I agree it doesn’t directly convey “edit”, but for me the icon’s goal is to represent “link object”, and I think it does that pretty well. When you eventually click it you learn what it can do through popup UI.
More problematic for me is that there’s no good way to discover the double-click shortcut for opening the link. I will likely add a dismissible note to the link popover mentioning this.
To me that feels less discoverable than current behavior. Instead of discovery by single clicking a button object you would need to also be holding down option key.
I think for now I’m going to keep the current design and see how people get used to it. If I still get requests for single click option I can imagine adding a preference to make it one click to open link and require Option-Click to edit.
What I think you loose in that scenario is an easy way to preview link destination. I could use tooltips, but those always feel finicky to me, sometimes they show, sometimes they don’t, never know when exactly.
Yikes, I argued so much for the current behavior that I think I’ve changed my mind . Instead of using build in tooltips I made my own so they show up right away, and end result is nice additional indication for when mouse is over the link button. Editing is harder (right click), but link clicking is easier, and clicking is what people will do most. Thanks for the convincing. I’m liking the change.
After a few more days with the new link functionality, I’ve discovered that it would be very helpful for both the link text and URL to editable from the popup – a few times now I’ve found myself pasting a link to a blog post and wanting to edit the text to be the same the title of the post.
Right now, when the link is the same as the text, the popup is ambiguous:
I found that highlighting the text of the link and trying to paste the title of the blog post to replace the text also doesn’t work (and would potentially be ambiguous with the “paste URL over highlighted text to turn it into a link” behavior).
Please note that in release 72 if you drag and drop a URL from web browser then it should be inserted that way to start without needing any editing.
I agree it would be good to have an option to set both link text and link URL in that popup. I’ll get to it eventually… I think.
This is a weird case… what is happening is there are two kinds of links in Bike, detected links and explicitly created links. When you paste a URL into Bike it is a detected link… if you edit that text so that it no longer looks like a link then the link button/formatting goes away. Editing a detected link to have different link label text is definitely confusing! To make it work you could:
Edit Link
Save Link (without making any changes). This “Save Link” action will change the link to an explicit link, so the next step will work.
Edit Link text displayed in Bike’s outline editor (ie not the URL)
Generally a much easier path is to copy the link and then type out the label that you want, select it, and then paste the link.
. Instead of using build in tooltips I made my own so they show up right away, and end result is nice additional indication for when mouse is over the link button. Editing is harder (right click), but link clicking is easier, and clicking is what people will do most. Thanks for the convincing. I’m liking the change.
