On 9/7/07, Ted Gould <ted@...11...> wrote:
Now I think one thing that bothers me is the idea that there could be hundreds of new palettes created by doing this. Every effect would have it's own.
How it's different from what we have now? Well, actually many effects have no params and dialogs at all now, and they will not receive them because of the changes we're discussing.
I guess the key difference for me is that you couldn't have all of them open at the same time before. Now, in theory, you could open them. I need a few 24" monitors :)
Well, a user can do a million other things to make his life harder :) Why do we need to aggressively watch and prevent all of them? We only need to provide guardrails where it's easy to do something foolish _accidentally_, but laboriously opening all extensions dialogs does not count as accidental in my book :)
By the way, what do you think about making all the extension dialogs dockable, docked by default? There are many advantages:
- more consistent UI;
- this will further justify their always-on status, because closing a dialog by OK when that dialog is docked would look rather weird anyway;
- we'll then be able to get rid of the Close button altogether, because no other docked dialogs have it.
There's only one problem with this: I'm not sure how it will be possible to make the rest of the window disabled (to prevent selections) when you click Live preview, when the dialog is docked and not a separate window. But this leads me to another idea. What if we get rid of that modal-window, no-selection-possible thing at all? Right now, as I understand it, it simply undoes the last change when it senses a change in params and runs the effect again. What if, in the live preview mode, we lock the repr tree from any change but allow selection tools, and also make it undo the effect change whenever it senses any selection_changed event? Do you think it's viable in principle?