On 9/5/07, Ted Gould <ted@...11...> wrote:
While I think this could work, it does change the behavior rather significantly from what we have now. I think that with this, live preview should be on by default as people will expect to start working on what they have selected already.
Other dialogs do allow you to work with the selection at once, true. But there's a crucial difference. When you've just opened any dialog (fill&stroke, path effects, whatever), it does not change anything in the document by the very fact of its opening. This is because all the standard dialogs _reflect the current state_ of the selected objects and allow you to change them by changing that state.
Extensions are different; they do not reflect or change the state, they blindly apply a transformation. So if we set preview to on, _just opening the dialog_ will change something (even if this change is "not real" and just a preview), and that is EXTREMELY annoying and has no counterpart in "normal" dialogs. So I remain convinced that the live preview should be off by default.
Consider also that, if you accept my plan, the default opened state of an extension dialog will allow you to change selection. And this is an aspect which will make the extension dialogs a lot more like all others, so it is an important improvement.
Do the "perception speedups" that I added make enabling preview by default seem reasonable to you?
I guess the answer is no, although I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "perception speedups" :)