kõik – drawing menu
The first short movie in the kõik on the MS Surface series; the drawing menu:
The Surface has been hanging around in our office for a while and we’ve done lots of interesting small and big projects for it. However they’ve been pretty fragmented and to show what we could do with the Surface you had to use several applications which had many similarities, which was confusing. So we decided that it was time to create an application which would show all our new ideas and developments. Looking for a nice name we came across ‘kõik‘ which both means everyone and every(thing), which is pretty much sums up what we want to achieve: an application which can be used by everyone and shows everything we do.
It was originally designed for landuse planning. Planners need to be able to move and zoom a map, but also annotate on it. The trouble with touch devices is that there is no difference between drawing and dragging, unlike keyboard/mouse (drawing is left mousebutton and dragging middle for instance). Having to press a button somewhere on the Surface to enable/disable drawing was too confusing, people tend to forget that they pressed them and in what modus they are now.
Having a physical object on the table turned out to be much easier to use and remember. If there was ‘the’ object on the table, you could draw and if you want to move the map, you just lift the object and move the map. Having established the object as the drawing-toggle, I then moved all drawing related interaction to a menu activated and related to the object. Currently you can choose the color and line thickness and whether you want to draw a line or polygon or you want to edit existing features, undo/redo actions and add new drawing layers.