Entry index in IOBox and other UX improvements for IOBoxes

Since one of the original posts by @sunep never got any replies and it doesn’t seem to be fixed, I am reporting it again:

The Entry Index in IOBoxes is always overlapping the text, so is kind of pointless or at least looks bad:

image

I also noticed that if you click on one of the entries, the corresponding entry index simply disappears:

image

Lastly, and this one is very annoying:

If you change the number of visible entries in an IOBox, then copy and paste that IOBox, it will always default back to showing 5 entries. Then you go to customise it and it still has the old number, but you need to change it once for it to update:

iobox_entry-index-bug

This is all in 5.3-0380.

Thanks for considering and fixing.

5 Likes

Would like to add an other inconvenience that is the initial size of IOBoxes which often is too small to fit the contents. Like that freshly created Spread of Vector2:


Also the IOBox should adjust its width wenn a scroll bar appears.
image

3 Likes

The same is needed for tooltips. They just need some better sizing and avoid overlapping or hidden text: IOBox ovelays datatypes at certain vertical sizes

image

I hope the UI gets some more love in the details, not just the big stuff. This is all stuff you notice like an hour in from ever using vvvv and it’s not a good look. First impressions and all… ;)

2 Likes

Okay, just one more:

In a string IOBox, can you make it so we can scroll a long string with multiple lines, please.

Normally you for example paste in a large string and then you always have to resize the IOBox till you think you see all the text and then make it smaller again.

It already does word breaking horizontally, although I guess having a horizontal scrollbar if needed would be better, so you can actually tell where the line breaks are in a string.

Vertically there should certainly be a scroll bar if the string exceeds the bounds of the IOBox, similar to how it does for a spread.

iobox_string-overflow

Thanks for considering!

2 Likes

Found another one:

If you have an output IOBox with a spread of paths, there is this little grey button(?) added to the front, which opens the file in the path if you click it, which is kind of neat, but also not obvious at all.

Then if you switch on the Entry Index, once again they are just overlaid over the buttons and not legible:

So yeah, some UX improvements are definitely needed for the IOBoxes, but it’s sad to see that the devs don’t seem to acknowledge that…

thanks for the report. most issues mentioned above are fixed for >= 6.5
please open new issues for things you find missing.

3 Likes

Thanks for the great improvements. Just checking in 6.5-0025 and a lot of the things have already been fixed.

I think the only one that is still behaving as always are the tooltips or rather the placed tooltips:

The tooltips when you hover is actually sized well, but then when you place it, it gets some default size and you have to manually size it correctly:

It would be great if the placed tooltips could just be the same size as the hover tooltips, which are already correct.

Here you can see also that the hover tooltip is sized correctly and I think everyone would expect that when you place it, it has the same size.

Also for Spreads like that spread of Meshes it would be great if we could specify the number of slices to preview like we can for IOBoxes.

Thanks for considering!

4 Likes

pinned mesh tooltips now adapt their size:

in the latest previews.

5 Likes