On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 9:10 PM, Josh Andler wrote:
If I may just chime in, Inkscape could do with an updated design to use way, way less screen space. We really could learn a lot from e.g. Gravit.
+1 It's especially painful at the standard 1366x768 that most laptops ship with. I'm just wondering, do you have any suggestions for decent GTK3 apps to look at?
Not really, no. To the best of my knowledge, GTK+ apps (and GTK+3 apps in particular) tend to be in the productivity and entertainment depts these days, and those aren't areas we you typically get a lot of dockable dialogs and suchlike.
Perhaps this should go to a separate thread, but here are some initial thoughts.
1. Dialogs in Inkscape were designed by different people who didn't put a lot of thought into how well these dialogs align to each other. For instance, if you have a relatively narrow dialog such as Align/Distribute, and then you open SVG Filters editor or SVG Glyphs, you get a complete mess.
2. Inkscape leans towards text-based UI elements (just look at the LPE dock), while comparable proprietary software products are more icon-based.
3. This needs an actual research, but my gut feeling tells me that various non-free applications of this kind tend to use less padding around elements, which naturally decreases the amount of screen estate being used.
4. Inkscape doesn't use ellipsis for too long captions. The Symbols dialog in 0.91 is that wide only because v0.91 ships a symbols set called "United States National Park Service Map Symbols" and automatically expands the width of the dock to show the name in its entirety. What some other (non-GTK+) apps do instead is showing a dock/dialog as small as possible while keeping it usable and showing an ellipsis at the end of the visible part of the name. When you resize that dock/dialog, the rest if the text starts appears character by character, until there's nothing left to ellipsize. Granted, Inkscape is not alone here: GIMP shows a horizontal scrollbar when a layer's name is too long and doesn't fit (it looks just as bad).
The course of action that seems sensible to me (I don't insist on that) is to take a holistic approach to UI design:
1. Analyze the existing UI, make a list of UI decisions that are inconsistent between each other. 2. Look around, see how other project solves these things, figure out what's good/applicable for Inkscape (like designing particular custom widgets that are less pixel-hungry etc.). 3. Design some sort of HIG for Inkscape. 4. Use it to redesign existing dialogs/docks.
I've no doubts that there will be problems like the one you guys had with the SVG Filters dialog that causes both love and hate in more or less equal proportions. But if others solve this somehow, so can you.
Alex