Frustrating Bugs I've found.

[jamest...@gmail.com]

1. Text size gets stuck occasionally and will not change even if I edit the font size. Upon pressing enter to accept the new font size it simply jumps back to the stuck size. Nothing fixes this except for just recreating the text box and text, which is frustrating as I need to re-animate and fix events for the text.

2. Moving something that has mouseover/mouseout events attached to it causes the mouseover and mouseout events to stop working. Even if I go in to the events and update them for the new location of the object. The only thing that fixes this is recreating the objects. Extremely frustrating. Deleting the events and recreating the events does nothing. For example, multiple times this has happened when I have a button that upon rollover increases its height and width, and on mouseout returns to its regular size. In order to center the animation I also compensate by moving it left and up as it increases width and height. If I decide I want the button to be in a different spot, oftentimes either the top or height part of the event stops working. Nothing fixes this. Recreating the event the exact same way doesn't fix this. I am not a coder, so I have no idea what could cause this.

3. Sometimes animating the color of font or fill of an object works, other times it does not. This is doing it the exact same way, with different objects and files, sometimes it just does not change color. Same goes for changing color on mouseover with events.

4. Creating objects, events, etc, and then deleting them, does NOT return me to the file size I was at before creating them. If I start at 50kb and add some objects, create some animations/events for them, and the file size is now at 90kb, then decide I dont like them, after deleting my file size could be at 60kb. What is left over? Why doesnt it fully delete these things? This means that as I work on a project, deleting and replacing things, the file size steadily goes up no matter what.

Heres a question as well: Why does adding a simple label to the timeline add ~40kb to the file?? This is ridiculous considering a blank GWD file is around 40kb, and the adwords file size limit is 150kb. Not much room to play around in.

[jamest...@gmail.com]

Another thing. When resizing text boxes with the mouse using the transform controls, sometimes it will constrain proportions regardless of whether that box is checked in the properties panel. Dragging the corner or a side will keep the proportions, and the only way to edit it without that happening is to do it on the properties panel.

[jamest...@gmail.com]

Here I am at 129kb, I add a label to the start of the animation - suddenly I am at 161kb... Something about that doesn't seem right. Why should that be WAY WAY bigger than my most complex .SVG, at ~5kb.

[jamest...@gmail.com]

Since im here I might as well mention a few more things as they come to me.

If you have two spots on the timeline that are pretty close to eachother, to add or edit easing between the two, you have to drag one farther away to be able to do so, then drag it back. From a UX standpoint, if I can fit my cursor between the two spots and right click, I should be able to add or edit easing. No reason to make the user do more work.

[jamest...@gmail.com]

I've also noticed that upon opening a file, the timeline scale bar will be 1 "point" away from the left, but show no yellow besides the dot, making it appear as though it is all the way to the left, aka zoomed out fully. But you can move the dot to the left a bit and it will fully zoom out. This behavior is bizarre and I can only imagine it must be a bug and not on purpose.

I have attached screenshots to illustrate what I am talking about. "upon opening.png" is of course how the bar looks upon opening. "all the way to the left.png" is the bar fully zoomed out, and "in the same spot.png" shows the bar after I drag to the left one bit and back to the zoom level it opens at, note the presence of the yellow bar that is absent upon opening to signify how zoomed in you are.

[jamest...@gmail.com]

And please fix the behavior of how selecting multiple keyframes works. Right now it seems as if there is absolutely no rhyme or reason to it. Shift and select grabs random keyframes, not the behavior I would want. perhaps implement the ability to do a box select in the timeline for grabbing multiple keyframes.

Currently it is a BIG pain to decide I want a portion of the animation to last longer, as I have to individually move each keyframe after it.

[jamest...@gmail.com]

And as someone who doesn't code and is unfamiliar with CSS styles, it would be really helpful if pressing tab in the set styles box of an event would give me a dropdown of all possible styles I can set. You have no idea how many times I tried things like "fill" "color" "fill-color" before I found it was "background" that allowed me to change the color of a div.

In the same vein, hovering over things like buttons or input boxes to get more information or a "tooltip" about what it is or what it does (very common and an expected behavior in similar programs), it would be great if that worked in GWD.

[jamest...@gmail.com]

I have also found that I VERY frequently have to click just to the left of a keyframe to successfully select it, and not its nearest neighbor to the right. Would love to just be able to click what my cursor is over.

