However, yesterday I read this post which got me thinking:
The problem is that some times you don't want FL to "pick up" the last clicked item (note or clip) and obviously FL can't read your mind, but then again we don't have any way to communicate our intentions to FL!jesussaddle wrote:The first is that when you right click on the Magnet Icon to give a length for the next notes you enter, you defeat that the moment you edit any note with a different length. Is there some way to avoid your chosen length being "assimilated" by the length of the note just clicked on? Say you want to work between channel instruments, and you want to copy material from a groove going on in a synth or bass part you MIDI-recorded. Maybe you turn "editable ghost notes on", and are periodically copying a line here or a little pair of notes there. Every time you happen to click on any long notes, you need to go back and right click the magnet and change the note length back to a short one, because the long lengths you un-intentionally insert when doing this often extend under other notes...frustrating.
Currently FL Studio paints the last-clicked item, the last-clicked item being any item that has been:
● clicked without moving the mouse (the item neither moves or resizes), or...
● moved, or...
● resized
After sleeping over it, I realised the problem: moved and resized items should not count as last-clicked, only items that were clicked without moving the mouse. In other words, FL Studio should paint the last-clicked item that was neither resized nor moved.
This has some several benefits:
(1) It is intuitive (can easily be learned by trial and error).
(2) It gives users finer command of FL Studio.
(3) It is error-tolerant: If users click on the wrong item and doesn't want FL to remember that as the last-clicked item, they can simply move the mouse around and then back to the original position. This way the condition that the mouse must not have moved is no longer satisfied, and FL Studio won't update the last-clicked item, even if the start and end positions of the mouse pointer are exactly identical (FL should monitor for the fact that the mouse has moved at all, not just the button-down and button-up locations).
Cheers!