InfoQube IM - Community

Submitted by Paul_J_Miller on 2019/01/02 08:06

InfoQube Surface has a lot of potential to be a really great tool for the arrangement, clustering and juxtaposition of ideas.

It would be nice if the Surface would re-draw itself with the node (item) which has the focus at the centre of the window pane. Re-drawing with the focused node at the centre shows it in context and this is much more useful.

It would be nice if there were multiple surfaces but that is probably not going to happen anytime soon.

An alternative to multiple surfaces would be to have different clusters of nodes (items) in different positions on the surface, each cluster remote from the others. But this introduces the problem of finding (scrolling to) the correct cluster when you display the Surface and that brings me back to the other point. Finding the correct position on the surface would not be a problem if the Surface re-drew itself with the focused node at the centre of the display.

Comments

Hi Paul,

I'm working on some improvements for the Surface, but did you know that currently:

Hold Ctrl and Shift and roll the mouse wheel to toggle between viewing all items and setting the zoom to 100% centered on the item under the mouse pointer. This is a great way to navigate in a large surface

[edit] In v111k, this shortcut was changed to Ctrl+Alt as it conflicted with the one to toggle Auto-Arrange On/Off [/edit]

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

Something makes me think that 0.9.111k is very much not the final version.

At zoom levels other than 100 the text is not visible in the boxes. (this is not new to 0.9.111k it was present in earlier versions)

Regarding Auto Arrange, centering the display on an item when it is selected works for some items but not for others and there seems to be no logic as to which items it works for. The centering position seems to be in the centre horizontally but towards the top of the display.

I have twice experienced a problem where some parts of the screen are active (receptive to mouse clicks) but others are not. The Surface was active but the grids to the left of the screen and the menus were not, niether was the 'close' button in the top right hand corner of the program window. I don't know if this is new or not, I haven't experienced this fault before. I do not know how to reproduce it.

Other than that it is OK, it would be nice to be able to change the size of the text in the boxes. But I suppose I must change the size/boldness of the font in the grid to achieve that, which is OK except that when I try to do that it messes up the display of the text in the grid (and on the surface).

Like this (I have chosen a script font to illustrate what actually gets formatted).

and this :-

Not what I was expecting or wanting.

And when you do manage to format the grid entry without it messing up it seems as though it doesn't actually change the font of the item on the Surface (but it does format the tags which it shouldn't).

And some of the links between boxes seem a little awkward.

Sorry for all the criticism, the Surface is becoming more useful.

[quote=Paul_J_Miller]

And some of the links between boxes seem a little awkward.

Sorry for all the criticism, the Surface is becoming more useful.

[/quote]

As specified in the Doc, Item fonts are not currently shown on the Surface. Only embedded fonts. It is a limitation of the control used for the Surface
To have the item font only apply to the Item's column, set this in the grid properties > Options
Links: Yeah, the curved links are not great. Again a limitation of the control used. Other line shapes are sometimes better looking (I generally prefer the one called Angled)

HTH !

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

[quote=Pierre_Admin]

Links: Yeah, the curved links are not great. Again a limitation of the control used. Other line shapes are sometimes better looking (I generally prefer the one called Angled)

HTH !

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

[/quote]

Have you thought about having different shapes for the interconnections like straight segments connected by curves which could be adjusted (dragged by handles on the line segments) by the user to suit the way they want it to look.

You could put connection points on each side of the items to act as docks for the interconnections. An adjustable line width would help, as would rounded corners on the items (or different shapes, or even drop shadows, or a linear gradient as the background of the item).

Just a thought.

Hi Paul,

Text when zoom not 100%: Works here quite well. If the zoom is below 80%, it becomes hard to read, but anything above is fine (and I don't have a DPI display). What font are you using ?
Center on click. This is by design. On click, it moves to a bit above the center, as people tend to put more info below than above. It could be an option in the future.
Also, centering is only performed when the item clicked is outside this central zone, this to avoid contant surface movements. Again perhaps an option in the future
BTW Ctrl+Alt+Wheel Up does perfectly center the item on the screen, so that's an option
Inactive screen area: If you can reproduce it, I'll see how to fix it
Font size: You can use the editor to increase text size
<Div> tag: I thought this was fixed. I guess not, at least not always. The pop-up editor should work fine

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

Sorry for the massive screen shots. For most of my work on InfoQube I am using the 'Cadman' font designed and built by Paul J. Miller.

