Hi Grendel - pretty darn close to what I've been thinking about.

re: Color - one thing that I've been thinking is to have an object properties panel that shows up in the area where command options normally go (above the "Draw curve" palette, and below the open file name).

I was thinking of having color assignable to objects in that spot, rather than assigning it to a tag.

Assigning color by tags only is kind of problematic because I want to allow you to create different tags/groups and allow the same object to belong to potentially many different tags instead of only one.

Like take a car for example, maybe you might want to have one tag for "wheels" with 4 wheel objects assigned to it, and another tag for "Front of car" with all the front half of the car assigned to it including the front 2 wheels.

That would mean those front 2 wheels would belong to 2 different tags neither one of which was a child or totally subordinate set to the other.

Allowing this kind of multiple membership would open up a lot of flexibility I think but it also tends to make for some problems if you try to assign properties to a tag instead of to an object, like what if you assigned the "wheels" tag to have a color of blue, and then the "front of car" tag to have a color of red - what color should the 2 front wheels be, blue or red? They would have these kind of 2 inconsistent properties applied to them.

By applying properties at an object level instead of a tag level it should help to remove this kind of potential inconsistencies.

I think there is still a good chance to incorporate color into the tag browser UI still though just through some simple rules like maybe if all the objects that are under a tag are all the same color, the background of that tag will display in the browser UI as that color, stuff like that.


To assign a different color to a tag, you would click on the tag to select all objects in it, then go to the object properties panel to the right of it and assign the color to all those objects there.

Similarly hiding or showing a tag would be a shortcut for hiding or showing all the objects that belong to a tag - the actual tag itself would not have a hide/show property of its own but the UI for it could indicate in some way if all of the tag's objects are hidden or not and allow flipping them easily.


Any ideas/comments on the above?

- Michael