A rant on Principle's UI

I am getting back to motion design after a while and yet again I am in a conundrum -- Which tool to pick? Which tool would allow to express my thoughts faster.

While I am fairly comfortable with Flinto, there have been numerous medium posts and dribbble shots by designers using Principle that I've come across. So, I download the trial to get my hands wet and see if I've missed something over the past few months.

The same annoyances of it's UI stare at me, irk me and do not allow me to get into design.

Serial order of Artboards

All the artboards position themselves serially. You cannot re-arrange them! May be there is some way, but I am unable to figure it out. This is such an annoyance because as a designer I want freedom on my canvas. The layout of the artboards in the context of laying out a flow is crucial. And lets face it -- the flow of screens in your application is not simply linear.

A designer should able to translate the mental picture of the flow to the screen. Isn't that a basic premise of all the design tools? -- The ability to translate what we have in our head on to the screen? It might have great animation capability, but this basic mis-step has irked me endlessly.

Consequence of the serial order

Principle represents the interaction from one artboard to the other by an arrow. Since all the artboards are serial -- the arrow could extend to couple of views for a complex application. This results in so much horizontal scrolling -- that one has to zoom out, look for the concerned artboard, zoom back-in to it.

While there is an option of selecting the Event Destination in the UI, this does not switch to the destination artboard. It changes the context in the animation timeline. Perhaps, the reason of naming it 'Select Event Destination' and not 'Switch Event Destination'.

So much of fiddling around in the UI to go to the desired artboard. Ofcourse, this is inevitable for an app with more than 10 screens, but a simple way of looking at the causality of the interaction -- source & destination artboards would have made things so much better.

I wish these simple steps were taken care in a tool that allows one to start animating with a fairly less learning curve.

End of rant.