They aren't "band aids" they are UI navigation tools.
Band aids is my opinion. I've been using desktop computers since 1982, and I've had a lot of experience using different tools. Some are better, some are worse. Pretty much anything can be improved. Being improvable doesn't mean something isn't good. And GMS2
is overall good -- better than what came before, certainly. Speaking specifically to Workspaces, I find that they are good in concept, but need considerable improvement for me to find them pleasurable to use.
We have to point out it's in the manual because as a rule - no one reads the manual, and when it comes to shortcuts you'll likely never know about them unless you read the manual.
The better the UI, the less need for a manual, the fewer questions and complaints.
I read the manual
all the time. It's good to have it, it's very well written, by and large.
Yet, there's still things that may be "addressed" by documentation, that are better
resolved by design improvements.
We are all for adding more navigation aids and short cuts to help users quickly move from one task to another - these are not "band aids".
It's good that you want to make the product better; I don't know that I'd agree that the way to make the product better is to always add more to it. In a lot of cases, it's better to re-think and simplify. It's really sufficient to say that you're in favor of continually improving the UI. Everything else will follow naturally from there.
A book mark is not a band aid because books "don't remember" what page I was on.
Cursor keys aren't a band aid because a "Mouse" is a pain to move a cursor around a text editor
A pencil sharpener isn't a band aid "because pencils don't work right and keep sharp".
A scroll bar isn't a band aid because "monitors are too small".
Page up and down isn't a band aid because cursor key movement was designed too slow to move through large documents quick enough.
I'm not sure how these examples all relate to the specific issues that I and others have pointed out with the UX issues that they have with GMS2. I think these examples are a lot of false analogy, frankly. And you're describing things that don't have fundamental problems, rather than pointing out examples with the UX of GMS2.
The fact that you can read the manual to learn some advanced navigational tool overcome a fundamental problem with the surface presentation of the UI is a band aid. With better UX, the user would ask fewer questions, need to consult the manual less often, have less cognitive burden to carry in their heads just to do basic simple things, freeing their minds up to do more "real" work, and navigating the UI would be intuitive and easy.
I'm on a 4K display, which I have to downsample to 2560x1440 in order to be able to read fonts, and I find that the amount of scrolling I need to do to navigate a Workspace is not acceptable. My monitor resolution is not the problem. Regardless of monitor sizing, the design choices that went into creating Workspaces necessitate a lot of scrolling. The "fix" for this is a keyboard shortcut that is not common to other software, and thus is an oddball that you have to find by reading the manual, and then develop a habit to learn to use. This is painful. I could break 25+ years of habit and force myself to CTRL+T to get around, but it will NEVER feel intuitive and easy to me to do this. I will always have to stop and think and break my train of thought in order to to this. Every time I break my train of thought, I exit "The Zone" and therefore it will
always irritate me. CTRL+T not bother all users; to me it will always be a band aid.
In other IDEs, rather than scrolling around an infinite, featureless space looking for maximized editors to work in, I can simply tab between one open file and another. You guys tried to innovate and it may look great in a screen shot, but the UX is not as good as it could be, not as good as other tools, and is a frequent source of irritation.
It pains me to say it. But it pains me to use it. So I gotta speak up. Like I say, I want to like GMS2, and I do like a lot of things about it, but these UX issues are causing me pain whenever I use the product.
These are all "tools". The more tools the better, and we will add more over time.
There's such a think as too many tools. You guys really need a good UX designer who can straighten things out for you, and simplify things, make things easier to do, etc.
Just because you're not a fan doesn't mean others aren't. We have loads or messages from others who love the new workspaces. The number of users on here not liking them are tiny compared to the numbers who love it the way it is. Feedback is not constructive if you spend the whole post just complaining about something - as the post above does. It's just a rant, and all that does is annoys those who have spent years making the product.
Oh, but I *am* a fan.
I happen to have criticisms, and problems. Obviously nothing will ever be perfect, and I don't expect it to be. I just hope that you hear me when I offer ideas for making things better. I get that you can't everything for everyone, and you can't do things right away.
If I wasn't a fan, I'd just walk away and use something else. I have a lot of time invested in learning the GML language and I'd rather not give it up. The product has a lot of promise, but it's not perfect. I understand no one wants to hear people think something you worked hard on isn't perfect. But you need to be willing to listen to feedback. I do think that generally you guys are great at receiving feedback -- I know of very few tools where you can interact with the developers on a forum, as we can with YYG. That's one of the main reasons I like GMS so much.
We took lots of UI feedback before and during beta, and we weighed it according to how we felt about it, and how many users were telling us about it. We've said from Day 1 we are happy to add more tools, more options/preferences to help, but we're not ripping everything apart for a limited number of users who aren't making the transition. Lets remember such "helpful" suggestions of throw away the whole workspace and make every dialog a full screen tab, or make every window a "real" OS level window. These were never going to happen - and we explained our reasons at the time, and I also believe that doing this would have resulted in basically remaking 1.x, which would have been a pointless task.
I can't speak to every suggestion offered. Obviously you have to weed through a lot of feedback and let that inform your design decisions. You can't just do everything everyone suggests. That would be disastrous. No one wants that.
So by all means suggest extra things we can do to aid in navigation, but please stop continually going on and on about something that isn't going to change. You are in a small minority, and while we will certainly do everything we can to help improve your user experience - including adding more bespoke tools, shortcuts and menus, we're not going to fundamentally change something that so many others are enjoying. Continuing to go on and on will simply result in YoYo staff just not taking part in these discussions, and you losing out on the ability to help shape the product.
I haven't been keeping score, nor do I have any means to, so I don't know that I'm in a minority.
Even if I am in a minority, we can't really know who's in the minority and who's in the majority unless everyone has their say.
I do know that if I never say anything, nothing will be done.
I do read a lot of people on this forum coming back with the same problems, over and over. Whether they all together constitute a minority or not, it nevertheless seems to be a rather common complaint about the product as-is. We don't complain because we hate you; we complain because we have problems with a product that we really want to get the most out of, and love.
Please try not to be defensive about the feedback.