Chortling Hamster Modules: Tie incoming

That is awesome. Great to look back on stuff like that as well. My sketch only looked neat as you couldn’t see the scribbled versions on the back. :smiley:

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Nothing wrong with a pencil :wink: Yes, I am busted that is Adobe XD. But there are a lot of other “screen design” programs around, and I think all of them have a free versions (Sketch, Invision, Figma). AFAIK they are all much, much better for panel design that a “traditional” vector art program like Inkscape or Illustrator.

In the little screen shot you can see my “component library” in the left pane. You can load you libraries into any project, so all the knobs and such that you need are right there. Just drag them onto an artboard. There screen is pretty un-cluttered with useless tools - the panel on the right only shows you the currently selected object. Oh, and I see my usual colors and character styles are there, too.

So I do everything in there, The for final output I hide all the layers that will be drawn by controls or other programatic things.

XD itself has some annoyances for this: it only works in pixels, and it won’t automatically render text as paths on output. But it works for me.

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Do you know if the SVGs created by your product which shall rename nameless (ahem!!) will work with the Python module creation helper script?

I only use Inkscape to make the panels because of that, even though Inkscape makes me want to curl up into a ball and make pathetic mewling noises when I do use it. Not being hard on Inkscape, just that my brain hurts when arguing with applications that have 23 ways of doing the same thing.

I’ve read on here that the more cleverer super developers are too rock ‘n’ roll to use the helper script and just hand code all the widgets and things, but I’m stupid and need the push. :slight_smile:

Having a component library would be awesome, though. Agamemnon goes in there first.

Little edit: I did own OmniGraffle years ago and loved it, but the upgrade cost made my hair fall out.

I don’t know. I’ve never tried helper.py. You can certainly name layers in program, but I honestly don’t know what happens with the layer names on SVG output, etc… I would not be surprised if something made it not work.

Of course before doing the drawing I do everything with code to position the controls in an ugly fashion and an empty background. I don’t usually even think about layout the the module is “working”.

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Is that a sneaky way of saying you’re making modules again? :zipper_mouth_face:

uh, yes and no? But I have for sure not made any new panels with XD. That was supposed to be a description of “my normal way of making a panel”, which I haven’t done lately :wink:

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