Planning: Expected Shape Interactions and Behaviors

[olearydw]

Developers using drawing tools for user interaction expect the drawing tools to support a small set of basic interactions on a drawn shape including:

• Select shape
• Rotate shape
• Resize shape
• Order shape (z-index)
• Add/Remove vertices of shape in some cases but not all (e.g. yes for rectangle, no for circle)

Additional feedback received from developers using 3.x 'sketch' tools:

• Hover state should light up and show edit handles for easy editing, resizing, etc.
• Colors, sizes, etc of shape state are definable by the developer (inDraw, inEdit, inHover, inComplete, inRotate, inResize, etc)
• Interaction feedback at a minimum should include showing rotation angle while in rotate state, show area measure while polygon in resize state, show radius while circle in resize state, etc.
• Shapes should persist their type and metadata. For example, a circle should record and save the center point and radius and not just a collection of vertices in order to respect behaviors when circle is brought back to the canvas after it has been persisted as an object

[olearydw]

Some additional things come to mind thinking back to conversations at UC and GeoINT. These will impact the capabilities of drawing observations and reporting annotations on the imagery.

• User needs the ability to select one or more graphics and make a copy of them as new features -- likely expect a Ctrl-C keystroke command to copy.

• User needs the ability to paste one or more graphics that were previously copied -- likely expect a Ctrl-V keystroke command to accomplish this

• Like PPT, users will expect the ability to select a graphic and 'nudge' its location using arrow keys for fine grain placement of an observation or annotation.

• Users expect the ability to undo and redo the previous action.