New admin commands bar in Designer + new Templates creation behavior

Hello!
This all started in this thread, but as there are also some other news, better to post it here.
We understand the flow will change a lot, but I'm confident this version will be far better than earlier.

THE NEW ADMIN BAR
Now the admin bar is a floating bar.
It can be moved around, and becomes pretty small when collapsed using the arrows or double-clinking on it.
This means you can simply put it where it will not "disturb" you, no matter which kind of layout you have.

PRODUCT TEMPLATES SAVING
I love this! It is no more needed to save product templates by first adding them to the cart!
For whoever still prefer that method for any reason, the ability of saving it from cart is still there.
But now it is also possible to hit a single button right into the "Product Templates" area of the admin bar to save your current design as a product template with no extra steps needed. Pretty fast!

GENERAL TEMPLATES VIEW
As suggested by Cos, now the area to save the templates will always be visible, while the eventually saved templates can be scrolled.
I've re-arranged the placement of the fields, but the items int the fields are still the same.
and finally, when you import a general template, the button to save over it will appear automatically on top (labeled "Re-save over Last Imported", will ask for confirmation because previous version of the template will be lost).

In general, while the concepts remain the same, the layout and the workflow has changed a lot.
I feel this is better, but I'll be waiting for your comments about eventual other finetunings.

Enjoy!



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/13/2014 07:38PM by Admin.

Your implementations are nice and the extra features are great and will be real time savers. Really nice upgrades all around. Nice touch of collapsing the window when moving as I noticed the lag was terrible when trying to drag the open window previously.

The large height of the admins window can get lost below the view screen if moved lower in the browser and there's no way to get to the hidden contents unless one moves the window towards top of screen again. Could you have the admin window stop at bottom of browser window instead of disappearing? Sorry, don't know the tech terms for these. Ideally, I think, on a large screen the best placement for rapidly working with templates is in the lower 1/4 to 1/3 of the screen. Although I know many Designers have pop-down/under fonts, colors, etc. and many different working screens. One of my own mockups was for a single column of templates so the window could be unobtrusively on the left or right side of the designer when working full screen. That means more scrolling, but the trade off may be worth it. I know there's many variables here, but this is a tremendous improvement over the old style. One thing is for sure . . . with one of the high pixel count ultra wide Dell screens, building templates should be a scream with this new layout. Would def be worth the investment.

Also to consider: a toggle to change the show order of templates "newest on top or bottom". Perhaps a jump to top or bottom feature also to facilitate less scrolling.

Thanks Alex for the great update.

Will think at all you said, while waiting for someone else to comment (come on, I know you are reading. Share your thoughts!)

One one note about your suggestion of stopping the window at the bottom.
I would not do that. When it's there, you can grab it and move on top again. On smaller screens this new admin area is REALLY big, so I feel the ability of hiding that wherever you're used to is probably better.
For example, I myself normally prefer to move stuffs on bottom or off the left area.
In any case, if I'd make impossible to go down, the risk of being forced to open/close the admin bar instead of simply moving that back and forth will be very high for a number of regular displays.
I am currently on a 1920x1080, and YEAH, that area would hide me various section if unable to move it out of borders.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/13/2014 08:55PM by Alex.

I see you changed the collapsable movement to solid fill the window instead. Smart move.

Understood about your small screens comment. What I meant was that lets say you moved the bar 300 pixels from bottom of the screen and when you let go, the bottom snaps to bottom of browser scroll bars appear. Flexible design.

I too prefer to move "stuffs" to bottom. Couldn't you just make the bottom of the window flexible anyway so we could adjust the size to suit? Default at 80% or so.

There's just one issue there, given by the fact that the "floating thing" is not really a block element.
It's floating, so a % means nothing because it is not placed into the normal page structure.
However, let's try someting different.

The behavior you're seeing is because I used a "fixed" position for the bar.
This allows to scroll the RTD, but without scrolling also the admin bar.
But this can be changed, making that absolute instead. And this is what I did now, so this is a request for comment

What changes is that the adminbar will move with the page, but also it will be a "solid" element. When moved to the bottom, it will increase the page's size causing vertical scrollbars to appear. Which means, things will always be reachable by scrolling.

Thoughts?

That appears to be working perfectly and faster than any other method. Reminds me of a great old American western comedy movie "Support Your Local Gunfighter". Character there called Swifty Morgan. I shall call you Swifty Morgan now.

Thanks Swifty.

I see there is an option to import design from file. What file types are supported? I tried cdr, pdf & eps with no luck.

That option was there since the very beginning. It can import exclusively a native RTD file, which is the one you can export with the other button.

However, while they were needed in the early days, now they should really be no more.
I think we're going to get rid of them pretty soon.

This bar thing is working great. A real time saver. One more observation. In Product Templates would it be more consistent and helpful if clicking the thumbnail returned a larger image and a button added to reimport in designer? As currently implemented one must add to cart to get an enlarged image.

Easy enough. Done
I've also added the same function to general templates, so now clicking on those thumbs will pop up a larger version too

Sorry, forgot to thank you for this update. Works perfectly. We all appreciate the listening ear and attention to detail that Alex provides and I'm sure we have no idea how fortunate we are to have this.

You know: in this system, in your own job, and in general in everything biz related, listening to users and customers SHOULD be just normal. I am sure almost everyone would agree with this.

I know we look kinda unique and very good for this (I saw very few companies where you can directly deal with the main programmer), but the feeling is NOT that this is special: the feeling is that a lot of other companies out there are just doing it wrong.
We should set the standards!