dear vvvv team
after a long break in using vvvv, i recently returned to it. despite the inital “awww, such a nice and straight forward way of coding” experience ( it is an awesome tool!!), i again struggled with some usability flaws that make life difficult for newbies and/or people that come from a different platform.
probably you guys are so used to it you might not even notice these obstacles are there, so i hope you find my experience helpful. maybe it contributes a little bit to an even better future vvvv.
** closing / hiding vs. learned user behaviour
ctrl+w closes a subpatch, but deletes its node as well. that is quite confusing and error-prone in regards to learned user behaviour. moreover code-windows behave even differently - ctrl+w closes the window, but the node stays! (actually this is the behaviour you would expect, coming from any other editors/ide/software).
renderer-windows close and are deleted when pressing ctrl+w - even if the renderer-node is in a subpatch! so you might not even notice you just ruined your sub-patch…
if you than start using alt+3 to close all sorts of vvvv windows, you end up with new troubles - with help patches: they close, but i.e. their renderer windows stay open! if you close these later on using ctrl+w you delete them from then help patch that is not even visible. can be quite a source of frustration …
long story short, why not have ctrl+w close the current window only? (be it the renderer, code window, subpatch, helppatch.) not have it delete any node from any hosting patch.
** closing dialog
longer path names sometimes cut off. a small suggestion to circumvent this, please see the attached image.
** new renderer windows sometimes pop up in existing windows
(getting sligthly strange looking tabs.) but how to control in what window the renderer opens its output?
further these tabs names only add the renderers description. but if the renderer sits inside a subpatch - i.e. using the Preview node! - you end up with a number of tabs all called “dx renderer”. I wonder how that could be improved.