Boost Toolbar

Stacks Editor
Hardware Acceleration

Give the performance of the Stacks editor a boost and speed up your project workflow at the same time with this easy to use stack for RapidWeaver.

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What is Boost Toolbar?

Boost Toolbar is a Stack made to improve performance and workflow of the Stacks Editor*. It has two useful features that help save you time while editing Stacks pages in RapidWeaver. The first feature automatically improves the editors performance using hardware acceleration.The second is a slim quick access toolbar that is fixed to the editor window.

*This stack is strictly a utility for the editor and does not provide any content to the live project when published.

Improve drag & drop performance

Improve copy & paste performance

Reduce stack selection delays

Improve editor scrolling performance

Prevent accidental stack placements

Add a customizable stack toolbar

Create custom default stack settings

Quickly add frequently used stacks to the editor

In this example, hardware acceleration cuts the editing time nearly in half.

This demonstration was made with:
MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019) 2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9
Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB
macOS 10.15.5
RapidWeaver 8.6.2
Stacks 4.0.4 (Page with 100+ stacks)

Hardware Acceleration

We here at 1LD have been creating projects with RapidWeaver Stacks for almost 10 years and many of our projects use a lot of stacks and images. These projects can start to get a little bloated and the performance of the Stacks editor suffers as a consequence. While there are workarounds, such as using fewer stacks/images per Stacks page, we wanted a simpler solution. It was important for us to have the ability to add many diverse stacks to a stacks page to ensure our customers can edit and design their projects as they want.

Why does content effect the performance of the Stacks editor?

Slow performance is not the fault of the Stacks plugin. When using the Stacks editor, any movement made will cause the editor to repaint the elements pixel by pixel to update the visuals (all modern browsers handle it the same way). If you have a lot of images and stacks on a single page it can be quite taxing on your CPU. Even the most powerful CPUs have trouble maintaining smooth visuals when the Stacks page has a lot of content. The editor visuals can stutter so much that editing a page can become quite difficult, especially when scrolling, dragging/dropping elements, or even when simply selecting a stack to edit.

How does Boost Toolbar help?

As stated, in the Stacks editor the graphical heavy lifting is done by the CPU. Boost Toolbar uses a special method to enable hardware acceleration which allows your GPU (Graphics Card) to step in and give a helping hand. Every computer has a GPU that can be utilized to help improve performance in the editor, though the amount of improvement will vary from device to device. We find that these improvements can making editing large stacks pages easier and give life to older abandoned projects that have become uneditable.