PowerCADD Forum

Every once in a while I like to review my PowerCADD settings to see if I really have them set most efficiently. One of the things I would like to customize better is the way I use the mouse wheel. I have it set for zooming when I use the wheel and the Zoomer action all works quite well. A couple of things I would like to improve:

1) Regardless of how I have the acceleration set in Preferences > Tools > Mouse Wheel Options, when I scroll slowly nothing happens – I have to scroll at a certain threshold speed before any zooming takes place. Is there any way to adjust it so I can still zoom with small movements of the wheel? Also I realize that the zooming is indexed so that it takes place in increments – is there any way to change those increments to make the zooming smoother?

2) I can set the mouse wheel to either scroll or zoom (I always keep it set to zoom). In many applications, holding the Option key toggles the function between the two. I would really like to be able to hold the Option key and have the mouse wheel change from zooming to scrolling. Is there any way to set that up? Right now holding the Option key has no effect.

I remember when Alfred was working on the zoomer function we needed to install USB OverDrive in order to customize the mouse operations, but I don't have that installed any more, so I assume it is not necessary. However, if I installed it would it allow me to do what I want? I'm always reluctant to start to make changes in case I screw up my whole setup.

Any refreshing of my memory on these issues would be appreciated. Thanks,

Greg

Hmmmm, I have the same questions and haven't asked.Thanks

Hi all,

I was hoping I might get a bit more traction from my original post from some long-time PC users.

I'm still wondering if there might be a way to make the "indexing" finer so that I could do more precise zooming? I've set the acceleration to zero, since I find that I more often need precise zooming rather than big jumps in scale. It would be nice if there could be some sort of numerical setting or slider for the indexing, in which case you could choose to make it quite fine, then I think the acceleration would be more useful...

Greg

Greg,

It's been a long time since I even thought about this.

I remember that there was a delay with using some of the PowerCADD zooming commands, so I came up with some Misc Commands to deal with this. Misc commands don't show in any menu, but you can assign command keys to them.

These are (with my key choices):
Wild Normal Size (N)
Wild Zoom In (I)
[PowerCADD has Zoom (Command-1)]
Zoom in Now (1)
Zoom Out (O)
Zoom Out Now (2)
Previous View Now (3)

I do have USB Overdrive running on my machine.

My PowerCADD Mouse Wheel Options are
Zoom with Invert
No Acceleration

In System Preferences for USB Overdrive I have
Wheel up, direction Up, speed accelerated
Wheel down: direction Down, speed accelerated
Pan up: direction Right, speed One Line
Pan down: direction Left, speed One Line
Z axis up: direction Left, speed One Line
Z axis down: direction Right, speed One Line

In all of these, I have Wheel Button: Middle Button with speed and acceleration in the middle of the slider

Let me also mention that I have a Logitech MX Master mouse, which I've used for years. I'm lost without it.

I also have an Apple Magic Trackpad which I use for two-finger gesture scrolling. It all works so smoothly with all programs that I don't even think about what I'm doing.

Not to overload you with too much information but all of the event processing in WildTools happens in a very low level system thing called Carbon Events which Apple intends for game developers. So if you are in the process of drawing something with a tool in WildTools, from mouse down to mouse up, this is all happening down there, and it's why you can use a single key command for one of my 'Now' commands, it happens right away.

I'm hoping this will get you going in the right direction. Zooming is smooth on my machine.

Zooming in WildTools is all done in the Zoomer programming, which handles scroll wheel zooming as well as normal mouse events. I know the zooming is always related to what your zoom-in/out level is, and the response is related to the time from the last event. When you are zoomed way in, all this logic breaks down and it just steps in and out without any consideration of speed.

One more thing: some of these behaviors have changed over the years with different versions of the MacOS. I'm on High Sierra.

Alfred