Forums | NoesisGUI

• Clean, thoughtful, organized design
• Some of the arrangement of various sections and panels just makes a lot more sense, or it maps better to the way my designer brain thinks. Less of xaml’s raw functionality is obscured or buried, and instead it’s been tabbed apart, or coupled into panels you’d more naturally expect.
  • Visual States and Storyboards being nestled into the Animation section, for example.

• Seems fairly stable thus far. I have not experienced any crashes, hangs, or errors, though admittedly, the opportunity to really push it too hard hasn’t happened yet.
• Happy to experience snappy dropdowns, responsive panel / tab switching, and even swift property focus changes via the Tab key. I think everyone appreciates this since it is the foundation for fluid workflows.
• I lost power one day with Noesis Studio open, and when I relaunched it the next day I was greeted to a restored version of the file that I had left on-screen. Very happy to see this backup-save feature so early in the launch of the app. It was a welcome surprise.

• Previewing most things is smooth and feels less sticky/glitchy when compared to VS Blend
• The core interaction model seems very good..
  • Very happy to see great functionality when it comes to cursor control and click detection (over Blend). I stacked multiple nested grids/objects on top of each other with lots of overlapping busy-ness and the view was able to click and select every object I highlighted.
  • In my experience Blend gets very confused and locks you out of being able to do these interactions, so you can't select anything reliably in those very dense and complicated xaml files.
• Great nesting controls and feedback in the canvas, as well as the dragging objects into layout containers, like Grids. I appreciate the outlines and object nameplates that contextually light up when dragging them in range of each other. The interaction I’m describing is the blue-outlining “Move to Grid” visual feedback.
• The Properties panel has very pleasing clarity and spacing. It makes seeing things like how a Resource is bound to something much easier.
  • Also appreciate the color-coding of that decoration to reinforce the type of resource (brush, color, etc…)
• The Resource Library has a nice visual representation, and the ability to view/edit those resources in real-time within an open page or template is a big help. It just helps visualize things and explain the connections for newcomers to xaml resource structure.
• The same can be said for the way you can preview how image brushes are mapped to objects. The tiling, cropping, layout, and even the Viewport/Viewbox parameters being preview-able are a huge help. This is some of the stuff that can get very sticky in Blend. Especially if you want to animate some of these properties in complex files.

• I noticed immediately that we can keyframe to the most granular frame in Noesis Studio’s timeline. This seems big.
  • In VS Blend, I think at its smallest increment one can only plot a keyframe every 10th of a second, which, in a 60fps game is only once every 6 frames. I might be wrong about that limitation but that has been my experience. As a result, this left room for there to be un-editable interpolation. This was definitely not desirable.
• Appreciate that looping behavior options are much more apparent and accessible in Noesis Studio

• None of the Help items in the File Menu appear to function or open up any information windows.
• No settings or preferences yet.
• No Keyboard Shortcuts listed anywhere. These would definitely be nice to have at this early stage since it's a brand new program and shortcuts are fresh.
• I have noticed hotkey tooltips on the button icons in the interface.
• Selecting multiple objects in the Navigator and trying to change a common property between those objects (such as Width or Fill, for example) doesn't work. It only affects the first selected object. If possible, this would be very desirable to have for efficiency, and would improve a lot of mass changes in one action.
• Objects in the Navigator have Hide and Lock toggle icons. I would love for there to be a way to keep something in the editor but ‘Disabled for Export’, so to speak... Something to keep in the file, but not output it into the runtime file.
  • Not sure how technically doable this is since it’s probably not supported by xaml code.
  • Maybe it could be commented out in the xaml code, but still readable in Noesis Studio?
  • Perhaps it could just be information stored somewhere within Noesis Studio’s background files.
• Would love a way to fine-tune or customize the auto-backup save feature that I accidentally discovered and mentioned earlier.
• Are there any plans to introduce a live Code view, or split Code panel into Noesis Studio? This would be to view the code updates in real-time, or directly edit them.
  • I know there are shortcut buttons that launch out to VS Code view, but that’s just the last saved instance of the file. It doesn’t update in real-time without saving.

Selecting multiple objects in the Navigator and trying to change a common property between those objects (such as Width or Fill, for example) doesn't work. It only affects the first selected object. If possible, this would be very desirable to have for efficiency, and would improve a lot of mass changes in one action.

Objects in the Navigator have Hide and Lock toggle icons. I would love for there to be a way to keep something in the editor but ‘Disabled for Export’, so to speak... Something to keep in the file, but not output it into the runtime file.

Would love a way to fine-tune or customize the auto-backup save feature that I accidentally discovered and mentioned earlier.

Are there any plans to introduce a live Code view, or split Code panel into Noesis Studio? This would be to view the code updates in real-time, or directly edit them.

Ticket #3388 created for this. This was already in our roadmap. It is not an immediate task though, but will be implemented at some point of the alpha.

If think this can be implemented with the d: keyword. Applying this to a node will make it visible only in Studio. Do you have an example of where this would be useful for you? Just to understand the pattern a bit more and think about the translation to UX.

What would you like to customize about this? Something we are considering is, when you close Studio, giving the option to save your files, because right now when you close it, the unsaved changed remain in the backup folder and this can be a problem if you are working under source control.

Right now, there is a way (although clearly not well exposed and we are working on this). For any modified file, if you click on the VsCode icon, it will open you a diff view of that file against the saved file that is also dynamically updated while you make changes (without saving) in Studio.

In general, we decided to remove the XAML view from Noesis Studio to make the tool more designer-friendly and less intimidating. We are prioritizing the integration with our VSCode plugin. This integration will be two-way (changes in VSCode will apply to Studio), but it is still in development.

            <MyMeter x:Name="BlueMeter">
                <MyMeter.Resources>
                    <ImageBrush x:Key="ImageBrush.Meter.Fill" ImageSource="/Images/blue_fill.png"/>
                </MyMeter.Resources>
            </MyMeter>
            <MyMeter x:Name="RedMeter">
                <MyMeter.Resources>
                    <ImageBrush x:Key="ImageBrush.Meter.Fill" ImageSource="/Images/red_fill.png"/>
                </MyMeter.Resources>
            </MyMeter>

Regarding the shortcut button out to VS Code to see real-time changes, I wasn't able to find the "diff view" to see the "dirty", un-saved version of a page. I should say my experience in VS Code is low, so apologies if this is a fairly routine thing to generate.

Do you have a good way to do something like this? Or do you foresee the need to drop down to hand-coded xaml?

Oh, I also forgot to add that I managed to get the application to crash consistently and I have a few dump files if you want them. I don't know how you prefer to have that handled but just let me know. I can also describe exactly what I was doing to achieve this, and it's pretty severe since it rendered the project's .noesis file unopenable from my end.