[jamest...@gmail.com]

If you set the page color to a gradient, you can't edit it with the gradient tool. Seriously?

So if I have a gradient as the background, it can only be going side to side, or radial, whatever I can change in the properties panel. I have to place a rectangle or a div and color it with a gradient if I want to do this currently. That's just unacceptable.

[jamest...@gmail.com]

Why isn't changing somethings color an undo-able action? I certainly expected it to be.

[jamest...@gmail.com]

Found another bug where if you try to copy and paste a hex color code into the text color input on the top of the screen, it just pastes it into the text box, replacing all the text you have highlighted.

I found this by creating some text, pasting a color code into the text color input, then when I tried to change it to a second color it wouldn't work. I could still type in the text color input, but copy and pasting would replace the text.

[jamest...@gmail.com]

Creating something with the pen tool, and then setting the stroke to 0, does NOT get rid of the stroke. I HOPE someone is out there filing these as bugs, and (eventually) fixing them, you guys could sure use it!

Is anyone still actively working on Google Web Designer? Is there a Google Web Designer team?

[jamest...@gmail.com]

HERES ANOTHER BUG!!

If you have an svg, (not sure if it occurs with other types of objects, but I can consistently reproduce it with svg's), if you have an SVG and you go to the properties panel, and check the "scale uniformly" button ON, and increase the size by dragging one of the (x,y, or z) 3D scale inputs, then type 0 into one of the boxes, it breaks the scale uniform part. It remains checked, but it does not scale uniformly.

To reproduce:

1. select an .SVG
2. In the properties panel, make sure the "scale uniformly" button is checked ON
3. drag one of the 3D scale boxes to increase the size
(note that it works as it should, and the X,Y, and Z all scale together.)
4. in the same box you just dragged, type "0" to set the scale to 0
5. Drag that same box to increase its size
(note that the "scale uniformly" button is STILL checked ON)
6. It doesn't scale uniformly. Although it should.

Added weirdness, if you then drag it again, it scales uniformly now, and to fix it you must uncheck and recheck the scale uniformly button and type in your values to the 3D scale boxes.

[jamest...@gmail.com]

Surprise another bug.

If you scroll to the bottom of the CSS panel with the trackpad, you can't scroll back up using the trackpad. You have to click and drag the scroll handle.

[jamest...@gmail.com]

Another bug.

If you select a text box and click it with the text tool, so as to edit the text, and then scroll/pan around the screen, the black dots on the corners and midpoints of the text box follow you around the screen until you stop moving, then they snap back to the text box.

[jamest...@gmail.com]

Good another bug.

If you type nonsense such as bogus hex color codes or words into the text color box, it doesn't realize you didn't put in a valid color and not change color. it changes the text color to INVISIBLE. The bubble icon shows a grey fill, but the text turns invisible.

[jamest...@gmail.com]

Wow. loads of problems with copying text and groups.

I dont know exactly the extent of it, but at least if you copy a group of text, that is at least 2 separate text objects grouped together, and copy and paste it, even if you rename them in the properties panel to have DIFFERENT ID'S, it will (FOR SOME REASON) keep them "linked" for lack of a better word, and any changes you make to one will reflet in the other.

If I am changing the ID's, OBVIOUSLY I DONT WANT THAT. THAT'S WHY I AM CHANGING THE ID's. this program i swear has more bugs than any other program i've ever used

[jamest...@gmail.com]

ANOTHER ONE.

can you tell I'm getting more and more frustrated as I write these? I've been using this program only for 3 days. There is NO reason a user should encounter this many bugs, in a program that's been in beta for years. You've had users telling you about bugs. What are you even doing?

the bug: if you are in a text box, you can't zoom in or out using cmd/ctrl and the + or - buttons. This is different than any other tool.

[Sukhbir Kaur]

Hi James,

First of all, I would like to thank you for giving us your invaluable feedback.

I’m really very sorry that you are running into some issues while working in Google web Designer. We are looking into the issue's you have posted here and will get back to you soon.

Once again thanks for the feedback.

Thanks

Sukhbir

(Google Web Designer Team)

[jamest...@gmail.com]

Fantastic. I am glad someone from the team has seen this! I'll continue posting any bugs I may find.

[James_]

There seems to be no way to delete gradient markers if you add them. I wanted a gradient with 3 colors, so I easily enough added a marker to the middle of the gradient bar. I decided I wanted to go back to two colors. How do I delete the gradient marker? There is no clear way.

