My blog has been moved to ariya.ofilabs.com.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Magic Guide Lines

Casper Boemann and Thorsten Zachmann have worked together to implement a nice feature: automatic guide lines. This is available in KPresenter and Kivio. The idea is, when you e.g. drag an object to move it, then vertical and horizontal guide lines should appear magically when necessary, thereby making it easier to align the object with other objects:

In the above screenshot, the circle is being moved (by dragging) and at certain position, the dashed guide lines (in light green) show up. If the circle is moved away, the guide lines are placed in another position e.g. close to the object that the circle is approaching.

This is much better than using the manual guide lines. Very cool, isn't it?

1 comment:

jospoortvliet said...

very cool indeed. this will be in 1.5?
yeah, just tried SVN kivio, it is ;-) the green dashed line can be a bit jumpy, but the fact the moving object snaps to it makes it really usefull.

but when i have two items connected with a line, i notice when moving one of them the line is painted twice: a 'good' one, always connecting both objects as it should, and one coming from the 'static' object, which goes in the general direction of the moving object, but seems to snap to some grid... looks weird.