I have followed this discussion passively untill now ... what really matters (and what has the original background for this discussion) is how Inkscape presents to new users and also people involved with occasional image editing, as it is the major part of the user base. Having too much options is distracting for this group of people. I have to admit that I never ever used any other palette than the default one. And I also have never used the right part of the default palette. Although I use it for a long time, I do not consider myself as an indeep user, nor I am a graphics specialist. So in a way I am pro sanitising the color palette, but on the other hand you have power users who have needs that are quite distinct from the needs of most users.
So why can not we add an extra tab in the preferences, where you can modify the number of selectable colour palettes. Also I would be much in favour of being able to select the available colour palettes in the installer (which is far far to simple for the program that Inkscape actually is: we do an aesome amount of work on the program, but what do we do with the installer?). This way you address the complexity for both new users as well as the needs for power users.
Secondly, I agree to the fact that the default palette is far too big (the scrollbar is really distracting). From a user interface point of perspective, there is a contradiction between complexity (too much colors most of the time) and accessibility to colours (you want colour palettes as big as possible). Therefore I would focus on adding a button to the right of the colour palette bar to access a new dialog consisting of part of the Fill and stroke dialog (I stress "part" because of interface complexity). So the new dialog window would default to show the colour wheel (the other three colour selection methods RGB, CMYK, and HSV would be present as well in tabs). This option, an easily accessible colour dialog, would in my humble opinion address most of the issues for everybody.
Regards K.
2010/7/8 bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...>:
If we agree that a default totally without scrolling is not feasible, then what is the profit in reducing its length slightly? Can't we just extend the primaries and leave the rest as is?
And even if we must reduce the h/s/l, you are going too far IMHO. The old grouping was 11/9/7, yours is 9/6/3. I might perhaps agree to a compromise like 10/8/6, but again, I just don't see why we must reduce this at all.
And I also strongly object to dropping the light grays (5% and 2.5%). They are useful.