[James_]

Wait. Now I deleted the object to try to recreate it as that was the only thing I could do to change the gradient, I thought. But now EVERY object I create , if I try to add a gradient to it, STILL has the 3 gradient markers by default now. I cannot create a gradient with less than 3, now that I've added a third one to an object that's since been deleted. This is a MAJOR bug, I now have to restart my project if I want to create gradients that aren't stuck like this.

[James_]

Bug - 

if you give something an ID, then delete it, and try to give that ID to a different/new object, it gives you the error "The id ____ is already in use. Please use a different one." This however, isn't true, as looking in the code shows no ID that matches it.

There seems to be a lot of problems in Google Web Designer to do with deleting things and having the program REALLY delete it. For example, the assets folder just keeps filling up with every object you have imported even if you delete them. I had to go into the assets folder and delete many no-longer-used .SVG's and other assets. This problem with the ID seems tangentially related.

[James_]

Another text bug.

If you create a text box without dragging it on the canvas, but just by clicking on the canvas with the text tool, the properties panel will show that the text box has a width and height of 0. This is wrong, as you can clearly see the outline of the text box change size with the text. As soon as you change the width/height in the properties panel, it will update to the size you input.

[James_]

A label adds about 40kb. I have consistently had at least 40kb added to the project upon creating a label. This NEEDS to be reworked. People who use this for creating ads have small maximum file size requirements. I am not sure how this is adding so much to the project, but something about that has to change, it is just unreasonable. Someone who is using this for ads basically can not use the label function.

[Sukhbir Kaur]

Hi James,

Please see my comments inline.

1. Text size gets stuck occasionally and will not change even if I edit the font size. Upon pressing enter to accept the new font size it simply jumps back to the stuck size. Nothing fixes this except for just recreating the text box and text, which is frustrating as I need to re-animate and fix events for the text.

We will log a bug for the text size issue.

2. Moving something that has mouseover/mouseout events attached to it causes the mouseover and mouseout events to stop working. Even if I go into the events and update them for the new location of the object. The only thing that fixes this is recreating the objects. Extremely frustrating. Deleting the events and recreating the events does nothing. For example, multiple times this has happened when I have a button that upon rollover increases its height and width, and on mouseout returns to its regular size. In order to center the animation I also compensate by moving it left and up as it increases width and height. If I decide I want the button to be in a different spot, oftentimes either the top or height part of the event stops working. Nothing fixes this. Recreating the event the exact same way doesn't fix this. I am not a coder, so I have no idea what could cause this.

I’m unable to reproduce this issue.Please give us details or an example where  mouseover/mouseout events are not working properly.

3. Sometimes animating the color of font or fill of an object works, other times it does not. This is doing it the exact same way, with different objects and files, sometimes it just does not change color. Same goes for changing color on mouseover with events.                                                 Are you trying to use animation for canvas elements( Pen,Rectangle,Oval and Line tool) then yes, Images inside canvas elements can't be changed using timeline animation. The enclosing canvas tag can be animated (to move the entire tag), but the color or shape of the image in the canvas tag can't be animated.You can find more details in our help section

4. Creating objects, events, etc, and then deleting them, does NOT return me to the file size I was at before creating them. If I start at 50kb and add some objects, create some animations/events for them, and the file size is now at 90kb, then decide I dont like them, after deleting my file size could be at 60kb. What is left over? Why doesnt it fully delete these things? This means that as I work on a project, deleting and replacing things, the file size steadily goes up no matter what.   I’m unable to reproduce this issue. I have lots of elements/animation and events in my file and deleting  everything change the file size back to normal. IF you have any file samples where all  the content is deleted and still the file size is not decreased.Please send us that file at gwd-s...@google.com

5. Here’s a question as well: Why does adding a simple label to the timeline add ~40kb to the file?? This is ridiculous considering a blank GWD file is around 40kb, and the adwords file size limit is 150kb. Not much room to play around in.
   A single label doesn’t add 40k, so we are not sure why  this is happening in your file.Please give us more details. Create a new file and Add elements and Label in timeline and let us know if you can still reproduce this.

3. Another thing. When resizing text boxes with the mouse using the transform controls, sometimes it will constrain proportions regardless of whether that box is checked in the properties panel. Dragging the corner or a side will keep the proportions, and the only way to edit it without that happening is to do it on the properties panel.

