Toon Boom Harmony, as amazing as it is, has a number of UI oddities and/or inconsistencies that can be annoying or require unnecessary busywork to work around. Below is a list of Quality-of-life suggestions that I believe would aid many users’ workflows. I believe that many of these suggestions would probably be relatively simple to implement.
QoL Suggestions:
• Allow Harmony to remember the last position of the divider that separates Palettes and Colours in the Colour Panel. Every time I open a project, the Palettes take up 80% of the panel, while the Colours are squished in the bottom 20%. Since I naturally have more colours than palettes, I have to drag this divider up every time to see my colour swatches.
• Right-Clicking on a colour swatch in the Colour Panel should select that swatch before opening the context menu. Currently, if you want to do something like “Recolour Drawings”, it takes 2 clicks just to bring up the context menu on a swatch: first you need to left-click the swatch to select it, then right-click to bring up the menu with the “Recolour Drawings” option. We should be able to do this with just a right-click, which is how right-clicking works in most major programs (including other parts of Harmony, such as the Library Panel)
• Allow Harmony to remember the state of the “Colour Editor” portion of the Colour Panel between sessions (currently it disappears after each session, and must be manually re-enabled from the panel drop-down menu each new session)
• Allow the disabled node color to be customised. It’s currently a fierce out-of-gamut red which strains the eyes and steals attention from the nodes you’re actually using.
• Allow custom colors for Scene Markers - using a Colour Picker, not just preset dropdown list. (We can currently change the colours by #hex value by editing the xstage file in a text editor, but that requires closing and restarting the scene every time.)
• Let Timeline Untag All actually affect all nodes (and not just the ones from the current Node View group) so that we don’t have to go hunting around other groups untagging ‘all’ nodes repeatedly
• The Timeline’s Selection-only mode is annoyingly fussy about any non-node items you have selected. It doesn’t update properly if you click on a backdrop, or use the drag-a-rectangle-around-nodes method and a backdrop or a waypoint is included in the selection. Hunting down and deselecting minuscule waypoints one by one until our selection finally registers is really tedious. The Selection-only mode should just ignore any backdrops and waypoints it finds.
• Allow external windows to share multiple panels. The way panels can be currently be combined into separate areas of the main window, with borders between them that can be resized/open/closed, is excellent. But this functionality is missing from any panels that are dragged outside of the main application. So if you want to have, say, Node View, Scene Marker and Function panels on a second monitor, you need to drag them there as 3 separate windows. Most of these windows are then treated as separate entities by the OS, which makes swapping between Harmony and other programs annoying and clunky. Instead of alt-tabbing once to switch to Harmony you may need to alt-tab 4 times to force each of the 4 Harmony windows to the foreground, one at a time.
• Allow custom toolbars to be customisable from anywhere, and not just from the main toolbar area. Currently, to add/remove items from a custom toolbar that’s docked in a panel (eg. Camera or Node View), we have to add it on the main toolbar area, add/remove items to it, then add it back to the desired panel, then reposition it to where we want it. It’s a lot of steps that feel unnecessary.
• Let TAB & shift-tab move between fields in all node properties dialogs. It does in some, but in most cases it doesn’t.
• Let Up/Down arrows increase/decrease numbers in various dialog box fields (eg. in Colour Picker or any node’s Properties dialog). Holding shift should increase/decrease by x10.
• If you rename a node to the same name in a different case (eg. Head → HEAD) it will successfully rename it, but mistakenly popup an error saying that the node can’t be renamed because the name is already used. This popup shouldn’t occur.
• It would be helpful to have a profiling feature or script that outputs into the Message Log a list of the nodes and the time taken to process each, so that we can easily see which are the most expensive parts of our rig (so we can disable/cache/optimise them as desired )
• The dropdown menu in the Blending Mode Properties is needlessly tiny. You can’t see all the available options without a lot of scrolling. It would be helpful if it was big enough to fit all, or at least most, of the options at once.