Public Service Announcement: Group Isolation Mode in CS2

Question

Hi everyone!
Since you'll undoubtedly be playing with AI CS2 sooner rather than later, I wanted to pass on a tip so that you don't pull your hair out.
Illustrator CS2 has a new feature called Group Isolation mode. Here's the concept. You're working with an existing group of objects (maybe a logo, or whatever), and you decide that you need to add another path or shape to the group. How do you do it today? You basically have two choices. Either draw the new shape and use the layers palette to drag the new shape into the exisiting group hierarchy, or draw the new shape, ungroup the existing group, select the objects along with the new shape and group them. Tedious in any case.
With AICS2, with the Selection tool, you can double-click on a group and then the group enters isolation mode. Which means that any shape that you now draw is automatically drawn inside the isolated group. When you're in isolation mode, Illustrator will display a gray box around the bounding area of your group. To exit isolation mode, you can double click on any blank area outside the gray box. Additionally, there are buttons in the Control palette that can take you in and out of isolation mode.
This feature is especially helpful when working with the new live paint feature.
The reason I mention this is because it's easy to double click on a group and you'll see the gray box and freak out and not know what it is.
So now you know.
:) Mordy

Answer 1

Scott,
OK, I see now the relevance of Lock/Hide. It assumes you are using Cut/Select/Paste in Front as your way to get the newly created object into the group, and locking/hiding is ancillary to that, as something one might want to do if there were other things on top of the destination object making it otherwise hard to select.
What this tells me is that you seldom have a desire to draw lots of new objects into a group, so you don't find the two major preexisting methods (Cut/Paste or drag in Layers palette) to be onerous. Most likely if you expect to want to keep drawing into a particular location in the stacking order, you make it be a layer or sublayer instead of a group. But not everyone does so. And something that is easy to do occasionally gets annoying very fast if you are repeating it dozens of times in a row.
Admittedly the main motivation for this feature was the Live Paint groups, to make it so that people could pick up the pencil tool and keep working continuously, drawing and painting, into a Live Paint group, for hours if need be. Since they are groups, not layers (there are architectural reasons why it would be difficult to make them be layers), one can't just set them as the current layer. A "sticky" way of drawing into a non-layer was needed. But it was just as easy to make it work for all groups, so we did so. It may not be used as often for regular groups, but it is still potentially useful. Several other drawing products have the same gesture of double-clicking on a group to "open it up" and make it be the drawing focus. (Although some of them couple this status with making objects outside the open group be unselectable, which AI doesn't do.)