Howdy, @Misho! As always, the feedback is certainly appreciated and we take everyone’s thoughts into consideration. Here are my thoughts on these things at the moment:
- One of the realities of adding more flexibility to the document structure over time (as people have requested) is the mixing of “Layout” Elements with “Standard” Elements. At this time, without completely rethinking some things, I’m not sure there’s much we can do in the Outline itself as this is simply the nature of working with multi-dimensional documents. Something I personally do in various builds is prefix / suffix things with a naming system that makes sense to me. For example, I might do something like “(SEC)”, “(ROW)”, “(COL)”, “(GRD)”, “(CLL)”, “(DIV)”, as a convention to give me more oversight from the Outline pane itself. As part of this Beta cycle, one of the biggest changes we’ve made to help with identifying Elements is on the Inspector pane itself. By default, the name of the Element is used in the title, but if you rename the Element, the “Inspector” title at the top of the Workspace is replaced with
{{element_type}}. For example, if you had a Button that you built out of a Grid with multiple Cells inside it, you could rename that Element “My Button” and right above it you will now see “Grid” to help you understand which Element you’re on. I know this isn’t on the Outline pane, but a naming system that makes the most sense to you paired with some of these other updates I think are a very clean way to do this. Other apps like Figma for prototyping basically do this…they offload much of the understanding of what you’re working with to the label itself, encouraging users to use a slash syntax to group and identify content easily (e.g. “Button / Primary,” “Button / Secondary,” et cetera). - We understand that this adds an extra click at the top-level; however, it also lends more consistency throughout the whole document. Now, clicking to add an Element is always the same outcome presenting you with the whole library to work with. Unfortunately, if you have a lot of Favorites as you mentioned, it might push down the new “Layout” group introduced in Beta 2, but this is a reality of surfacing those individual items. Additionally, the search field is highlighted by default, allowing you to start typing and find any Element and surface it even if it is quite far down the list. Finally, adding Sections are the outlier…I understand that at the top-level it is likely common to need them, but far and away once you move beyond that level, you’re working with everything else (Sections aren’t even allowed nested). Once you have one Section on the page, it is also possible to duplicate another and use that as a starting point. So I think all of the tradeoffs considered here and the consistency this experience provides, we will likely be keeping things as is for now as a big part of this update is trying to bring more consistency to how things are done and have less outliers.
Thanks!