We are unable to reproduce this issue.  Are you trying to  use shift key with transform tool?

7. Here I am at 129kb, I add a label to the start of the animation - suddenly I am at 161kb... Something about that doesn't seem right. Why should that be WAY WAY bigger than my most complex .SVG, at ~5kb.

A single label doesn’t add 40k, so we are not sure why this is happening in your file.Please give us more details. Create a new file and Add elements and Label in timeline and let us know if you can still reproduce this.

8. If you have two spots on the timeline that are pretty close to each other, to add or edit easing between the two, you have to drag one farther away to be able to do so, then drag it back. From a UX standpoint, if I can fit my cursor between the two spots and right click, I should be able to add or edit easing. No reason to make the user do more work.

This is why Zoom is implemented. I guess we should be able to access to easing from a keyframe selection...but not sure when we have a practical workaround.

9. I've also noticed that upon opening a file, the timeline scale bar will be 1 "point" away from the left, but show no yellow besides the dot, making it appear as though it is all the way to the left, aka zoomed out fully. But you can move the dot to the left a bit and it will fully zoom out. This behavior is bizarre and I can only imagine it must be a bug and not on purpose.
   

9. We do have a bug for this issue.

9. I have attached screenshots to illustrate what I am talking about. "upon opening.png" is of course how the bar looks upon opening. "all the way to the left.png" is the bar fully zoomed out, and "in the same spot.png" shows the bar after I drag to the left one bit and back to the zoom level it opens at, note the presence of the yellow bar that is absent upon opening to signify how zoomed in you are.

Thanks, we already have logged a bug for this issue.

11. And please fix the behavior of how selecting multiple keyframes works. Right now it seems as if there is absolutely no rhyme or reason to it. Shift and select grabs random keyframes, not the behavior I would want. perhaps implement the ability to do a box select in the timeline for grabbing multiple keyframes.

Marquee selection for timeline  feature is not implemented yet. This feature will be available in our future release.

12. Currently it is a BIG pain to decide I want a portion of the animation to last longer, as I have to individually move each keyframe after it.

            Same marquee issue.

13. And as someone who doesn't code and is unfamiliar with CSS styles, it would be really helpful if pressing tab in the set styles box of an event would give me a dropdown of all possible styles I can set. You have no idea how many times I tried things like "fill" "color" "fill-color" before I found it was "background" that allowed me to change the color of a div.   

  We do have code hint in CSS panel. If you type like background and with the arrow keys it will show different option available.                                                                              

14 . In the same vein, hovering over things like buttons or input boxes to get more information or a "tooltip" about what it is or what it does (very common and an expected behavior in similar programs), it would be great if that worked in GWD.     

            We do have tooltips. You can see the tooltip by hovering over .

15 I have also found that I VERY frequently have to click just to the left of a keyframe to successfully select it, and not its nearest neighbor to the right. Would love to just be able to click what my cursor is over.

      The bug is  logged internally.

16. If you set the page color to a gradient, you can't edit it with the gradient tool. Seriously?

       This is working as intended as page is not selectable in the backend.

17. So if I have a gradient as the background, it can only be going side to side, or radial, whatever I can change in the properties panel. I have to place a rectangle or a div and color it with a gradient if I want to do this currently. That's just unacceptable.  

        Same as above.

18. Why isn't changing somethings color an undo-able action? I certainly expected it to be.   

       I’m unable to reproduce this issue.You should be able to undo color to elements.Please give more details.

19.  Found another bug where if you try to copy and paste a hex color code into the text color input on the top of the screen, it just pastes it into the text box, replacing all the text you have highlighted.                                                                                                                                           

        This is working as intended. The selected text container will be updated with the pasted hex color in the option bar. If you don’t want the selected text container to have pasted hex color first unselect the text container ,add the hex color in option bar ( text color) input box and Add a new text      

        container on stage.

20 .I found this by creating some text, pasting a color code into the text color input, then when I tried to change it to a second color it wouldn't work. I could still type in the text color input, but copy and pasting would replace the text.   

 I’m unable to reproduce this issue. The Text color always changes for me when I copy and paste new hex color in option bar .

21. Creating something with the pen tool, and then setting the stroke to 0, does NOT get rid of the stroke. I HOPE someone is out there filing these as bugs, and (eventually) fixing them, you guys could sure use it!

