Smart Guides: Auto vs. on Key Press

#1

Great first stab but unreliable and not every useful in its current state of implementation.

The way it currently works, seems to auto-show the distances between widgets as you are drawing, moving, or resizing them without any key-press. However, this isn’t very reliable because it doesn’t show ALL the distances between neighboring objects ALL the time. Sometimes it shows just the distance of the component to the left, sometimes only with the components above and below. Sometimes it shows the distances, while other times it ignores it completely.

And so, rather than making the smart guides, SMART as in automatic & magical. I think it would be far more useful and reliable if it only showed on key-press, like it is done in Sketch or Figma today.

Here’s how it works in Figma.

  • Click on an object to select it.
  • Hold down the “Option” key (Mac)
  • Mouseover a neighboring object
  • See the distance between the selected object and the neighboring object only

This implementation is FAR more useful and reliable than what is implemented in the 9 beta, which is great in concept but kind of distracting to see all the smart guides all the time.

#2

um that’s how it’s working for me… exactly as you described.

#3

Oh shoot, you are right! >_< I swear it didn’t work like this on initial start up lol

Although, looks like its showing some odd, invisible distances as well. Looks buggy, Not sure what the “91” is pointing to. It’s not the padding of the object, because the padding is set to the default 2,2,2,2.

Screen Shot 2018-09-06 at 3.41.18 PM.png950×570 2.77 KB

#4

It work this way to show distances, however, when dragging a widget - I could not figure out how Axure decides which widget it present the distance from… Are there any rules?
Can I control Axure to show distance between the widget I am dragging to a specific widget of my wish?
It sometimes show distance not to the adjacent widget, but to another guy, far off…see below: instead of showing distance between arrow to the label, it show distance between two arrows (and no, they are located in order in the OUTLINE panel).

Thanks,
Iris–

#5

From what I’ve learned, it will compare the widget being dragged to other widgets or groups at the same level… so if you are trying to compare to something that is in another group, or is outside of the group the widget is in, it will not compare automatically. This is super frustrating but I understand, since otherwise you would have lines all over the place comparing the widget to everything on screen