On Sun, 20 Feb 2005, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 10:11:52 -0800 From: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...> To: Andreas Nilsson <nisses.mail@...563...> Cc: Inkscape Devel List inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] NEW: on-canvas gradient editing
On Sun, Feb 20, 2005 at 11:52:38AM +0100, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
This is what the HIG says about the edit menu:
The Edit menu contains items relating to editing both the document (clipboard handling, search and replace, and inserting special objects) and the user's preferences.
I think it would be natural to find preferences in the edit menu, just as my other apps. I might be wrong on this, but I think the ongoing gimp menu reorganisation puts edit in preferences too. Doing it the firefox way sound like a good solution.
I tended to agree with Bulia about it's placement under the File menu. I've always felt that all the application-level stuff should go there.
However, the fact that Edit>Preferences is a standard and appears to be becoming more of a standard trumps that. Particularly with the HIG specifying the position. I think that since we emphasize compliance to the HIG, and since it's listed in it, it seems fairly clear cut. If GIMP and Scribus will also be placing it under Edit, then I think that too is a compelling reason for placing it there.
Here is the bug report for the GIMP suggesting Edit, Preferences http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157613
Maybe it was because it was me suggesting it or maybe it is because he saw straight through me and knew greater design implications of where I was trying to go with the idea.
Essentially in a CSDI app like the GIMP I want to duplicate most of the Toolbox items are also in the Diagram window so that I'm not forced to switch context to the Toolbox if I dont want to (something I already experimented with in Dia by getting the Help menu in both places). Duplication of menu items is generally not a good idea but The GIMP already duplicates most of the File menus, and a fair few of the Xtns items could be moved entirely to the image window. (So I may be on crack and Svens scepticism is probably well warranted.)
It's also an excellent point that we have both Document and Application preferences (or properties), and having them in two separate menus could be confusing. However, I think other applications like OpenOffice, etc. also have this dichotomy; we could do well to follow their approach, since at least it'll be consistent across open source apps.
As usual my bias is for consistency because I spend small amounts of time using lots of different applications whereas Bulia is an expert user who I'm sure knows just about everything there is to know about Inkscape inside and out.
I dont personally like the idea of putting preferences in differnt places on different platforms like firefox does but I'm still using Mozilla. The trade off is that you make windows users a little happier and do things they way they expect (consistency with windows) at the expense of consistency with Inkscape itself and the Gnome platform. Again I know where my bias lies and I'm trying to move away from the Microsoft way and I can understand the Firefox has different priorities and that I'm not really their target user.
So the question is who are the target users of Inkscape and what are the Inkscape priorities? (I'll leave that as a rhetorical question.)
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Free SVG Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org Dia is for Diagrams http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Inkscape, Draw Freely http://inkscape.org Abiword is Awesome http://abisource.com