On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 3:28 PM, Martin Owens <doctormo@...400...> wrote:
Hey Arcadie,
It's great to hear from you, thanks for the review, more below...
I will also add, it's nice to you around again. :)
The third set of people missing are the templators. People who create objects similar to what you can see in the video, they don't want the computational stuff in their way as it's too ridged and they certainly don't want arbitrary and error prone mouse inputs. If templators have to edit the svg directly in order to produce the stencils and templates required for productive use in inkscape, they can and then ship them out to users.
with the concept of a third way safely understood we can see how simply having the ability to insert arbitrary points is insufficient, you also need to be able to move them in relation to the creation. I made a lot of use of align and distribute functionality to get my points into the correct locations and I imagine it would be a dis-pleasurable experience trying to click on a specific pixel or move it with the keyboard.
Just to get it on the list. Perhaps we can make mouse input less clumsy and error prone by coordinating with Diederik. If we have the ability for snapping to nodes and such when adding/moving connection points it could greatly speed up the creation process for these objects and would also bring about precision to the workflow.
Some objects will not want those extra 8 points, the start/end flowchart objects for instance should not have them for fear of confusing new students in the art of flowcharting.
which one would compute the intersections I mentioned above.
It's possible that we should have computational points, but they should be defined by the shape's dynamics. Triangles should have 7 points, hexagons 13, etc. Moving the computational work out of detection of bounding boxes and into the shape code would make it cleaner and clearer how it works.
This definitely sounds very useful. I'm curious how we go about this though given your comment above about some objects that should not have these additional points. Would we add a button to the tool controls bar to creating the computed points? Obviously we can't have it automatically create them because it would mess with the above scenario you want to avoid.
Let me know when you're finished with your PhD work, it'd be nice to work with you on this. also please do continue to talk with me about the idea. I'm on IRC if that helps.
Seconded, please do let us know. We may be able to coordinate a small hackfest for anyone who really wants to work on this (hopefully Michael Wybrow would take part) to really make the connector tool feel like a complete tool. Obviously we would need get board approval for travel funding and such, but it's generally something that the board has found favorable in the past.
Lastly, because it's somewhat related... http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/the-ultimate-quest-of-bringing-visi...
Cheers, Josh