Although the font appearing on the surface definately isn't Cadman, I don't know what it is or how I would change it, I would like to use Cadman on the surface as well as the rest of the program.

Zoom = 100

Zoom = 105

Zoom = 95

Bizarre indeed. I'll test on a high DPI PC I have here to see if that is the cause. Shown below is at 100% and at 50%
The Surface should be using the default grid font (tools > options > grid), but it was not. Fixed in the next version

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

I played around with the padding without much effect but with low values of padding there are some wierd effects.

At low values of padding parts of the text start to appear, they are most noticable at a padding value of zero (0). It is as if the text has been drawn and then overwritten by rectangular blocks of the background colour. At Zoom = 105 the overwriting blocks are at the bottom and to the right hand side of the text. At Zoom = 110 only very little parts of the text have not been overwritten. Anything over 110 and the text is completely obscured.

At zoom = 95 very little of the text is visible but it appears that the blocks have been drawn at the top and to the left hand side of the text. Again at 90 very little of the text remains and anything below 90 obscures everything.

I hope this provides some insight into what the problem might be.

Thanks Paul !

I'll check it, but by the looks of it, it could be a high DPI related issue

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

My desktop computer does not use screen scaling. The main monitor is 1920 x 1200 and is scaled to 100% i.e. no scaling. It does not show the problem of disappearing text at different zoom levels on the InfoQube Surface.

My laptop has a much smaller screen which has a resolution of 3200 x 1800 and the secondary monitor is a bit bigger but still smaller than either of the monitors on my desktop machine, it's resolution is 3840 x 2160. The screen scaling factor on both these monitors is set to 250% which gives text of a comfortable size for reading. On both these monitors the text on the InfoQube Surface becomes obscured at zoom levels other than 100.

If I set the scale factors on the laptop to be 100% for either screen then the problem of disappearing text on the InfoQube Surface goes away on the screen set to 100%, however I need a magnifying glass to be able to read the screen.

This would suggest that the problem is related to screen scaling. I don't know how you would tackle this but it does mean that you could simulate it on your laptop by setting the screen scale factor to a value greater than 100% and putting up with oversized text temporarily.

So you might be able to reproduce the problem (if you are running Windows 10).

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the detailed information.

I was able to reproduce the issue easily on a PC with a high DPI display.

If it helps at all, this only occurs when the DPI override setting is set to "System Enhanced". In waiting for a fix, perhaps you can use another setting, such as "System" or turning off DPI override altogether

HTH !

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

I tried InfoQube once again tonight with no High DPI override and with just the system setting.

The results were the same as before. With the System (Enhanced) setting the rendering of the text and graphics is so much sharper, it renders at the native resolution of the High DPI screen which few applications can match. Only Libre Office, recent versions of Microsoft Office and very few others can render at the native resolution of the screen.

Strangely enough ConnectedText can also render at the full resolution of the screen with the System (Enhanced) setting but it slows down the performance of the program to a crawl. It looks good but the performance is like a snail on vallium, you can see different parts of the screen being re-drawn. But this setting doesn't seem to slow down InfoQube at all, I don't know what is going on there.

I will keep the sharp graphics and keep the Surface at a Zoom of 100.

[quote=Paul_J_Miller]

I will keep the sharp graphics and keep the Surface at a Zoom of 100.

[/quote]

In v111k, the Surface zoom steps are defined in Options.ini. You may want to reduce the number of steps to quickly go from 100% to say 30% and back.

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

v111k patch was silently updated with a small fix so the the IQ Surface now uses the same font as the default grid font (tools > options > program > grid)

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

I am running 0.9.111k and the font used on the surface is still the same as it has always been. It is not the 'Cadman' font which I am using as the default for the items in the grid.

Hi Paul,

You need to download the v111k patch and overwrite your infoqube.exe file. It was silently updated on Jan 4th with this fix

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

Sorry, I didn't know what you meant by 'silent update', it works now.