Frederik,
In the last few months two Nodebox users approached me. Both are prominent Nodebox artists and one teaches Nodebox. They asked me to ask you for a few very simple UI improvements that would make their lives MUCH easier. I suggested they ask you themselves, but they are both shy.
REQUEST 1: Widen the Font Selection Widget
When selecting a font for a textpath or other text node, you must choose often long font names that are only partly visible in the narrow font widget window (see attached screenshot). This can be maddening! Sometimes the salient part of the font (bold, italic, etc.) occurs at the end of the name so that you literally cannot tell which is which. This despite the fact that there is oodles of wasted space in the parameter pane. It's like picking names through a keyhole.
All we ask is that you simply widen the widget to at least twice its current width, or make it proportional to the width of the parameter pane so that we could stretch it ourselves. I suspect you could make this simple change in a matter of seconds.
REQUEST 2: Better placement when pasting nodes
When you copy paste a node from one place to another (from elsewhere in your network or from my node library in a separate window) it is often hard to find where it lands. The placement seems to be based on the location of where it came from, not on where you currently are. The pasted node is sometimes VERY hard to find. I have occasionally spend MINUTES looking for the damn thing. I have to zoom way out and repeatedly undo and redo the paste, scanning for a single pixel change or flicker to find the needle in a haystack. This happens to me multiple times an hour, every day.
Even worse: the pasted node sometimes lands exactly on top of an existing node and is then pretty much impossible to find. WORSE STILL, it's surprisingly easy to accidentally copy paste a node on top of itself. When this happens it is completely invisible and seems harmless at first, but later, if you go to edit the node, you are actually editing the copy while the links remain connected to the node underneath. The first time this happened to me I went half crazy trying to figure out what was going on; it took me hours to find the hidden copy. I am now paranoid and constantly check for hidden copies.
Again, this should be fairly easy for you to fix. When you paste a node, maybe place it near the last place the user clicked or in the center of the pane currently visible. A momentary flash or movement would be helpful. Also, it should NEVER be possible to paste one node exactly on top of another. Even if a user tries to do this, the pasted node should automatically displace itself one unit over so that it's obvious that one node is atop another.
REQUEST 3: Allow users to choose a frame rate when exporting a movie.
Currently all movies export at 25 frames per second. This is still fine as a default. But it would be a huge leap forward for animators to export at, say, 30 or 60 frames per second.
I heartily concur with all three of these requests. And I have a long list of other relatively simple improvements, should you be feeling ambitious. Any improvements you can make will have a huge impact.
THANK YOU!
John
