Objects sometimes move ("jump") when selected

I have the same problem. It happens when you select three or four items with shift+click and then shift+click on one of the selected items again. Then all selected items move a little bit. I think, it doesn't happen when you use ctrl+click.

This issue probably occurs for me at least once an hour when working with Balsamiq, I really like the tool, but it really does slow you down when you are creating mockups.

I frequently get this problem and seem to spend a lot of time nudging things back into their original position. Unfortunately I have not been able to tie down the exact cause, however, I do normally see the alignment guides pop up when the item nudges so maybe there is an unwanted alignment happening?

Also the move does not register on the undo queue so it is not like I can just undo it.

Usually, if you nudge the item back (using arrow keys) after it "jumps" it will snap back into the place it was in.

I have also noticed that sometimes if you grab the resize handles after the move (but don't resize) they also may jump back. It's almost as if the sizing gets a little bit confused.

Yeah, you can tap left, then right on the arrow keys and it'll "unjump", but it is annoying. ;)

I thought it was just me!

I use a tablet instead of a mouse and it can sometimes be a bit sensitive. All I want to do is just tap the control to edit its attributes and I often nudge it out of position.

Perhaps a simple solution would be a key you can hold down that temporarily locks controls in place so they don't move but can still be selected.

Peldi,
Let's fix this thing once and for all.

This is the single most glaring problem with Mockups for me. There's no excuse for something as fundamental as selection and placement to be so unpleasant. If I were to ever stop using it for any reason it would be this.

To reproduce, try to draw a PC (just happened today)
1) draw a keyboard and a monitor
2) move the monitor to the right of the keyboard
3) try to center the monitor over the keyboard



The 3rd step might need two or three tries.

I've found that if you're very steady with the mouse, you'll rarely see a jump. It seems that if you move the mouse slightly while clicking, then a jump will occur.

I figured this out because sometimes I am using a laptop touch pad, which makes it very unlikely that I'll continue moving the mouse when I click an element, however, I often cause jumps when using a proper external mouse (especially my 3200dpi Logitech G9).

Do the following:

1) Create an element (boxes are the easiest to see for this bug).
2) Deselect the element.
3) While moving your mouse across the element, click to select, but do not hold your click.

At this point you should observe a jump. I've gotten to the point where I can cause a jump reliably.

Often I'll see the item highlighted, but without it's selection outline. (see attached image) This makes me wonder if the bug is in the "drop" part of drag and drop, which keeps the position of the item being properly updated and having the outline not be reapplied.

OK, so from what I can see the problem is related to the drawing of the drag handles when selecting items. I just recorded an AVI and found that when I select items *SOMETIMES* the drag handles are not displayed at the border of the object and hence I believe the item is being shifted by a small amount. That amount equates to the amount of the drag handle that would be displayed outside the boundary of the item.

You can see this in the attached image - I have the same label in 3 different states:
1. Unselected (initial position)
2. Selected (correctly showing drag handles)
3. Selected (erroneously not showing drag handles).

If you observe the red lines that show the vertical alignment of the left side of the label and that of a neighbouring text box you can see that the bounding box of the label is shifted left to account for the drag handles. So when the drag handles are not added then the label itself moves instead.

Note that subsequent selections of items will continue not to draw the drag handles but will not shift the items. However, if I subsequently click in white space to de-select and start selecting again then most likely the drag handles will start appearing.

Let me know if you want me to send you this AVI.

Good luck fixing it!

Martin

For me, sometimes when I select and object it jumps a little out of place, but if I then click an arrow key to move it, the object moves relative to its original position. So, if I select an object and it jump up and to the right and I click up arrow, then down arrow, it is back to where it was... which is how I fix it every time.

Thanks for looking at this, even with the workaround it still slows me down. it seems to happen once every 10 selections or so.

Right, it's very specifically a mouse issue. The keyboard movement is always on target.

I also have the problem occuring when the drag handles are not drawn properly.

I have also noticed that when in the misaligned (nudged) state then if I grab the invisible resize handle and do a tiny move then the control will go back to it's original position.

Also noticed that when the problem occurs for me, there is always a brief flash of the alignment guidelines before the item is nudged and the resize handles dissapear.

Hi. Same problem here. This is my main complaint with Balsamiq. It slows down my work so much. I have resorted to using my laptop's touchpad rather than my mouse to avoid the problem.

I can confirm what Jon is experiencing. I see a flash of the guidelines right as the unwanted resizing happens.

I have a mockup and a setup (wacom tablet) that causes this to occur at least 50% of the time when selecting a text object., Only to happy to send it to you Peldi/Marko if it helps.

FYI, when this problem happens to me I just have to select another object and select the first one again to see it back to it's original place.

Just some more thoughts:

The post I made a week ago seems to be perfectly accurate. Additionally, the severity of the "jump" seems to be affected by the position of the closest guide lines. As people are reporting, the element is snapping to a guideline, but the handles/outline is not doing the same. This happens when you move ever so slightly toward a guideline, while clicking, thus making the element think it's getting moved, but doesn't get moved enough to register a proper movement. As a result, you get a bit of a "half move" where only the visual part moves, and the actual element itself does not. The further away the guideline is that the element decides to snap to determines how severe the jump is.

This is just a side effect, however, as it is possible to cause a "jump" even without the presence of any other guidelines, just it's impossible to cause a severe one.

Make sense, or am I rambling?

Glad to hear it's not just me! I didn't think to mention this as I attributed it to me somehow selecting wrong.

Hi Peldi,
Have you been able to reproduce this yet? Any chance this gets fixed soon?
It's happening sooo often for me and it's sooo annoying that I hope it's high your ToDo list! Thanks.

After using the latest version from Feb 2nd which allows to disable grid snapping I don't see this problem anymore! So this is clearly a side effect of the snapping. It's great to finally have a work-around.

(put false in your BalsamiqMockups.cfg file)

".. when I select an object it moves by a few pixels. As a consequence, the object location and the selection are not the same..."

This annoyed me too. Then I realized that the object graphics get displaced but the selection rectangle and handles are not, and the latter reflect the real position of the object.

So this seems to be rather a rendering problem, than a data handling problem. Please note that when you undo your last steps, the displacement does not get undone - yes, because it does not really exist as data, just as an on-screen phenomenon.

Since I have this theory, whenever a displacement occurs, I just zoom a bit in and out with the scroll wheel or switch to the next mockup tab and back. The forced redraw of all elements fixes the problem immediately, and renegade object graphics crawl back to the object rectangle.

Please let me know whether this workaround works for you.

A real fix from Peldi & Team would of course be highly appreciated.

I spent a few minutes playing around with your fix and I haven't been able to reproduce the problem. What I have seen that is new, though, is that a few times it looked like an object jumped, then quickly jumped back to where it was. So maybe this is the result of your fix. It doesn't seem like the ideal solution, but it does seem to address the original problem. That's my experience based on using your updated version for 10 minutes, at least.

So far version Next.471 looks very good to me. Thanks for the hard work!

Version Next.471 also seems to be working for me - no jumping or missing drag handles so far! The issue I'm noticing now is that if I move the properties pop-up then it jumps to the left-side of the window (x=0, same Y as where I moved it to) when I click on the next item. I just confirmed that the pop-up stays in place on a colleague's 1.6.54 so it seems to have been introduced in recent builds.

Awesome work guys :)