V10 Late adopter impressions

[Donald Wardlaw]

I have been collecting a few impressions after upgrading to v10 very recently.

1. It was a fast upgrade. First one I can remember that did not require me to rebuild my workspace. This made the upgrade much more economical than previous ones.

2. Seems to work pretty well. Stability is good.

3. I like the favorites feature of the resource palette. But I think the interface design at the top of the palette is not very good. It could be more compact and more intuitive. Now it is cluttered. I don?t see a need for two separate drop downs for folder locations. The old model of putting both realms in one drop down with a separator worked fine and did it all with one control. Perhaps some other idea would work also. And why not place the Resources and Files and Folders buttons on one line? Perhaps with, should I say it, icons instead of text?

4. Double clicking to get into groups was a great idea and works neat. Why not let us double click (off any object) to exit the group?

5. Scrolling the screen during object creation by dragging to the edge of the screen does not work nicely. You have to hit a terribly small sweet spot, especially in the upper and left edges where there are no scroll bars. It is an exercise in frustration. I think this worked better in 9, which didn?t work as well as 8.

6. There is still at least one anomaly with clip surface, which in my experience has been the buggiest feature (except until v10 the workspace editor). For example, if you hollow out part of a filled, maybe somewhat complicated polygon, by clipping the surface and then deleted the clipping form, the resulting object does something weird. Namely, if you use the trim command, say just to trim a line, anywhere within the bounding box of the polygon, (can be outside the clipped void) it will undo the clip, and restore the clipping object, and the clipping object will take the fill pattern of the clipped object. It does other weird things too when you do repeated clips on the an object.

7. Workspace editor seems to work as it is supposed to in this version.

8. I?m slightly disappointed that transparency is not supported. I asked one of the NNA folks at Macworld SF if it was supported, and heard ?yes.? This would be a cool feature to have (a slider for transparency of a particular object) as it would open new expressive graphic possibilities. Nice to see gradients though. Transparency would be a natural next step.

9. The format text palette is not much changed since 9. I don?t like the modality. In my opinion it would work much better as a tear off that could remain open and float. And it is way, way too big. What I really think would be best of all though, is if it were a context sensitive mode of the object info palette. Why not let all that text info show up there whenever any text is selected? Text is after all an object with attributes.

10. Taking this one more step, why not show all object attributes in the object info palette? Sure maybe we need the attributes palette to set attributes prior to creation, but why not also show info on the object info palette too? Would make it easier to alter fills, tweak gradients, and set transparency. Or access gradient libraries, color sets, etc. The attributes palette may be a bit of a misnomer since it is not much more than a vestigial subset of the attributes that are currently available in the program.

Such is the crazy world as I see it now.

Best,

Donald

[Guest]

Donald,

What do you mean by this - transparency relative to what - to rendering, printing, object fill, etc...

"I’m slightly disappointed that transparency is not supported. I asked one of the NNA folks at Macworld SF if it was supported, and heard “yes.” This would be a cool feature to have (a slider for transparency of a particular object) as it would open new expressive graphic possibilities. Nice to see gradients though. Transparency would be a natural next step."

[Donald Wardlaw]

Transparency would apply to fills, gradients and images. Like in photoshop or illustrator. If a rendering is a raster image, it could apply to that. The benefit is more flexibility in the presentation of graphic information

I also forgot one other real cool thing...

11. Battery life on a G4 laptop is improved pretty fabulously. I would say somewhere between 40 min. and 1 hr. 20min. per battery.

[Guest]

Well if you have 3d objects and use the render bitmap tool to render your drawing, that rendering mode is controlled by the settings in Custom RenderWorks Options. If transparency isn't enabled there, it isn't enabled in the render bitmap.

Good point about the 2d portion though. I guess the transparency could be achieved via masking images, but sometimes that gets into being more work than the prize of the outcome.

[Donald Wardlaw]

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I don't know what you mean by this. I simply suggest that true transparency would add useful graphic power.

Here are a few more observations.

12. Still can't do custom selection on text attributes.

13. Smart cursor still does not function for object generation with the free hand tool.

14. Selection of symbols from the resource pallete when in list view has a bug. If you click on the name of the symbol, it does not select the symbol tool and the symbol. If you select in the column where resource types are listed, next to the name of the symbol you want, it then selects the symbol tool and that symbol. Clicking on the name of the symbol itself to select the symbol is what I think NNA would want.

15. I am having a problem with a post script type I font, ITC Tiepolo. This font has been included with Illustrator many times over the years. This font has a few differnent sets, bold, black, book, bold italic, etc. I use bold in drawings. It worked fine and predictably in 9.5, under OSX 10.2.6. In VW10.1, however, there is a problem. If "Tiepolo Bold" is the selected font, it will show that font while creating text. As soon as the operation is done, it deselects to Tiepolo Book. They are not reversed, as selecting book will give book. It is possible to select the book text blocks and change them to bold via the font menu, but this is extra work and not the expected behavior. Here is an example of where custom selection of text attributes would be useful.

Regards,

Donald

[Guest]

Is the transparency shader in the textures not the type of transparency you are looking for?

As for the font - it sounds like you may be missing something within that font or something is corrupted.

Download font doctor at cnet.com/downloads and run it to see if it finds any problems, especially with that font.

[Donald Wardlaw]

<>

Katy,

I think this is simply a bug. The font works fine in 9.5. It works fine in all other applications. It even works fine in 10.5 dimensions. It just is messed up in text creation with the text tool.

Donald