When I began developing Tangle I was playing with different ways of moving circles around. I ended up using the standard drag ideas and selection box mousing techniques. I really wanted a quick, intuitive way to move or rotate a group of vertices. The selection box makes movement possible but the best solution for rotation that I could think of was what graphic apps usually do with dragging on a corner of a selection. That wasn’t ideal, but may be implemented in a future version of Tangle with a fading in/out rotated rectangle around currently selected circles when you mouse over part of your selection.
What I did think would be ideal was multiple points of input. Those circle vertices are just begging to be grabbed by a players fingertips. Many times I’ve wanted to reach up and touch Tangle’s circles on my iMac’s display. The circles are really asking for it.
This leads me to think that Tangle would be great on an iPhone. It’d be perfect to drag the vertices around with your fingers, independent of each other. It’d be easy to pick up and play when you have five minutes and wanted some fun. I’d be very interested in writing this if I could.
April 9th, 2008 at 2:52 am
I’d like more than rotation - I’d like more general linear transformations of the selection. Some sort of flip operation (a linear transformation with a negative determinant) would be very powerful. A scaling operation would be useful as well.
As for the interface (lacking multitouch), I’d suggest adding some use of the keyboard. Having made a selection, holding a rotate key would make mouse motion control rotation, while holding a scaling key would make mouse motion control the scale. (Each of those two families of linear transformations being described by a single parameter, you’d only use one axis of the mouse motion - you could even do shears using both axes for extra fun).