Hi Felix,

> Some will draw the shape immediatly and some need extra
> point(s) entered with the mouse. It's not the end of world
> of course but I thought it would be more consistent if the
> behaviour was the same.

That's correct, but the source of the inconsistency is that some commands are restricted to either only create an axis-aligned shape, or the alignment is uniform like with a circle (and thus more simplified).

So with those particular commands there can be fewer steps involved in the particular command.

Some other commands though incorporate the orientation of the shape directly into the drawing command itself and those ones can require another pick to define the orientation.

Often times there are a couple of different varieties of commands to have some in each of these flavors - that's the case for both rectangle and ellipse as well.

For rectangle the first 2 commands (by corner and by center point) make axis aligned shapes. If you want an axis aligned shape then those are the most convenient to use. But there's also a 3rd variety of rectangle command rectangle by 3 points which allows you to define the orientation of the rectangle right in the command. If you want to create a rectangle at a specific orientation that one can be more convenient to use since it allows you to create it directly where you want it without doing any extra repositioning steps later.

For ellipses, the first 2 ellipse commands incorporate orientation into the commands, while the 3rd ellipse command (the by corners one) makes an axis-aligned restricted one and so that last one requires fewer picks.

These differences between the drawing commands is an intentional part of the workflow design so that you have an overall more flexible toolbox of drawing commands at your disposal so that you can sometimes use simple axis-aligned tools for more efficiency and lower number of picks for basic stuff but you still have some other tools to do more advanced "in place" drawing available as well.

This kind of flexibility and variety is a good thing, I'd hate to lose that type of functionality just in the name of forcing absolute conformity. It's not bad to have uniform behavior in general but there are times when variety is useful too so it's a balance and it is not a goal to have 100% conformity at all costs or 100% variety either.

Hope this helps explain the overall design rationale better!

- Michael

Basically what it comes down to is that if I were to make the Ellipse command end after you had picked the first point and then entered in a width and height, the only way to do that is to make an axis-aligned ellipse.

If I did that, then the behavior would become inconsistent with the rectangle 3 point workflow.

Right now it's not like the Ellipse command is inconsistent with everything else - it behaves the same way as the rectangle 3 point command that deals with drawing an oriented rectangle.

- Michael

an awesome printscreen program that is free is gadwin http://gadwin.com/download/
Hit the prt sc button drag a box with the mouse and save to file / folder and or printer and or to clip board and to email, you can even change the destination between capture and save.
Save as jpg gif or even as a tiff
Its very good
cheers
shayne