Move Lockout Option (by feature?)

Easel Feature Requests
1

Hi,
New here but not new to CNCs, and very not new to software design and development…

Have distilled my #1 dislike down to a few things, and THIS is the problem:

Must select by touching a feature, makes sense, but mice are not precision, and if the mouse moves after a selection (may not be visible) the feature moves. Therefore carefully registered mating features such as holes that must line up are subject to the Whims of my mouse clicks (and/or I must double check the exact location after every selection. (!)

I note there “Layers” of grouped features could solve this issue, but mating features may not all exist on a single drawing, so seems not likely to solve all cases.

My suggestion would be to consider a “accidental move lockout” feature globally, where a feature is not moved within some time limit of the Click to Select, perhaps ignore immediate moves for 1sec but if selection is longer and move persists then to accept this move.

Perhaps I have missed some way to avoid (in a mode where I can select individual features) but as things are this problem is most serious for me, and rather destroys my trust in my own work. No matter how carefully I design, and check dimensions the dimension can be distorted by a unsteady mouse click.

Thinking about this now, I know there are pointing devices that do not combine motion and clicking as directly, perhaps this problem has been solved with some type of pointer hardware?

Conclusion: I feel this is a serious issue for anybody like me that is trying to do any product design with critical dimensions. I will even go so far as to say anybody doing ‘mechanical drawings’ of machined parts cannot safely use Easel just because of this single issue. (I watch for feature movement every time I must select a critical feature such as a drill hole, butI continue to have problems with this.)

2

Whoops!

I think the “LOCK” feature is what I needed… seems to solve the problem beautifully…

I will leave my problem definition up, perhaps it will be useful to others to recognize the (rather unexpected to me) problem and appreciate appears to be an elegant, intuitive, and fail-safe-ish
solution (so far). Nicely done! (Minimum complexity, uses a known symbol, allows to be used only when needed - and for many art related projects, probably not often… so ticks all the right design boxes to my thinking).

Full Story: Some of my very few really critical holes were shifting around 0.2 mm or so occasionally and it was not immediately clear what was happening. Because I didn’t recognize the source of the problem (unsteady mouse) I was just generally irritated until I recently noticed that even when I clicked carefully small less than 1 mm type moves were being made when I was selecting features.

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3

Another thing that might help on initial clicking (before locking a feature) would be to “click & drag” across the object. Click where there are no objects and drag across the object(s) you want to select. If you select more than required, simply hold down the Shift key and deselect the ones that you do not want to be selected. While the Shift key is held down, movement is disabled for objects.

{:0)

Brandon Parker

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