 

We will log a bug for properties panel to not accept 0 .If you need to delete a pen stroke from stage ,select and hit delete key to remove.                                          

22 If you have an svg, (not sure if it occurs with other types of objects, but I can consistently reproduce it with svg's), if you have an SVG and you go to the properties panel, and check the "scale uniformly" button ON, and increase the size by dragging one of the (x,y, or z) 3D scale inputs, then type 0 into one of the boxes, it breaks the scale uniform part. It remains checked, but it does not scale uniformly.

              I was able to reproduce this issue and have  logged a bug internally.

23 If you scroll to the bottom of the CSS panel with the trackpad, you can't scroll back up using the trackpad. You have to click and drag the scroll handle.     

          I’m unable to reproduce this issue. Can you give us more details like the screen display size ,OS and version. Do you have any other panel open like properties/ color etc ?  Is CSS panel fully expanded

24 If you select a text box and click it with the text tool, so as to edit the text, and then scroll/pan around the screen, the black dots on the corners and midpoints of the text box follow you around the screen until you stop moving, then they snap back to the text box.             

We are able to reproduce this issue and will log a bug

25 If you type nonsense such as bogus hex color codes or words into the text color box, it doesn't realize you didn't put in a valid color and not change color. it changes the text color to INVISIBLE. The bubble icon shows a grey fill, but the text turns invisible.            

We are able to reproduce this issue and will log a bug.

26. copying text and groups.I dont know exactly the extent of it, but at least if you copy a group of text, that is at least 2 separate text objects grouped together, and copy and paste it, even if you rename them in the properties panel to have DIFFERENT ID'S, it will (FOR SOME REASON) keep

them "linked" for lack of a better word, and any changes you make to one will reflet in the other.                                                                                                                                                      

     If you are copying and pasting the group, it will create group instances and they will reflect the changes if you edit in one group.

27 . the bug: if you are in a text box, you can't zoom in or out using cmd/ctrl and the + or - buttons. This is different than any other tool.                                                                                             

              This is working as intended , This is good feature request and Ii’ll log this as feature request on your behalf.

I  hope this helps!

[James_]

Thank you! It is great to get a response like this, I am glad to hear I could bring a few bugs to your attention. I am going to go through and see if I can make screenshots showing some things you could not reproduce!

[Sukhbir Kaur]

Hi James,

if you give something an ID, then delete it, and try to give that ID to a different/new object, it gives you the error "The id ____ is already in use. Please use a different one." This however, isn't true, as looking in the code shows no ID that matches it.

There seems to be a lot of problems in Google Web Designer to do with deleting things and having the program REALLY delete it. For example, the assets folder just keeps filling up with every object you have imported even if you delete them. I had to go into the assets folder and delete many no-longer-used .SVG's and other assets. This problem with the ID seems tangentially related.

I'm unable to reproduce the ID issue you have mentioned. The error will prompt only when the element with the same ID exist. Please send us a screenshot or a file which have this issue.So I can take a look.

Regarding the asset Library. When you add /import an asset in the Asset folder it remains there until user specifically delete it from the library.When you publish an Ad it only add the assets which are used in the ad.

Please see our help doc on Asset Library here for details also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNfFm4YrLx8.

[James_]

2. I also can't get this to reproduce right now, but I will make note of it if it occurs again.

3. What I am trying to do for example, would be to change the color of text over time, or the color of a rectangle or div over time. using keyframes. Is this possible currently?

4. I am attaching 2 files that show this phenomenon. I have a 970x90 file that I deleted everything from. I have a 970x90 file I have not put anything into. The one with everything deleted is ~6kb larger than the other file when unzipped. The difference between these two is not that much, but still perplexing, and I have experienced a larger difference before, this is just for an example of the problem. The file with everything deleted is called "size test bigger file all deleted.zip" and the baseline file that never had anything in it is called "size test.zip". See for yourself, the one with everything deleted is bigger.

5. Creating a new file and adding a label does NOT increase the file size dramatically. You are completely correct. I find that if I have a file with lots of objects, animations, events etc, and THEN if I add a label to the timeline, the file size increases dramatically. I don't want to send you my file as it is work related, but I am attaching screenshots showing this. The one with no label is "nolabel.png" and the one with label is called "withlabel.png". The ONLY thing that changed between screenshots is that I added the label. You can see there is an increase of 36kb. Sometimes it is more or less. But nearly 40kb. I did blur out some personal info but nothing important to what we are discussing.