Moving element breadcrumb bar

Beta
#1

I thought I read about moving the builder elements around at some point but I couldn’t see it.
Thoughts on the bottom breadcrumbs of Section > Row > Column > Element > Element settings that now appears at the bottom of the preview:

  • It feels weird that it’s there, not grouped with the settings on the left. I know that may be a carry over from being used to it in its previous place, but thinking Gestalt and proximity in UX, it feels like it should be over with the settings.

  • Also, its really annoying that the dock on Mac OS keeps popping up over it every time I go to it so have to move the mouse away and then slowly approach so as not to trigger the dock appearing!

#2

You can drag it to the top. Still feels wrong there but it’s better. I guess as we get used to it, it will be better than constantly needing to scroll.

#3

See, I thought you could do that, but it wasn’t working. I even looked in the Pro settings etc.
Though after you confirmed you could, I just went and did it again. I tried dragging but not far enough - you have to click and drag a couple of cms before it turns to a grabby hand and shows you can move it.

At least that fixes point 2 for now, so thanks!

And I do get the logic of being able to see the whole breadcrumb, so probably just something to get used to

#4

Thanks Chris! I see where you’re coming from. Under Preferences, look for the last item (Navigation Bar) and you can change how the Breadcrumbs/Control Groups are arranged within that bar. Hopefully that helps, and you can find what feels best for you.

It’s a bit of a balancing act on the drag interaction - it used to be more sensitive but people were finding they accidentally triggered it by quickly clicking around.

#5

Thanks @alexander - since I moved it to the top its been fine and much more user friendly (for me anyway!) - definitely good to have the option to allow people to rearrange as they need.
Now you just need to be able to drag things out of the browser window so you can have a full windows for the builder :wink:

2 Likes
#6

Now you just need to be able to drag things out of the browser window so you can have a full windows for the builder

I’d love if that were possible. It’s a really big project and not a big priority for us. However, it’s always something that has intrigued me and I’ve been interested in exploring. The biggest challenge is managing all that data/state in realtime. So it’s a longshot.

But for the sake of conversation, in your opinion, what’s most the most advantageous workflow here? I can at least have some notes put together for later. Would you primarily want to pop the inspector into a new browser window? Would it be enough if we just gave you a way to pop out the preview frame? We already solve bidirectional state changes between the main frame and the preview so that would be much easier to attain at this point.

Might be a fun experiment to enable through the dev console at some point. I can foresee issues with frame focusing (like having to click an extra time to get the frame active before doing something) but that might be worth it for the separation, or might be solvable somehow.

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#7

Off the top of my head, I guess it’d just be nice to have a full browser window visible as the builder - but with other things open (rather than closing the sidebar for example) as then you just have to reopen it.
In all honesty, its not something that I think I need all the time although if it was there I would probably use it all the time as the main layout and ‘build’ my own workspace, much like the Adobe suite lets you do.
But having the sidebar open plus all the other windows that you have now - CSS, JS mainly but fonts/colours would be cool too especially when first starting a site, rather than toggling them when needed. I’ve used the new CSS floating window a bit in Beta and it’s really cool especially toggling between site wide and page, though it would be nice to have it open yet not in the way.
Whether mini browser windows would be a solution, I’m not sure. I guess that’s all its doing and you could reduce them down so they’re as seamless as possible.
Reminds me of something I said to Kyle a while back - its a shame this is on Wordpress and not a standalone site builder! All the power seems to be there and then you can have a standalone desktop app for creating sites.

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#8

Gotcha! This feedback really helps! Will add it to some notes I have running.