Dec 21, 2025, 12:22:30 PM
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Sweet Home 3D Forum » List all forums » » Forum: Sweet Home 3D bar » » » Thread: Tablets and SH3D » » » » Post: Re: Tablets and SH3D |
Print at Dec 21, 2025, 12:22:30 PM |
| Posted by Puybaret at Sep 5, 2014, 11:14:17 PM |
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Re: Tablets and SH3D I bought an Asus T100 tablet too (my first PC running Windows for many many years!) to make some tests. It's very interesting because Sweet Home 3D can run out of the box on it, and this can be very helpful to choose what should be changed to the user interface to make it more usable, before even considering porting Sweet Home 3D to iOS or Android. As I didn't buy any stylus, I used only my (not so big but not so thin too) fingers to test Sweet Home 3D: - First, I felt that selecting menu items without error is quite difficult when you use your fingers, because the default font size shows them at a too small size to ensure you won't touch the next or the previous menu item. The trick is to move around your finger around in a menu to get the visual feedback on the selected menu item before releasing your finger, and/or customize the system with a larger font (for example 12 pixels), but this second option won't have any effect on information shown in lists and trees (but that should be fixable). By the way, keyboard shortcuts feel completely useless and shouldn't be displayed on this kind of device. - Icons in the tool bar look a little small too, and an option to display them at a larger size would be welcomed (or maybe the size should be enlarged automatically as soon as icons look too small at screen). To replace keyboard shortcuts, the ability to customize the toolbar would be probably very welcomed, even if all the tool options are also in contextual menus that are easily accessible with a longer finger press on the screen. - Drawing walls with the finger is quite difficult to get accustomed to, because clicking and drag-and-drop operations works differently with the mouse and the finger, and the tooltip showing wall sizes is hidden by your finger, preventing from reading the size of the objects you modify. The workaround is to enter values with the virtual keyboard which works great after pressing Enter key. - To draw rooms, you'll probably prefer the option to double-click in areas surrounded by the walls you already created, unless you prefer to draw rooms first then using double-click to draw walls around rooms. - Drawing dimensions with the finger is the hardest thing to do, and even using the keyboard to draw them won't be that easy since you'll have to enter values that might be not so easy to guess. I hoped that zooming in the plan could help, but it wasn't really better. The difficulty comes mainly that the finger is really too imprecise to point a place in the plan, default magnetism tolerance is probably too small and the multiple clicks required to draw dimensions don't fit the tablet behavior. It's also the kind of drawing where the Escape key is missing the most, forcing the user to finish an action and undoing it when he made an error. - Placing furniture works pretty well. First, you should display the catalog with a searchable list to get bigger furniture icons that you'll be able to drag and drop with the finger more easily. The main issue is that rotate/resize indicators at the corners of a selected piece of furniture are not easy to use, forcing the user to modify a piece with its modification dialog box. - Using the dialogs are ok, but editing numbers with spinners -/+ is not easy because they are too small. - Modifier keys (shift, ctrl and alt) are missing a little but not too much. - The good surprise came from pinch gesture that is automatically translated to zoom in and out in the plan and in the 3D view (even if it's too slow in the 3D view). Very handy! As a conclusion, here are a few points that should be changed to improve Sweet Home 3D usability on this kind of device: - Increasing magnetism sensibility - Enlarging indicators size of selected object - Displaying bigger icons in the toolbar and in the navigation arrows - Removing keyboard shortcuts - Making number spinners more usable - Showing text in lists with a larger font - Moving the tooltip showing edited values elsewhere, maybe in some kind of status bar - Proposing an other way to create dimensions Maybe all those features (except the issue with dimensions) could be set with a simple Pointer option showing Mouse or Finger radio buttons… Feel free to ask more details or propose some solutions. ---------------------------------------- Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D creator |
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