Forums | NoesisGUI

Not sure if this is the right thread! Downloaded this and played around for 30 minutes with the samples.

Studio seems lightweight and I'm glad I can open multiple instances. (To reference other projects.) You CAN actually open multiple instances of the same project simultaneously, as well...

Dark theme is great! My eyes thank you.

From the demo projects, Basic keyboard navigation (arrow keys, enter or space to submit) during Play Mode only works as expected with the Z3L example. The others:
- don't respond to keyboard at all
- navigation happens but is unexpected (navigation keys select unrelated controls in a strange sequence) (eg "Paradigm")
- navigation is sometimes happening but invisible in the ui. Sometimes it comes back partway and keyboard keys start selecting other controls again (eg "Engineering")
- submit via spacebar sometimes simultaneously submits whatever's under the mouse cursor (you can even see two buttons clicking at once) (eg "Engineering")

This could be that the examples were primarily designed for mouse input only, but it makes me unconfident about robust input support and worried about how tricky it would be to fix the bugs if the GUI system is too far abstracted/blackboxed from integrations (my use case would be Noesis GUIs inside Unity). I don't know Studio very well yet but I'm not seeing obvious diagramming for UI navigation like for example designing UI navigation in the Unity editor.

I don't see an obvious way to do fullscreen play (so I can't test 1080p aspect at true 1080p zoom)

Source control would be a must since changes seem to autosave easily/without indication, making it easy to catastrophically edit complex UI's.

I would really like to see some predefined styles and not totally styleless components (the styleless ones are good in some workflows, but hard to prototype with). For example, it would be great to have a set of premade tables, dropdowns etc with any pre-applied theme and some dummy styles/data, to design UI subtractively rather than additively.

I somehow triggered a very nasty bug where Ctrl+Z would undo but Ctrl+Y would switch the main editor panel to a view of the underlying xaml. It would also autosave the UI I was trying to redo, without the redo, and forgot the redo state. (Making Redo act like the opposite of its intended purpose, ie permanently committing the undesired changes.) I can't recreate this bug but it's in there somewhere.

Will play with this some more, it's a cool tool. Thanks!

Hi camfox, Dorian here! I just wanted to thank you from all of us for taking the time to create this post, and sharing your first experience with us! We really value posts like yours a lot.

I'll also go point-by-point through everything you mentioned:

Keyboard Navigation:
Your intuition was correct that these were originally designed for mouse input. However, your comment about your expectations marked us, so I've gone ahead and split our Samples up and created tasks for us to address this to improve this aspect:
https://www.noesisengine.com/bugs/view.php?id=4342
https://www.noesisengine.com/bugs/view.php?id=4343

Fullscreen Functionality:
Fullscreen Mode can be engaged whilst in Play Mode by pressing [F11].
(The same key can be used to exit Fullscreen Mode)

Source Control
Completely agreed on your comments about integrated Source Control features. It's on our radar and is something we'll be working towards offering.

Subtractive UI Design
One thing we are moving towards is somewhat similar to what you expressed: essentially, we will be exposing our Noesis Studio 'Built-In' Default Templates and Styles. This will allow you to deconstruct all of the prefabs in a method similar to how you suggested, without reducing each Element to the most minimal version of the Elements, as it does now. So, in theory, you'll be able to choose whether you want to build UI "Additively" or "Subtractively". (I love these terms you used to described each process by the way, its a perfect way of looking at each workflow).

Bug
Thanks for signalling this; we'll see if we can track this down. If you do encounter it again however, and are able to determine 100% repro steps we can get this to happen again, please let us know and we can jump on getting a fix out immediately.

And I think that covers it! Thank you so much once again for all of this, and drop by anytime if anything else!

- Dorian

Just adding a first impression as well:
- the TAB key does something really weird in Noesis. I'm not sure what it's doing, but it does not do the 'normal' thing I expect which is to exit out of the current text entry field, and instead it switches to an entirely different workspace or something. It's very frustrating for people who are used to being able to tab out of numeric entry fields, e.g. when changing the weights on grid partitions.

Hi llamahunter,

Thanks for this! As a result, we've investigated further, and we were able to log these two separate issues related to Tabbing:

0004373: Pressing [Tab] Whilst Active In A Grid Column/Row Definiton Adorner Switches Pages

0004374: Pressing Tab With An Active Zoom Level Input Field Opens The XAML View

Let us know if what you came across is even different than this, and we'll look into that, but otherwise, we'll get these two fixed!

Thanks again for taking the time to flag this to us!

- Dorian