Rearranging UI for multiple displays

Um, hi - this is probably a real noob question, but Hype Pro's "Fully rearrangeable interface panes"... does that not include tearing off palettes so you can rearrange them onto other monitors?

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Unfortunately you cannot currently tear off into a separate window, just re-arrange within a window. This is a popular feature request and we definitely understand the need especially when dealing with multiple monitors.

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Thanks for the reply Jonathan.

If I could impose a further question (being formerly a Flash, Director, Livestage Pro user over the years...) is this feature possible / likely, or are you deep enough in a tech path that it's a "rewrite the whole thing from scratch" change?

Cheers,

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It is possible, but may be limited to just breaking off the scene and/or timeline.
It is actually more of a UI issue than a technical one in some ways since some of the panels are part of the document itself and some are inspectors that one might want changed contextually based on which document window is active. It could create quite an unintended mishmash of behavior if done incorrectly. (A lot of other apps that break everything off only allow one document to ever be open, which is very much not the mac way).

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Hi Jonthan,

I understand the concerns, but still - tear-off panels, with document-specific content in multiple document applications, is literally the way every Mac content creation app worked from the 1980s, until the mid 2000s.

Even iWork functioned that way (though the palette tabs themselves weren't undockable from the floating inspector) up until the 2010 "make Macs work like iPads" re-write.

I'm sure we all recall Macromedia (and Apple, and everyone else) and Adobe had a patent fight over whether those tear-off panels could be docked together into multi-tab palettes - hence the era of vertically-docking palettes with disclosure-triangle-collapse headings. Thankfully that patent is long expired.

In the Affinity suite, Serif does floating palettes with multiple documents, either as tabs in a single document window, or as separate floating document windows. They have a mode switch to flip between tabbed documents in a single window (with floating or docked palettes), and multiple document windows, each option recording its own layout for the floating palettes.

I think concerns over user-confusion are somewhat looking for a problem that doesn't really exist. "All floating palettes show the details of the currently active document" - that's literally the only documentation needed. Whether MacOS is still doing enough to differentiate the window chrome of the active document is a different matter, but as Serif, Adobe etc (and the entire past of Mac apps) have shown, this is a solved problem from a UI/UX perspective.

Cheers,

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Hype has taken a lot of design cues from iWork (before and after its redesign) for familiarity, and this is how Hype also worked before version 3.0. As we don't like losing features, we always intended to bring back the functionality :slight_smile:.

The UI issue at hand isn't the floating palettes -- both the Inspector and Resources Library were designed and originally implemented as palettes. The heart of the issue is the things that aren't exactly palettes. Is the timeline view a palette? Is the scene/layout list a palette? What about individual code editor tabs? There can definitely be arguments that some should be, but these items were not really designed to be. And then if they should be considered still part of the document, should they all come to the front whenever any is clicked? (Which is probably the most useful but also pretty non-standard on the Mac).

Most apps are "all palette" or "only one document" and also don't have the exact baggage Hype has. There's tons of issues that might crop up in regards to saving state and restoring state on different machines. It all needs to be worked out, and turns out has lots of little creaky corners :slight_smile:.

Anyhow there's really no "convincing" needed, as I'm also someone who understands the need - not just as a long time mac user, lover of customizability, and often a multiple monitor user!

I see the most value for multiple monitors in being able to separate the timeline from the scene editor, since these are the biggest views and have the most space demands to efficiently work.

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Amen!

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