Just a quick head's up - there's a new Release 9 build out today, 9.0.182.0. Check out the News page for a quick summary. Downloads are at the Release 9 downloads page.

The focus on this build is implementing alpha transparency throughout the system, which involves very many internal changes to support a few external ones, such as a new color picker dialog. 182 is a restart of routine builds with a focus on implementing many small conveniences that add up to faster and more productive workflow.

Doc updates and videos will follow soon, with an update of Viewer to 182.0 as well.

There is a typo in "Say "Adois" to 7 and 8" on the News page.

So nice to have an update again.

A typo:

Say "Adois""Adios" to 7 and 8

Thanks! Fixed.

Wonderful news! I had started to believe that this day would never come. I'm very happy to be proved wrong

Landsystems Ltd ... Know your land | www.landsystems.co.nz

Alpha transparency is a huge upgrade. That was one of my biggest issues with 9 over 8. Now that it's here, I have a better idea about why it took so long to implement. But also, now I'm afraid of it. I'm anxiously awaiting the YouTube tutorial to make what seems overwhelming seem trivial.

Manifold is the only reason I change operating systems. When you guys deprecate Windows 10, I will move on to 11.

There's a new video up: Select Color Dialog - Transparent Colors

Thank you so much for the video. It may be longer than your normal 5 minutes, but it was captivating all the way through.

One suggestion: The crosshairs in the gradient square should have a shadow so you can find them in the color palate where the colors tend toward white.

The crosshairs in the gradient square should have a shadow

Good idea. I've added it as a suggestion for 9.0.182.1.

I've also suggested that the "recent colors" swatches in the Select Color dialog persist across sessions.

OK, that was a *really* good suggestion. :-)

I just was sent an internal build to play with and the result is great. Here it is with the crosshair on a very light color:

... and here it is with the crosshair on a darker color. Either way it works well:

Attachments:
shadowed_crosshair01.png
shadowed_crosshair02.png

It's a very useful, practical, and easy-to-use tool. However, its effectiveness diminishes when applying a color palette to the polygons in a drawing, unless I am mistaken. It seems that transparency must be applied to each color in the selected palette. Is this correct?

If you want to change every color that you've loaded from a palette, sure. But that's the case with any changes to colors in a palette, for example, if you applied a palette and then wanted to tint each palette color with a greater blue or greater red component, true?

I wondered the same thing.

Not mentioned on the release notes is a new Classic pallet, Beaded Pastel Alpha. When applied to a drawing layer, each colour has an Alpha of 71%. Applied to a drawing the results are as expected.

This differs from setting the drawing layer to 71% in the layer transparency settings. Applied to an image (mean slope) offers rather interesting output.

Ah, that's an oversight.

If I recall correctly there was a time when the initial color grids, the field of many small swatches you see when first pressing a color well before you press More... to move on to a full color picker dialog, included some duplicate groups pre-set with alpha values. That turned out to be a bad idea as initial testers couldn't make heads or tails of them since it is very difficult to indicate which are alpha with such small swatches, and cluttering up the grid with gadgety user interfaces or graphics defeated the purpose of having simple, clear, fast choices from the grid.

There were also a variety of new experimental palettes added, which seemed to clutter up the existing lists (already long). Beaded Pastel Alpha was one of them and should have been removed, as it's an outlier compared to all the other non-alpha palettes.

I think tastes can reasonably differ in such things but to my taste what is really needed there are two (or three) different approaches. First, it would be convenient to load user-specified palettes into user specified groups besides Classic and CB. Second, it would be convenient to have a few extra palette groups that match, say, other GIS packages like Arc. Third, if you want to globally edit palettes, that's a different thing than a color picker dialog.

Manifold doesn't provide a palette creation and editing subsystem, which ends up being a pretty big subsystem if you look at applications for creating palettes and editing them. Instead, there is a context menu in the thematic formatting system in the Style pane:

That context menu allows making simple adjustments to the selected swath of colors. But that's not a color picker dialog function, even though you could also use a color picker dialog (like Select Color) to lighten or darken.

But if you want to introduce *new* features to manipulate palettes, where I'd start would be to add two more entries to that context menu, "More Opacity," and "Less Opacity" [or maybe, "More Opacity" and "More Transparency", or "Opacity +" and "Opacity -"... the usual debates about command names...] and possibly an "Opacity..." entry that pops open a dialog that allows entering a number for percent opacity.

(Technically, the internals all use alpha but the UI in Manifold uses percent opacity since that's more comprehensible to more people.)

The above is not a palette editing system, but it is a way to get immediately useful ability to specify alpha for more than one color at a time that is being used in thematic formatting.

I think next rather than diving into a full palette editing subsystem I'd look into loading user-specified palette files on startup. A problem with that is such initialization steps slow down the initial launch. Every little check, like touching the file system, takes some time and that adds up. The unrestrained "oh, let's put another option into user startup files..." approach to customization you get with some applications is why they take so long to launch. I'd hate to see Manifold lose its very snappy and quick launch.

Thanks for the insight. I'd concur with the context menu Opacity. That is an obvious (in hindsight) place.

Do you know, does the company still plan to have one of their employees post updates in the "announcements" area of the form, and collaborate on the forum?

does the company still plan to have one of their employees

Well, the answer to that starts with clarifying the context for that question. I would gently remind everybody that the company has never "had" any employees participate in the forum. :-) Any employees who participated here have always done so on their own time, voluntarily and unpaid on top of whatever was their day job.

Official news like announcements of new builds, products, etc., is what the Newspage on the manifold.net website provides. Instead of copying that info and pasting it here I think it's more efficient to post a quick note that a new build is out, trusting that anybody interested in details will get them with a single click on the News page.

Regarding "collaboration", I think that depends on whether that means "free technical support" or actual joint work on new technologies or capabilities. If it's the latter I don't recall any employees doing that here. Instead, I recall a lot of free tech support being contributed.

Given that people's responsibilities on the job and in life have increased I think it's less likely that employees will have the time to contribute free tech support. If the question is about the company providing assistance, answering questions, etc., that's what tech supportis for.

Quick thumbs up for the CB Spectral Reverse pallet. Saves me some time for quick shaded reliefs. And while I'm typing, the indents on the sliders work really well. Classic Manifold quiet UI.