1. I have lots of bugs here and there to report about, but it seems that there's no right place to do so, so I really suggest to open up "bugs report" section here, and if a way already existed to do so, please direct me! (I think you'll find me helpful with bugs(-skgskg
You can subscribe to our Redmine site (accessible via Circle Dock's Help Browser) and report any serious bugs there. Or simply open a new topic on this board.
2.I can see that there is a problem with "hide when mouse leaves" option in the visibility section, I have chosen a semi-transparent background (or circle), there are a lots of spaces in the image, so when I activate this option, it seems to confuse the software to determine when the mouse really leaves the circle, what I'm suggesting is that you consider changing the code to a more stable one, you can add a virtual radius in the options and when the mouse leaves this specific radius, the dock start counting and hides when the time comes. However a radius won't do the trick if there is no centre point, so you need to add that too to the code (calculated automatically). For eclipse shape the must be 2 centre points.
This is down to the design of the background image and to avoid this pitfall, your backgrounds should conform to one simple rule: there should be no areas of 100% transparency within the circumference whatsoever but the area between the circumference and the bounding rectangle's borders should have 100% transparency. This is simple to achieve using any half-decent graphics program such as The Gimp or Photoshop. The internal opacity should be at least 1%.
As for your suggested method of overcoming this, there are a couple of good reasons why that is a Bad Idea:
- Only the size of an image's bounding rectangle is known and there can be a difference between a circle's, or ellipsoid's, circumference and the bounding rectangle.
- Circle Dock installs global mouse hooks and, to keep resources down to a minimum, the program reacts passively. To do as you suggest would entail tracking the cursor's position as well as the Dock's coordinates, in other words, active tracking - since Windows does this anyway, why duplicate the effort?
3.I'm really interested that the circle appears in the centre of the screen, I know that I can do that manually by choosing that I appears wherever the mouse is and after that lock it in the centre, but it's really annoying and anti-user-friendly, so I suggest that you add a new option saying that the circle will appear at the centre (by the way it's also a stability problem)
You are the first person to request this. Since you can place the Dock anywhere on the screen - and lock it there - I don't see the problem! And how is this a "stability problem"?
4.as a software engineer, I must say that the program has a really though complexed interface, the good news is that the program has almost all the possible options on earth, but with great power comes great responsibility (sorry for that, I always wanted to say it) which means that you should choose the perfect interface for the program, when I first opened the settings window, I believe everyone agrees with me, it gave me the feeling that I should really work hard to find what I'm looking for, and by the way I opened up the settings almost 10 time until I finally found what I'm looking for!
The problem, as I already said the quantity and the variety of the options, now I'm not saying that you should remove any of the options, but what I'm saying is that, the order of the options is not right, there are lots of misplaced options!!!
The perfect interface is the interface where a new user, normal new user, can locate the thing that he's searching for in just a few clicks without even using the help! The place and the order of the options is very important, it should be Intuition who helps the user find the options.
If any of you interested in a new interface, I'll be glad to start thinking about one and submit it as a donation (since I'm not working I cannot donate any money).
However ugly and unwieldy you may find the main settings dialog it is, I can assure you, considerably better than when I took over the development some nine months ago. It would not, for example, fit on to a Netbook's screen - and there were considerably fewer settings back then!
The settings dialog is by no means perfect and some options may appear to be out of place. That's simply because there are overlaps - labels being a good example. However, the dialog is designed to be extensible and, where appropriate, to work from left to right (as far as the tabs are concerned).
That said, I am always open for suggestions as to make it better and welcome any you care to make.
5. i really didn't see any good use of the rotation option, if a user wants to change the order of their shortcuts he should do that manually after opening the setting windows, since it's not that popular, you see; the order of the items should be permanent, when it's like that I can access whatever shortcut I want from the circle with my eyes shut! Isn't that’s the whole program is about??? Making useful fast shortcuts???
Rotation does not affect item ordering, merely their relative position. It's all about personal preference - some people want the ability to rotate the dock to bring an item to the mouse pointer rather than take the mouse pointer to the item. If you don't want dock rotation, simply disable it!
6. I didn't find search button in the help window! It's really necessary.
The help system was designed to be usable as local help as well as online. If and when I have time, I may add some form of keyword indexing to the local version. The help browser is quite simply a customised web browser.
Mark
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