Advanced View Features

Atom Craft boasts a lot of useful features to manage your workspace, like the docking/undocking of windows, or the possibility to save user layouts. The latest version goes even further in allowing you to customize the interface and tailor it to your workflow.

View Link Mode

By default, when an object is selected in a tree, a timeline, a list editor, etc., the display of each view switches in sync with the contents of the selected object. In most cases this behavior is convenient, but there are some instances where it can be impractical, especially when you want to compare several objects displayed in different views.

Thanks to the new View link feature, it becomes possible to lock the content of a particular view. So, you can effectively decide whether the view’s content should be synchronized or not when an object is selected somewhere else.

To lock the content of a view, click on the link icon located in its upper right corner. At the time of this writing, in Atom Craft 3.48, the View Link Mode can be changed in the Project Tree, the WorkUnits Tree, the Materials Tree, and the Timeline.

Multiple views

It is now also possible to open multiple views of the Project Tree, the WorkUnits Tree, and the Materials Tree.

By displaying multiple views of the same tree, it becomes easier to compare and browse objects that belong to it. When combined with different View Link modes, you can for instance have one WorkUnit Tree locked on a specific Cue Sheet while the other will change as you select other objects. You could also display the Materials folder of different WorkUnits at the same time.

This simplifies editing operations such as moving and duplicating objects, dragging and dropping objects from one tree to another. It becomes easier to create Cue links between Cues that are located far from each other in the tree’s hierarchy.

To add a new view, right-click on the Project Tree, WorkUnits Tree, or Materials Tree button – they are now underlined in green – in the Show/Hide View bar at the bottom of the interface. A new window of the selected tree will be display, while a new button will appear on the right side of the Show/Hide View bar. You can click on this button to show or hide the window, or right-click if you want to remove it permanently.

Lock Size

The final improvement is the possibility to lock the size of a specific view. Typically, when all the windows are docked, extending one of them will shrink the surrounding windows proportionally, which can be an issue depending on which one you want to interact with.
For instance, the views of the WorkUnits Tree and the Inspector often display a lot of information, and having to constantly adjust them when resizing the surrounding windows can quickly become cumbersome.

Now it is possible to simply click on the lock button located in the bottom right corner of a window to prevent it from changing size, and to ensure that important information is always visible where you expect to find it.