Sneak preview: Select and move selection

Years ago, I was invited to a transit meetup held at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) HQ to give a demo of Metro Map Maker. It was a really fun night, and I enjoyed getting to show off the site to a friendly crowd.

Afterwards, an attendee suggested being able to select a portion of the map and move it around. That's been a popular request from lots of MMM users, and I'm very excited to show it off in today's sneak preview of version 7.2!

You'll notice there's a new button to Select (keyboard shortcut: T) in the green section of the menu. Click that, then draw your selection box around a section of your map.

Once you have a selection, you can move it with the arrow keys (if you prefer, you can use the Move Map menu buttons). Either way, only your selection will move.

You can also move your selection around using the mouse. Once you have a selection, click the Move Selection button (keyboard shortcut: M), then move your selection to the desired location and click to place it.

To cancel a selection, you can either press T again, press the Select button again, or press the Escape key.

In the next sneak preview (coming soon!), I'll show you what else you can do with the Select menu. My plan is for Select to be the only new feature added to version 7.2, because you've had to wait long enough since version 7.1.

Version 7.2 doesn't have a release date just yet though; I still have lots of testing left to do to make sure that this new set of features works well. But I think it'll be a matter of weeks, not months.

I'm also planning to make this release smaller and quicker instead of taking a longer time to perfect the Select feature. Although I can think of a lot of quality of life improvements to the feature already (like having a freeform select instead of a box), if I did all of those things, it might be much longer before you get to use it!