Hi Will, thanks for the feedback!
Yeah I also find the trackpad kind of awkward, you will probably get a significant amount more control if you use a mouse instead, MoI's UI was really designed to be used with a mouse or wacom type pen and not really finger stuff.
I think that you're right that multi-touch would be a help there, but yes as you suspected it's not easy for me to make use of it since the porting method that I used (which is Wine/XQuartz/Wineskin) does not handle it yet. So that's not likely to happen anytime soon since it would require a tremendous quantity of work to switch off of that.
Really the easiest zoom method currently is the scroll wheel on a mouse.
> or even better have smooth/continuous zooming.
There is actually continuous zooming available by using the "Zoom" button that's at the bottom of the viewport -those buttons down there offer an alternate method for view controls separate from the in-viewport methods. If you go down to the Zoom button at the bottom of a viewport and click and hold down and drag upwards just slightly you'll be doing a continuous zoom in to the center of the viewport. You only need to move a small amount, and the sensitivity of that is adjustable under Options > View > Rotate/Pan/View options. That may work better for you in the absence of a scroll wheel mouse.
There are also some alternate shortcut keys for the in-viewport navigation which may be better than trying to do a right-click with the trackpad, you can use: Cmd + left drag as the equivalent of Right button drag, which will Pan the ortho views or rotate the 3D view. Cmd + shift + left drag will pan both the 3D view and the ortho view, and Cmd + ctrl + left drag up or down will do zoom in/out. Since these all only use a simple left drag on the trackpad they will probably be a lot less finicky than trying to do right drag on the trackpad which I guess by its nature is kind of tricky. These may be your best bet actually.
> It'd be cool to have a guide tool (a la Sketchup's guide and protractor tools)
MoI's guide mechanism is called "Construction Lines" and there are a lot of functions available with them - anytime you're in a draw command where MoI is asking you for a point if you hold down and drag you will create a construction line instead of actually placing the point. There is a lot of stuff you can do with them such as capture distances and move them to other areas, get the point midway between 2 existing points, make divisions of thirds or fifths or whatever between 2 points, do extensions and intersections, etc... - there's a bunch of information about those in the help file topic here:
http://moi3d.com/2.0/docs/moi_command_reference11.htm#constructionlines
> Also, CAD would be a really good application of the new(ish) full-screen functionality in OSX
That will probably come eventually when XQuartz is finally updated to get the new Lion functionality. But really I'm not sure there is very much to gain there, just zoom the window up with the little green + sign and you're basically 95% close to full screen already there...
> Before I start rambling, there are a couple bugs I've noticed (I'm using the latest beta,
> so these may have been fixed in the release version):
Probably not since the release version is essentially the same as the last public beta.
> • The menubar disappears after switching to another app and back.
Is there a particular method you use for switching back and forth that I could use to try and reproduce it? It's probably going to be a bug in XQuartz though and not one in MoI's own code directly so most likely it will take a while for a fix to trickle down.
> • Resizing the window or changing the UI size causes the rendered window
> to zoom and jump all over the place, then correct itself.
The sizing of the main window was improved quite a bit in one of the betas near the end, are you positive you're using the most recent one?
For the UI size change, if it corrects itself when you're done it's probably just not going to be a big enough issue for me to dig into, since typically you're going to just set that one time to what you like...
I'm not able to reproduce any problems relating to either of those on my own systems here, so it may involve some kind of system specific stuff or be timing related or something like that. Those kinds of things tend to be difficult to fix.
> if MoI was open source, I'd be hacking on it this very moment :)
There really would not have been any chance for me to get it to this point if it was open source because I would not have had any way to pay my bills and I would have had to abandon it quite a while ago and go to work for some company...
Anyway, let me know if the alternate view manipulation methods above help out any, I hope they will!
- Michael
