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by qwertox 918 days ago
Maya's C++ API was what taught me the most about the importance of proper do/undo functionality. As soon as you start to modify the DAG, you really must ensure that the undo operation leaves everything (be it meshes or shaders or curves, whatever) as it was before your custom object got inserted into the DAG. Else your plugin is worthless.

See the doIt/undoIt methods in https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2022/ENU/?guid=Maya_SD...
2 comments
vinkelhake 918 days ago
I've been working on an editor (not text) in C++ and pretty early got into undo/redo. I went down the route of doIt/undoIt for commands but that quickly got old. There was both the extra work needed to implement undo separately for every operation, but also the nagging feeling that the undo operation for some operation wasn't implemented correctly.

In the end, I switched to representing the entire document state using persistent data structures (using the immer library). This vastly simplified things and implementing undo/redo becomes absolutely trivial when using persistent data structures. It's probably not something that is suitable for all domains, but worth checking out.

https://github.com/arximboldi/immer

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bsder 918 days ago
Man, fonts sometimes really matter.

I've been pondering about calling your developers nasty names and what a dolt method is actually doing ...

Until I realized that they were DO-IT, UNDO-IT. <facepalm>

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genter 918 days ago
Bit of trivia:

The first Macs (or maybe it was the Lisa) had DO IT instead of OK. The people in the focus groups testing it got annoyed that they were being called dolts.

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Someone 917 days ago
Not the first Macs, the work-in-progress Lisas they used for user research https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Do_It.txt:

“Starting in the summer of 1981, Larry organized a series of user tests of the nascent Lisa software, recruiting friends and family to try out the software for the first time, while being observed by the Apple designers who recorded their reaction.

[…]

Finally, the team noticed one user that was particularly flummoxed by the dialog box, who even seemed to be getting a bit angry. The moderator interrupted the test and asked him what the problem was. He replied, "I'm not a dolt, why is the software calling me a dolt?"

It turns out he wasn't noticing the space between the 'o' and the 'I' in 'Do It'; in the sans-serif system font we were using, a capital 'I' looked very much like a lower case 'l', so he was reading 'Do It' as 'Dolt' and was therefore kind of offended.

After a bit of consideration, we switched the positive confirmation button label to 'OK' (which was initially avoided, because we thought it was too colloquial), and from that point on people seemed to have fewer problems.”

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