Thanks eelik.
For the developers: as much as this thread made me laugh super hard (I mean laughing at myself, when seeing the answer, so simple and should-have-been-so-obvious), I do have a few points of critique:
(1) There is no possible valid rationale, IMHO, for having this in a random menu item, and not on the Board Setup dialog, where one configures everything about the layers.
(2) The “Swap Layers” dialog box has zero help! In the manual online, there is no mention of the Swap Layers functionality.
(3) The functionality of the Swap Layers dialog is completely puzzling: I spent at least two or three minutes, and I still have no clue how to work with it and do what I need to do.
I see a column on the left, where I cannot read anything (it’s written on black text on a dark-gray background!). The column is “Move items from layer”, and then the column on the right reads “To layer”. What is that supposed to mean?
- Do I select one layer to move from and one to move to? Then, does the target layer get the sum of the items originally in it plus the ones moved?
- I guess not, so I need to select a pair, to swap. But then: why are there two columns? (why is there the “Move to” column) If we’re swapping, we only need to select the two layers to swap, not two “from” and two “to”.
- Assuming that the selection indicates the layers to swap, then why can I select three rows? Also: does that mean that I can only swap adjacent layers? (this is not a big issue; we can always chain several swaps to accomplish the swap of two non-adjacent layers)
Further puzzling issues: The colored boxes make the cells look like they’re “checkboxes”, but I click on them and nothing happens. Turns out that I have to click and slide the mouse while holding the button pressed, so the whole rectangle gets “selected/highlighted”. Then, if I click on the column on the right, the left box gets unselected :‒\
Bottom line: after all this scratching my head and trying what I think was the only way that could be what I’m supposed to do, I selected, clicked ok, and absolutely nothing happened (nothing that I could see anyway — the “Fille Save” toolbar button did get enabled, so something must have changed; but I didn’t see any change at all in the layers). I also noticed that I can ctrl-click to select, and with ctrl-click I can seem to select more freely from the two columns. Still, absolutely no effect (in this case, even the File Save toolbar button remains disabled, so there really is no effect).
Anyway, I’ll stop my rant. Suffice it to say — developers: I know that this is a rarely used feature, but still; the functionality is horrific. If you don’t want to devote too much work on a rarely used feature, then a very simple solution for the “Swap Layers” dialog is: just offer the user a mechanism to select two layers, period. (and then those two layers get swapped)
Apologies if I’m sounding rude or like I’m yelling at you — I guess you may be being victims of your own success: you’ve created an amazingly good software, with most features being between good and great. So, we the users get spoiled, and then we are baffled and furious when we stumble into a feature with poor functionality!
Cheers,
Carlos