After working in Intuiface for awhile I’ve been very impressed with how easy it is to “program” experiences with Triggers & Actions logic without any coding. This opens a lot of possibilities for our team. That said, there are a number of things that would be very welcome quality of life improvements for managing Triggers and Actions.
1. Label Triggers & Action sets - It’s great that you can program so many conditional triggers, but it can be easy to lose track of what each of them does without manually loading each one and reading all the condition statements and action statements. It would be extremely helpful to simply be able to label Trigger & Action sets. In addition to speeding up your workflow when creating an experiences, this could also be useful for other users working on a project or when opening an older project. 2. Re-order Triggers & Actions - While I understand that the order of actions is irrelevant from Intuiface’s point of view, it’s very relevant from a human point of view. Having actions ordered in a specific way from top to bottom helps me and I suspect many people keep track of the logic that’s happening in a series of actions. Especially when reviewing an action set after not looking at it for awhile or bug fixing. Simply being able to move an action above or below existing actions would greatly help in terms of quickly making sense of a series of commands. 3. Temporarily Disable Triggers or Actions - Just like you can enable and disable a layer or asset with the “eye” icon, it would be nice to do the same with triggers and actions. There are numerous instances where this would be helpful, but one example is timeout features. In many experiences I want to program a timeout of say 30 seconds or so. If no user interacts for 30 seconds reset the experience. However, when I’m building or bug fixing this can be annoying. Of course I can delete it, but I lose all my work in terms of the series of actions programmed. I also don’t want to risk forgetting to include this at the end of the project. Simply temporarily disabling and enabling triggers and actions would be a great quality of life improvement. 4. UI improvements to loading Triggers & Actions - Being able to program visually is incredible. I love it. That said, once you really get into it, hovering your mouse over a tiny lightning bolt to load the Triggers and Actions menu can become tedious. Worse is when you move your mouse a certain way and the whole menu disappears and you have to try it again. It’s a small thing, but I think this could be made more efficient to stay in a fast workflow state. 5. Trigger actions in Composer - There have been many instances where I want to design a layout of something that happens after a trigger. In Composer, I can only see what the experiences looks like pre-trigger. This makes doing things like transforming shapes into new shapes very cumbersome and requires a lot of pixel mapping. Being able to trigger or toggle a trigger inside of Composer view would solve this. 6. High Level View - I recognize that this one might be a big ask and probably something relegated to a large version update, but I’ll share it anyway. Sometimes in complex projects, I find myself wanting to “zoom out” to a more tactical view that would show how everything in the experience is connected at a very high level. The best visual example I can think for this is node based 3D programs like Cinema 4D or even something like Unity. Where you can see input and outputs connecting together. Again, I recognize this is significant and may not be worth developing, but it’s crossed my mind a number of times so I thought I’d share it.
My hope is that by consolidating these feature requests into a holistic group, they start to paint a picture of a user experience that would greatly improve quality of life for Trigger and Actions. Thanks for providing a forum to offer these suggestions. At any rate, keep up the great work with Intuiface!
I think the Intuiface UI is well designed overall, and there will always be enhancements to be made. I like #1 suggestion (Labeling Trigger & action sets), as it may help remember how you did things the last time you touched the project. The way I go about it is through methodical naming convention of all elements in a project and ordering actions in a visually consistent and sequential way.
I found that my mind scans text more rapidly than interpreting the little object type icons. So I add an object type prefix to the asset names. To reorder the actions, you can right click them and move them up / down.
One of the least publicized and most powerful tricks in Intuiface is the use of buttons to group actions together.
Let’s assume you have 10 images that share a common set of actions that are triggered upon tapping. You don’t need to repeat the common sequence in every image. What you do is create a button called e.g. Set A, add the common sequence there and move it outside the screen. Then from within each image script, you add a Simulate a tap of button Set A. That one line will do the trick to call your set of actions that are kept separate from the images. Your XP will be cleaner and it’ll be easier to maintain.
YES! All fantastic suggestions - have been wanting to write all of these for a long time.
Sure, nothing is essential here but it would make workflow a lot easier.
I’ve probably lost weeks of my life pressing those little + / - buttons thousands of times in re-ordering actions so they made sense to a human, yelling at the screen saying “why can’t I just drop and drag here!!” then calming down and remembering how much I love Intuiface
(And yes I know there is a timeline visualization on the right but my brain just doesn’t work that way)
Thanks for sharing these suggestions with us.
Couple of comments on these ones:
Label Triggers & Action sets - True, agreed. The way I handle this, and I guess Paolo @tosolini is using the same trick, when I have many actions on 1 trigger, and especially when I may have to call all these same actions from multiple trigger.
I create a button, outside of the scene
I add an “is released” trigger on the button that call all these actions
I name the button something understandable. Ex: “Open Menu”.
On my original trigger, I call the “simulate a tap” action on this button.
If I have multiple ways of opening a menu (a button, a gesture, a double tap, …), everything goes through this “Open menu” button and if I need to adjust my animations, I do it in only one place.
Re-order Triggers & Actions - You can re-order actions. It’s not as easy as it would be with drag & drop (and it’s already listed as a potential enhancement), but you can right click an action and use “move up” / “move down” menu items. You can also cut / paste an action, which will “move it” to the end of the list.
Temporarily Disable Triggers or Actions - Yes, happens to me all the time. Usually, I either
change the timer duration to something very long (600 seconds = 10 minutes)
change the trigger into something else (ex: Timer → Gesture detected), so that I don’t lose my actions. I then just need to change the trigger back to the correct type / values.
Another tip: a timer trigger is only raised if the associated structure item is visible. Ex: instead of putting a timer on the scene, which is always visible, put it on a dummy item (ex: an image, a button). Hide this item, the trigger will be deactivated.
UI improvements to loading Triggers & Actions - True, especially when your scene gets heavy. My way of working:
When I need to open the “Details” view of T&A panel, I use the one on the right side of my Composer. The detailed panel is usually opened on my second screen.
When I’m reverse engineering an XP (i.e. trying to help someone on support ), I use a lot the lightning bolt shortcut to understand where are the objects in the scene structure. Clicking the blue link will select the action target in the scene structure. See capture below.
Trigger actions in Composer - Did you try to use the animation panel? You have a play button to visualize the actions in Composer’s edit mode. It’s true that you can’t (yet) control the timeline and it jumps back to the beginning as soon as the actions are done. My trick: add a dummy action that lasts xx seconds. The “play” won’t end and you’ll see the “end position” of your animation
Thought of another really important one. Copy and Paste All Attributes. This is something pulled directly from programs like Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro. When you want to copy all of your keyframes from one clip to another you can do it simply by right clicking, Copy Attributes, and then Paste Attributes.
This is needed in Intuiface as often I have many conditional trigger statements to cover a variety of scenarios. While I can copy and paste one trigger and its corresponding actions, I can’t copy and paste ALL triggers. We’re building an experience for a video wall that allows two users to explore the exact same content. So essentially we have one module, duplicated. The problem is every-time we make a change or tweak we need to copy each and every changed trigger set from each and every layer to the duplicated module. It would save a lot of time to be able to copy ALL triggers and paste them. Still a tedious task, but this would make it less so.
), I use a lot the lightning bolt shortcut to understand where are the objects in the scene structure. Clicking the blue link will select the action target in the scene structure. See capture below.
