Posts made by tim

Weird; on my macbook I can do filled text ok but I do have the non-responsive font dialogue. except that I can type a font size value in the top-right field.

Sigh. This just gets more and more annoying. Even the simplest selecting will sometimes beachball. It does seem that there might be some connection with movement of the mouse. If I'm really careful to not move the mouse as I click to select it seems to happen less. This could connect with why it is so strongly related to using the selection windows, since clearly one tends to be moving the mouse then.

Right now SU is pretty much unusable, which is seriously irritating.

@santiagom said:

But, when after deleting, i also removed sup´s preferences, everything went back to normal.

OK, I tried that just in case - and what fun it was finding all the relevant files to remove, how about an unisntall option in the installer guys - and sadly it makes no difference. It isn't anything to do with installed plugins or style etc either, so far as I'm able to tell, since I tried the system out before I re-installed my collection.

I've noticed a few more selection related issues recently. For example, in a really simple model - not much more than a box - I had a few lines to select to delete. Since I know the selection marquees have problems I used shift-select but even then I got a several second beachball episode.

A few minutes later whilst trying out some of the sandbox tools I got beachballed again when clicking outside any component in order to deselect.

MacBook, SUPro 1145, hardware accel on, fast select off.

Hmm, yes, turning off hardware acceleration certainly avoids the massive delay when drag-selecting but it noticeably slows down almost everything else for me!

But it certainly provides some useful forensic info to help the guys find out where the real problem lies.

@bjanzen said:

Oh, one other thing: let the indexing run and complete before making any conclusions. Especially on a MacBook.

Yah, this was well after all indexing had finished, and not during a TimeMachine run either.

I did some more tests with very simple models (like a single square) and the delay was much much less though still much longer than one would expect. I also did some extra post-install cleanups like erasing old caches just in case. No effect on my current model which is not exactly extravagantly large at only 7000 lines 3000 faces in 56 component instances. Simply click-selecting works just fine for individual components/groups/faces etc as does shift-select.

Activity monitor showed SU never exceeding 0.8% cpu whilst taking it's time (about 10 sec) to do the drag-select, with a period when 'spindump' took 15%.

My MacBook is a 1.83GHz /2Gb / GMA950-64Mb /60Gb model. Mostly the SU performance is really pretty amazing for such a cheap machine. Bit different to when I was writing my own CAD systems in '81 on a NatSemi 16032 based box I built myself! How time flies...

@mike lucey said:

Any suggestions Tim?

Right now I'd say that if you depend upon SU for work then I wouldn't install Leopard yet. Or at least, not on your main/only disk. IF you have a secondary disc you can use and boot form it to test then you might find that this is only a problem on the MacBook models - after all they do have a rather low-power graphics chip, different from all the other models,

Since you really ought to have a secondary disk for TimeMachine usage anyway, this should be practical for you to try.

Aside from this problem my MacBook is quite happy. I love the new coverflow finder and when SU can make good use of it (an improvement in the 'custom icon' option should do it) it will be very useful. For example, I have large collection of pdf article from FineWoodWorking and used to have to rely on the filenames. Now with CoverFlow you can flick through them to find the wanted one. I see it as a way to return to the 'muscle memory' idea that we originally thought the 'messy desk' idiom would help back in the old days of graphical UIs. It's amazing how fast the thumbnails generate and how quickly you can open the doc to read.

Not so impressed by the translucent menubar though Then again, never was impressed with the menubar idea anyway. Had lots of animated discussions with Jef Raskin about that over the years!

It works mostly on my MacBook with Leopard.
Good news - the selection rectangles appear with the newer OpenGL version/drivers/ Bad news - it makes SU sit there for a long while spinning the beachball before finally returning control to you. Usually the resulting selection is what I'd expect but not every time. I see no difference whether using 'Fast Feedback' or not.

Also had long periods of beachball after rotating a fairly simple component (a cupboard door) - not a problem in the actual rotation which was perfectly smooth, but after finishing the operation.

And similar after placing a people component in my model.

And once a simple save failed, telling me that it was impossible to save the file. Worked immediately afterwards.

I think this is largely an unfortunate interaction between the forum software and Safari.
If I use Safari to download a style, it appears as "foo.style.zip' - if you d-click then typically you will get an unzipped folder with the assorted xml files etc. That's no use to you at all unless yo uwant to fiddle with the inner bits. Good Luck...
I tried simply renaming 'foo.style.zip' to 'foo.style', which appeared to work except that for the styles I was trying to use things went oddly wrong; 'ubracio' for example just didn't work. I tried following other advice to save it as a new style and then use that but that just got more confusing.

If I use Firefox to read the forum and to download attached styles, it just works as one would expect. Clearly something is causing a problem in the download interaction of the browser(s).

I occasionally see something similar but I think it might be related to the number of events that get sent when whizzing the scrollwheel. What happens to me is that it looks like SU has stopped responding for a moment, then it will catch up - mostly. Sometimes it seems to have lost track of the zooming.

I suspect that it's scrollwheel event related because I see a similar effect on one or two other apps, including one where I am able to debug and see that there are many, many, events being passed in. My guess for SU is that the large stack of redraw events caused just overwhelms some handler.

poster-tim

Thanks Dylan; I haven't had time yet to really scrutinse them all but a lot seem to be flooring type textures. The WoodWorkshop sounds like it might be useful except it only runs in Windows and I Don't Do That. A lot of the offerings also seem to be very high-res too, which isn't really practical for simple renderings; lovely for PR work of course.

I've been trying to find some good wood textures. When you're working on furniture you need
a) long bitmaps for sticks
b) several of each specie for plausible visual variety
c) bitmaps for panels

Has anyone found any nice samples?