected for each pixel that is affected. (Determined by tolerance, etc.) Doing the same for alpha would avoid having a lot of different opacity layers to get the right effect. Just pick a number from 0-255 and adjust those pixels for only that specific colour component. What spurred my desire for this the most was creating a pixel perfect crescent gradient to make an isometric round object look like it is being submerged in water or lava. Annoyingly time consuming and difficult with the current tools, which don't really treat alpha as just another colour to draw. None of the built in gradient tools are the right shape, so the work around is setting up many layers of different opacity and shifting portions of the image to those new layers pixel by pixel... ack! With the feature described you could create a white crescent, then paste it overtop the image with only Alpha locked in to change the alpha in a very fine manner. Flood fill the crescent shape to a slightly lower alpha and re-paste one pixel lower... rinse and repeat. Rather than taking 30 minutes the whole process would probably be done in half a minute. Not sure if Rick actually reads these requests. In case he doesn't, does anyone else have any ideas on how to accomplish the task faster? -BikeHelmet

I wanted the exact same thing. A configurable grid size would be invaluable! -BikeHelmet

Hi Ego, Doesn't really fit. I need to tell where the boundaries are to make adjustments to the tiles along their boundaries. That lets me stamp whole tiles in, but then I'd need to go and edit the semi transparency for blending reasons. Being able to set the grid size would make it trivial. But without that, it's like trying to edit a layer with the layer visibility turned off. I did try your plugin, and it works alright, except that the preview screen is completely blank when working with layers that are low opacity and mostly empty. When setting up 24 tiles that fade together, I had to re-enter and apply to different layers approximately that many times. (Again, with blank preview screen.) -BikeHelmet

Hi, Lately I've had to do a bit of pixel art. Lining it up on 32x32 boundaries is a bit of a pain when tiles may contain large transparent sections that make it impossible to tell where the tile boundary is except by counting. It'd be great if the pixel grid was configurable, so that I could choose 32x32 instead of 1x1. Cheers, -BikeHelmet

I noticed that this version is slower too, but haven't run any thorough tests. Also, I just upgraded to Win10 in the last few days, so I wasn't sure if that was part of it. I have an 8 core AMD CPU in this system. I do make use of a fair number of plugins. I can afford to wait a few seconds longer, so I'll just wait until a new version comes out. Thanks for all your effort, Rick!

Cheers, David.

Very, very true. Oh, I agree - it takes a while for anything to make it through the QA process. I used to participate on bugzilla, but after seeing poor changes pushed through only to be revised, then revised again, then finally revised close to the original suggestion... well, I grew tired of having too many cooks with hands over the fire. Much respect to your friends, if they can tolerate that environment. It's probably better on the inside than it was as an 'anonymous' bugzilla poster. Yeah, I mentioned that in my post - target user matters. PDN users are going to be more savvy than users seeking computer repairs. I was aware of Google's methodical decision making process before changing their logo. Read a long and interesting blog article about it. But I didn't get to see the Wrench to Hamburger debate - was it published publicly, or is that all internal info? I would be curious to read over the reasons for the change, especially now that Mozilla has adopted it too. Hundreds of people - not dozens. But yes, people do love to gripe, especially when stressed out. Usually the griping and the stress have nothing to do with each other - it's just a way to vent frustration. You were in IT, so you're probably also all too familiar with it. -BikeHelmet

Oh, you don't have to tell me. I had to start taking written instructions with most repair jobs to protect myself, as quite often customers demand something (Like three separate antivirus programs - against my advice/recommendation - "It will cause blue screens of death, system reboots, extremely slow performance, etc.; they are known not to work properly together."), and then when delivered as requested, they want you to correct it on your dime/time. 'The customer is always right' is an annoying attitude, especially when they don't understand what they're asking for, and if I came off like that... gah... seppuku! (Not really - but I am in the service industry. I'm all too familiar with that. I'm rereading my post now, and... gah. I bungled that one.) Note to self: Resist urge post late at night. Hold off and re-read when morning arrives. Also, I didn't call you crazy - I said I was not ready to call you crazy. I implied the Firefox devs are crazy. I see now I should've selected a more positive wording! In regards to Firefox, I've watched them over the years remove features, cause users confusion and anguish, then re-implement the same feature 3-5 years later as an improvement. I think they have too many cooks with hands over the fire. In Chrome I witnessed first hand the confusion that the wrench becoming a 'hamburger' caused, and now I'm witnessing confusion over the Firefox button disappearing in place of a 'hamburger' on the opposite edge of the screen. But if Mozilla holds true to pattern, 3-5 years from now it'll revert to something else (like a logo or Firefox button), right on time to confuse the average user yet again. It sounds like the changes you've made to PDN's interface are important to properly support the features you've lined up and are lining up. GOOD - that's a great reason to make changes! I like the reasoning behind the floodfill changes. People will learn it over time and be fine. I also like that I can see which file corresponds to which effect now, as locating a crashy plugin via trial and error would've been more time consuming than necessary. But please consider carefully when making changes that require relearning, but do not actually enhance features, as those are far more likely to irritate users. (Doubly so if it was something that they used regularly.) Firefox and Chrome are great case studies for that since they're on 2/3 PCs, and Win8 lacking a start menu and proper 'classic desktop' mode is another great one to analyze. Win8's start menu is almost the sole negative cited against Win8/8.1, and the main reason a fine OS gets smeared so much in reviews and articles - lacking a capable start menu and a way to set the Desktop as the main interface. (Classic Shell to the rescue!) -BikeHelmet

