OK... same as before, a lot of my comments here are either old news since the latest builds, or I'm still exploring the interface.... but that raises an issue of its own; is the color selection process intuitive, or still a little cumbersome?
It took me a while to find the resizing options for the swatch squares... nice to have the option to change them at least! I dont know of any other program that offers this, and it certainly is useful. However, the slow scrolling rate remains problematic, as does the inability to drag and resize the color selection area to be able to see more than three or four rows at a time (at least on WinXP). There is also a problem with the drop-down menu on XP - there's a lot of blank space and then the SVG / Web / etc menu and size selection hangs at the bottom of the screen. The top of the menu doesn't actually indicate what it belongs to - it would be nice to have the default selection showing, to indicate 'here is where you can change the size of your swatches'. I imagine this is an issue between Windows / GTK toolkits again, however, I am able to drag my dialog boxes around in Macromedia - one of the nicer features of Fireworks is that you can drag and drop the UI around the screen and customize it, or have the palettes dockable or floating. Now thats me asking a lot... but at the moment it still is hard for a new user to even locate how to select and change color.
I'm happy with the text 'None' for the moment.. but it would look nicer to have a foreground/background graphic to demonstrate 'none' or 'multiple selections' rather than text. However, 'None' doesnt risk Adobe jumping down our throats with a patent suit ;)... and 'N/A' differentiates from 'None'.
Scrolling between colors... yep, found the color wheel option as well. It took a while, but it is still intuitive for me to click on the foreground selection to access the popup dialog. The only problem here is that one can't click on it /before/ drawing - I usually like to make my selection first before working on an area. When Foreground / Background is set to N/A I'm unable to access the color wheel in my dialog box. I imagine this wouldnt be too hard to implement... it would be very much easier to choose color first rather than a random red from the top of the swatch selection and then draw...
In general... everything I was looking for was there, but it took me a while to find it. That's a problem that designers will find off-putting... unfortunately, with our visually rather than verbally-based approach, designers are accustomed to being able to just pick up a piece of software and play with it, and are more likely to throw a manual out the window than to read it ;)... (hence my being slow to find these features, unless they're very new).
mC~
miriam clinton (iriXx) wrote:
MenTaLguY wrote:
On Sun, 2006-01-08 at 13:53 +0100, David Christian Berg wrote:
- Squares have much smaller area than my horizontal-stretched
swatches. Even for flat colors, this matters: I can't get the good idea of a color from a tiny swatch.
I don't actually think your area is way bigger,as for the fill at least.
Well, it depends on what you mean by "area". The square may actually be larger in the width*height sense, but the longer shape can have a larger "visual footprint".
I have actually found color selection to be one of the more difficult things to work with at present. To start with, it is hard to locate within the UI - I instinctively look to my left or right, or for a dialog at the top to find my color selection, not the bottom of the screen. The other problem is the large footprint of the rectangles, which creates scrolling problems - but it is /very/ nice to be able to see a larger area of color rather than trying to locate a one-pixel selection and /then/ have it displayed (Photoshop/Macromedia/GIMP) or have tiny swatches as per Illustrator. Even Illustrator has to use a popup/pop-out dialog to select Pantone swatches, or the usual color wheel with a larger square for selected previous/new color.
Scrolling through the color selection is at present frustratingly slow, and there seems to be no way to enlarge / flatten the color selection area; even when using Inkscape at full screen, the selection area is the same size. Perhaps this works differently on GTK - at present I'm stuck on my Windows ME and XP boxen (which I like testing on as I'm interested in porting / promoting Free Software to Windows for your everyday user who is a bit nervous as yet of installing GNU/Linux).
One thing I do miss is being able to drag my cursor through shades - again, the one-pixel selection problem, but I'm used to it, and sometimes wish to go ever so slightly more towards cyan / magenta / alpha / whatever...
A seperate popup dialog would be nice imho, with selected background and foreground color displayed somewhere on the main screen as a reminder? (perhaps top of screen, as already exists with the gradient selection; or alternatively, a 'selected foreground/background' swapper as per the main toolbar on Photoshop).
yeah... I know I'm asking a lot here... but its one of the things i've found more cumbersome... a designer won't know where to look for color selection with the present UI, and may well give up before locating it :(...
The speed of scrolling does need to be addressed too.. even on my machine it is strangely slow (I'm working on a P4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb DDR RAM).
mC~