On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 03:17:38AM +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
On Mon, 26 Mar 2007, Jon A. Cruz wrote:
On Mar 26, 2007, at 5:02 PM, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Anyway, it seems there's a number of approaches for handling multiple pages that don't rely on tabs,
So something like a pages dialog as there is a layers dialog, or I suppose things could end up rather resembling an Integrated development enviroment like Anjuta?
Well, like I think I said, I suspect the ideal approach would be for the primary nagivation to be in-canvas. So instead of just seeing the outline of a single page when you pull up Inkscape, you'd see several adjacent page outlines, and would simply pan or scroll around to see the other pages. An advantage of this approach would be to allow non-linear page layouts, such as if you're doing a book with left/right pages, or doing a large drawing or banner and want to print it out on multiple smaller pieces of paper. For instance, imagine wanting to do a full scale guitar drawing made up of six 8.5x11 sheets printed and arranged in a 2x3 layout. Again, look at Scribus for a general idea.
Anyway, I don't know what the ideal approach is, but knowing the "Inkscape way" to approach things like this is to do it as general as possible, I think it's a good idea to not limit thinking to linear page flows, but to open it up as much as possible. I'd love to see Inkscape used for lite word processing and presentations, but really Inkscape's strength is in creating drawings, so its page layout system really needs to be designed to open maximum flexibility for that style of usage.
Of course, all of this discussion is moot until someone gets an itch to actually implement multi-page support and goes ahead and does it. ;-)
In all, I've seen that tabs work well for "documents" and not for "pages".
The most "successful" use of tabs has been Firefox, a web browser, or to put it another way a viewer rather than an editor. Integrated Development Enviroments like Anjuta do have tabbed interfaces, do many other editing applications offer tabbed interfaces such as these
If it is decided to add a tabbed UI style to Inkscape, I do hope we follow Firefox's approach of allowing *both* tabbed or separate windows. While this makes for additional menu entries, I find sometimes it makes sense to work with multiple tabs (like all documents related to one project), and sometimes to work with independent windows. Usually I end up with a mix of both. For drawings in Inkscape, I could easily imagine heavy duty use benefitting from being able to mix both UI modes, or switch between them as makes sense.
Something to keep in mind is that Inkscape differs from other applications like Firefox in that it relies heavily on dialogs, so going with firefox's approach of allowing *both* tabbed and non-tabbed windows is not a trivial matter. But I think it can be done, given enough code. ;-)
so I would think that the multi-page feature would not interfere with a choice of using tabs for multi-document selection.
I see you are all pretty enthusiastic about using Tabs and having multiple documents open at once. I would not be so enthusiastic, Tabbed MDI is better than MDI but it still has many of the same problems of MDI.
Actually you misread me. I currently favor staying with the current SDI style, dislike MDI, and am neutral with regards to a tabbed UI. However, realistically I know that given the strong interest in a multi-document UI, it's likely if someone codes it up with tabs, the patch is going to be accepted. So in practicality I think an optional tabbed UI could be the ideal compromise, especially if it doesn't prohibit using it in an SDI style with floating dialogs.
(Honestly, I think given the size of our userbase, were we to switch to a tabbed-only UI, we'd have a very vocal minority on our hands. We would best introduce tabbed UI as an opt-in thing people can turn on ala Firefox.)
While I'm sure most people here have many documents open at once, I really wish I could show you the type of users who ask "where did my documents go?" when they have more than one window open and the first window is hidden obscured by the second.
No need, I think we all have family members who have asked this exact question. ;-)
I guess the stated goal of Inkscape wanting to attract "contributor users" raises the bar quite high and implies usability in terms of efficiency for frequent technical users over learnability for artists with less techincal skills. Which is fair enough so long as it is clearly understood and users (and evangelists) are expecting the learning curve.
Correct. Also keep in mind the "where did my documents go?" question is a computer system learning curve issue, not just an Inkscape-specific issue. I'd guess the user would run into this problem with more generic things like web browsers, email, system dialogs, and the likes.
Yeah I'm a big sceptic of Tabs and that puts me out of the mainstream. Sure they get the job done but Window and document workflow management is still a great big mess of a problem.
IIRC, one of Jon Cruz' salient points is that window management (and, as a consequence, document workflow management) is something we ought to expect the _window manager_ to be solving. Addressing it at the application layer through things like MDI is kludging around inadequacies in window managers. And this is a whole other can of worms. ;-)
So best I think we can do is make things as generic and flexible as possible, and enable as many different workflows as possible.
Bryce