Enhance Milton as a "black/white board" or Khan Academy style videos?

[FrancoisSchnell]

(Edit: sorry about the double posting, not sure if you can delete the other one #32 )

Hi and thanks for this great software!

I find Milton excellent as a black/white board and Khan Academy style videos (light app, easy to hide UI, infinite canvas and zoom); I'm going to show it to teachers in my uni.

Two features ideas which could enhanced Milton in this usage:

• have the five color slots accessible via hotkey so we can change color without showing the UI.

• import image to draw on or around (maybe not possible due to the vector nature of Milton).

Anyway thanks and keep it up! :)

(discovered Milton while watching Handmade Hero dev on Twitch who used it as a black board).

[serge-rgb]

I'm glad you like Milton. It would be awesome to see it used by professors.

One problem with adding hotkeys to the existing color slots is that they change whenever a color is used. So if you hit the hotkey for, say, slot 5 and use the color, it will become slot 1. It would be hard to keep track of which slot has what color.

How about adding a color palette feature where users can create one or more different palettes with a number of colors, and make those accessible via hotkeys? I can see that feature being useful for the blackboard-style use case and for the general painting/sketching use case.

Importing an image is something I would also like to add. Maybe add a type of "bitmap layer" which is immune to zoom&pan, or just add a setting that lets you set the background to a bitmap instead of a single color.

Thanks!

[FrancoisSchnell]

Color palette with hotkey would definitely work.
For the images I wouldn't immune them to pan/zoom, they ideally need to stick to the board; it's not a problem if it gets pix-elated with zoom but the user needs to be able to write on them (or convert them to vectors if feasible but it's not critical for the blackboard usage).
Thanks again :)

[BrianWill]

Let me just second the color-swapping hotkey suggestion. I too find it very bothersome to have to click the slots to change color because big, precise moves are awkward with the pen.

Also, having just played with Milton for the first time, I found the automatic color slot system confusing. I think it would be more intuitive and generally convenient if the user explicitly toggled between slots, such that picking a color modifies the currently selected slot's color. A palette system would be great too, but color toggling is a much higher priority for the lecture use case.

(Last, a small nitpick: I had to look up why hitting space doesn't put the cursor in move-canvas mode. I think I would have figured it out if the keybind tip said "[hold space]" instead of just "[space]".)

[serge-rgb]

Thanks for the feedback. Just started working on a settings feature, adding default background color. I will also change the behavior of the color slots. I like the idea of the color-picker corresponding to the current color slot.

[ZackMercury]

I'd like to see a fixed color pallette that you can configure as you like and be able to assign shortcuts to it.

[vishrutmishra]

+1

[gavinbeatty]

I made a very hacky version of this in a branch, that works fine if you have a fixed palette and just want stable key bindings to select colors. See the commit msg details, but basically, colors stay in their position unless a new color is pushed in at left/head (selecting one of the 5 existing colors doesn't alter/swap positions anymore), and you can use CTRL+1 through 5 to select colors.

gavinbeatty@4b67650

[gdinit]

Hi

@serge-rgb

How about adding a color palette feature where users can create one or more different palettes with a number of colors, and make those accessible via hotkeys? I can see that feature being useful for the blackboard-style use case and for the general painting/sketching use case.

It would be great to see this, one day.

@gavinbeatty

I made a very hacky version of this in a branch, that works fine if you have a fixed palette and just want stable key bindings to select colors. See the commit msg details, but basically, colors stay in their position unless a new color is pushed in at left/head (selecting one of the 5 existing colors doesn't alter/swap positions anymore), and you can use CTRL+1 through 5 to select colors.

gavinbeatty@4b67650

Thanks for sharing this. Any chance you can add a 'binary/release' to your fork repo?

[gavinbeatty]

@gdinit If this doesn't work for you, grab VS 2022 Community edition and do what's described in the release. https://github.com/gavinbeatty/milton/releases/tag/v1.9.1_colorbindings

[gdinit]

@gavinbeatty it works and it is great. thank you so much!