Properties Palette annoyance

Sorry, another post to highlight something that’s been bothering me.

A year ago on Inside the Factory, a post discussed Modeless properties. One of the topics was that of User/Focus update. I thought that committing changes once the mouse is moved out of the properties palette was a brilliant idea. As I tested the new features in November, I thought it worked great. However now that I’ve been working with it for a while, I’ve changed my mind. Unlike Steve Stafford who is quite happy with the palette!

I’m finding that I keep losing focus when trying to edit a parameter. Usually once you click in a list box, you naturally move the mouse sideways to make sure the cursor doesn’t block what we’re about to type (at least I find myself doing that a lot when working in any software). Unfortunately if you move the cursor outside the palette’s boundaries, it commits changes immediately, and the input box you just clicked in, loses focus. At least when selecting something from a list box, you can pick the scroll, hold down the mouse button and move the cursor outside of the palette boundaries up and down, while still retaining focus until a selection is made.

At first I loved the above behavior, but now that I find myself losing focus constantly, it is growing to be very annoying. Sure I can adapt, but I think a better solution is to commit the changes once the focus is moved away from the palette, such as when clicking the next command on the ribbon, dropping your selection by picking other objects or clicking on an empty spot on the canvas. These are natural clicks that a user makes, so it wouldn’t increase the click count.

I know a lot of you like it the way it is but I just had to state my feelings as it’s not going away for me. I’ve held on posting about this for a while to see if I would get used to it and obviously I have not! Here is a summary of my thoughts together with some other possible solutions:

• Commit changes when a new selection is made or the current selection is dropped such as when clicking an empty spot on the canvas. Say you select a door and make changes to its parameters. Now you pick a wall; since the selection changed, the door parameter edits would be committed.
• Commit changes when a new command is invoked. This seems quite logical as now focus has moved away from the palette, as if saying “Hey Revit, as you can see I’m done editing parameters...commit my changes!”
• Define a distance in pixels that the cursor has to travel past the palette extents before changes are committed.
• To satisfy a wider audience, how about controls/settings to customize the commit behavior: current behavior or per my above suggestions?

Anyone else out there having similar thoughts or other ideas?

Properties Palette annoyance

UI annoyance

There’s no doubt that the 2011 UI has been a positive improvement over the 2010 Ribbon. But there’s one thing that has been really annoying me in this iteration of the Properties Palette: selecting a type when in sketch mode for system families such as floors, ceilings, stairs, etc.
In 2010, you had a button on the ribbon to change the properties of the element you were sketching:

This would open the Instance Properties dialog, from where you could change the Type as desired.
In 2011 things get confusing in my opinion. There is no Properties button anymore, so you might think that it’s just a matter of picking the correct type from the Properties Palette’s Type Selector. Wrong. You have to use the Edit Type button.

This will open the Type Properties dialog where you can then change the Type as before.
One could argue that the terminology got better in 2011 as you go to the Type Properties to change the Type. The number of clicks has remained the same. However I’m expecting to be able to change the type in the palette’s Type Selector rather than having to click Edit Type. After all I’m just selecting a type in most cases without actually doing any editing. Maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but I guess it bothered me enough to say something about it! What’s your take?

EDIT: This was fixed in Revit 2012. Thanks for listening Factory!

UI annoyance