As far as I know it doesn't - that's just a toolkit for .net, right? If you can point me to any other apps built on that, I can check. -BikeHelmet

I'm sorry - my writing style clearly offended you. I wrote it pretty late at night, so that probably contributed to its lack of tact. I'll stop pestering you - but I do want to be clear that any negative tone you picked up was not intentional. I love your program (why else would I be using it?), but I'm probably falling into the common trap of 'being the most critical of the things we use the most.' Keep up the hard work - it's much appreciated by many people, even if they don't say it - or drop in and say the opposite. (Whoops) -BikeHelmet

I fix computers for people (primary income) - so right there I'm dealing with those that are not power users. Regardless, perhaps 5% (if that) figure out the menu button in Chrome and Firefox. It's actually the main gripe that I hear. ("Where the hell did the menus go!? I hate [Chrome, Firefox] ever since it updated!") Most drift back to IE because they can't find the print option, so now a chunk of my time is just explaining where things went. Yet when it was a wrench, or there were fallback menus to use... no problem. Someone working with a paint program is probably a bit more technically savvy, but still - I can't believe how many users the main web browsers ostracized by using 'hamburger menus'. It doesn't bug me, as I figured it out immediately - but I do pass judgement based on the number of struggling users that I see. (Out of hundreds, a very high percentage.) Try to think of who your target user is before making an interface change - in the case of Chrome and Firefox, it's everyone. They are not catering to everyone. The number one complaint that I hear of with iOS and Android is that people can't figure out where the trash, archive/move-to, etc. options are in the email. The icons are plainly visible, but people look at them and don't understand them. They don't seem to understand that they are buttons, and don't understand the symbols. It's unfathomable for anyone posting on this board, because we are so far beyond that - unless you deal with it daily like I do. Luckily in Samsung tablets, you can just hit the menu button to get all the options available in text form, which everyone can easily understand. I think some people are not as proficient with devices as us, and we're not even cluing in. I can look at a screen and take in everything within miliseconds - but I suspect a lot of users are still at the stage I was at when I bought my first car. I got in, then I had to look around for about 5 minutes before I "saw" everything on the console. (Quite a few minutes before my brain processed all the input.) With symbols and icons, not all people are at the 'glance once, process immediately' stage - but everyone in North America should have pretty strong language skills, so unless facing a disability like dyslexia, text gets processed immediately by most people's brains. Yeah, I might be one of those drop-in crazy 'hit-n-run' forum posters, or I might have a point based on what I observe within my own life. You're the dev - do what you will with my feedback. -BikeHelmet

What's this have to do with my post? (Other than me posting my plugins for the devs to examine.)

Hello, I just installed PDN v4 - I'm happy to see I can turn off the dancing ants animation, since the shimmering grabs my attention and annoys my eyes. I just had a few possible suggestions/refinements. These are minor things, but help with "polish". One of the things that has been missing from PDN since the beginning is the ability to scroll images away from the edge of the screen. Lets say you have a huge image (a scan or something) and you want to zoom in to look at a detail, but also want access to the colour picker and tools. It only makes sense that at whatever zoom level you are at, you'd be able to scroll the image to the right (scrollbar at leftmost position) so that the image rests at least a few pixels to the right of the widest tool window. When the zoom level changes and the scrollbar has been moved to the leftmost position so that the image is visible to the right of the tools, it should maintain the same relative positioning (in the visible UI) when zooming in or out, at least until the image can be fully centred from zooming out. The second possible refinement is truly minor - I see the selection box is generated by drawing tiny alternating white and black lines, which shimmer as you move the rectangle around. You can reduce the shimmering by drawing it in two segments - one outward from the origin, and one outward from the cursor position. Near those two points there will occasionally be white or black segments that are far longer or shorter, up until you let go, and then it calculates it the current way. Benefits are visual feedback when you let go and less shimmering. Yeah, like I said, truly minor. I also have a huge amount of whitespace at the top of the screen, and wouldn't mind a way to make use of some of it. The toolbars are very static and lack the variety of customization options that most paint programs have. https://i.imgur.com/VmQjVZJ.png -BikeHelmet