I once took a course on Autodesk Inventor and was blown away by its parametric sketching tools, which allow you to define constraints on points, lines, and angles. It was very easy to draw a rough sketch of what I wanted and then add the necessary constraints to "clean up" the design—I want these objects horizontally aligned, with identical dimensions, arranged equidistantly from this point, etc.
Exactly. That's the right way to do layout, with a constraint-based GUI. The high-end CAD products have had this for well over a decade. The CAD people can even do constraints on curves, like having a line be tangent to a circle or an arc and line meet with equal tangents. This is far beyond what the HTML crowd even aspires to.
The Basalt people, though, have a textural interface for graphic design, which is pounding a screw. Ask any graphic designer.
Exactly. That's the right way to do layout, with a constraint-based GUI. The high-end CAD products have had this for well over a decade. The CAD people can even do constraints on curves, like having a line be tangent to a circle or an arc and line meet with equal tangents. This is far beyond what the HTML crowd even aspires to.
The Basalt people, though, have a textural interface for graphic design, which is pounding a screw. Ask any graphic designer.