I think VCP is a great assembly of software. Not perfect, but definitely affordable, highly useful, and has great potential. I like a lot of things about it. Toolbars and pallets, though, definitely interrupt my workflow at times.

Short version atop; longer details further below:


1. Please fix the VCP toolbars overlapping drawing geometry to be assignable to corners, across sessions, EVEN IF VCP crashes (which it does, depending on my geometry)

2. Please modify the VCP toolbars and pallets so we can corral or lasso/wrangle them together and back into view when the system displays resolution is change. Please, do NOT only consider win in native win multiscreen environments. Please, get a free copy of VirtualBox and test VCP's behavior under virtual win 7 in KDE and notice a few weird things that happen.

3. Please make the tools Alt-Left-Click moveable no matter where we click on a toolbar or pallet. Being restricted to the uppermost bar of a pallet or toolbar widget is frustrating when the tool somehow gets off edge in windows.

============LONGER VERSION ============


I use shift+k to toggle on and off the tollbars and pallets. But, in two-display mode, two weird and vexatious things occur. One is that the tool pallets appear and float over my geometry. I have had to accept that the tools are not going to be part of the canvas, embedded in the edges of the screen. But, when I hit zoom full, there are INNUMERABLE times when I just want my geometry to zoom only to the extent that it all fits BETWEEN the tools, not be overlapped by them. I wish we'd have an actual choice to have loose-floating toolbars as they currently behave, or dockable tool bars that snap to an edge and programmatically redefine the zoom extents/boundary. Depending on the geometry, and on what I am focusing on at any moment, the toolbars simply get in the way, and I'm always moving them around, only to have to hide/unhide or visually scan for where I shoved them.

Another thing that is annoying is the weird interaction between VCP and VirtualBox, or of VBxo upon win7, or possibly all 3 independently clobbering the other two when I work in two-display mode. My external LCD is on my left. It's huge, and I like it on the left because of my typing experience. My laptop is on my right. I feel less claustrophobic that way.

With Windows 7 in two-display mode I drag the laptop display icon from right to left because of trying to get win 7 into the right resolution. I've had to do this because despite my telling the ATI graphics driver that my external LCD is on the left, and telling VirtualBox I have two displays, win 7 does the stupid thing of telling the user that the external display is ABOVE the laptop, which is not reality.

I've found that depending on what is going on, the VCP toolbars and pallets (except for pen color, strangely) just VANISH. In reality, they are not turned off, but are totally inaccessable because the virtual screening geometry is way out of whack. By moving the screens' icons for positioning, they can be recovered, but there are times when the virtual screens NEED to be reoriented.


Suggestion: "Magnetic" wrangling of the tool bars and pallets. Please, in the next patch of VCP/Shark, provide a "magnetism" feature that offers an ability to make the toolbars and pallets "orbit" or hang peripherally off at some distance a user-defined point. If we have or cause a sudden change in screen resolution in multi-screen environments, we could hit an emergency hot key to yank the magnetically-lasso'd bars and pallets back into view. It should be possible to define a primary collection point when there are two screens, and a secondary collection point should one screen die. It is harrowing and irritating to be able to toggle the tools yet not be able to grab them.

This brings up another feature, one which irritates me to NO END. Windows developers really need to pay attention to some aspects of KDE's GUI. In KDE/X, it is possible tho hit Alt+Left Mouse Button and while clicking ANYWHERE on the texture of a toolbar, pallet, dialog box, etc, and move that object around. Why is this beautiful or awesome? Well, imagine in Windows you change resolution of the virtual environment but not of windows itself, or in the case when windows does something wonky after a lot of Alt+Tabbing. In windows, sometimes, the dialog boxes end up at the top of the screen where the title bar is totally inaccessible. It is virtually impossible to grab that item and bring it back into view. It also is almost impossible to hide a pallet or panel by dragging upward. For some reason, microsoft feels it is not necessary to permit this.

Also, in Linux/KDE, it is possible click on an icon of an app in question on the task bar and then right-click contextually, and then click on "Move", to bring to focus or to the current desktop any app that is "out there" on another virtual desktop. So, if I have 8 virtual desktops, with 4 atop and 4 below, and i am in desktop 3 and drag a toolbar down to 7, i can still flip or click to the desktop #7, look at the top edge of my screen, and say, I want that app here, and simply click on Alt+Left Mouse Click and I can drag it down. This should be possible in VCP, so that if the have a piece of a toolbar visible but spanning an edge between two screens, we can manipulate that toolbar with minimal fuss.

"Suggestion: "Magnetic" wrangling of the tool bars and pallets. Please, in the next patch of VCP/Shark, provide a "magnetism" feature that offers an ability to make the toolbars and pallets "orbit" or hang peripherally off at some distance a user-defined point. If we have or cause a sudden change in screen resolution in multi-screen environments, we could hit an emergency hot key to yank the magnetically-lasso'd bars and pallets back into view. It should be possible to define a primary collection point when there are two screens, and a secondary collection point should one screen die. It is harrowing and irritating to be able to toggle the tools yet not be able to grab them."

I might have overstated in this one. It seems that whether or not the tools and pallets appear and where they appear on starting/restarting a windows session/VCP session may depend on whether an external LCD was disconnected before or after VCP or windows shutdown. I'm getting a feeling i wrote egg on my own face...

THAT WAS CLOSE!

I cannot believe it, but I had yet another manual semi-rolling backup from May or June of my \users\username\AppData\Local\Punch!\ViaCad Pro path.

You might not have experienced my issue/s, but if you keep a rolling backup you may be happy and breathe a sigh of relief. It also is a great way to recover your MRU (if you're not prone to restructuring your file structure every couple of weeks), so, it might not be a bad idea to put a shortcut to that on your desktop and then manually copying it as often as you want, to an incremental date-time stamped filename. It only totals 40-70 kb per folder backup.