On 1/7/06, MenTaLguY <mental@...3...> wrote:
I've been pondering the object style minibar, and come up with a variation on the current idea. It's not a huge difference.
I suspect many people will like yours because it's more traditional. But I think I prefer mine, at least for the statusbar. So if I will be unable to convince everyone in the benefits of the current one, I will have to play Scislac and ask for an option.
My reasons:
- Squares have much smaller area than my horizontal-stretched swatches. Even for flat colors, this matters: I can't get the good idea of a color from a tiny swatch. For gradients etc, it's even more important. You can't fit a visually unambiguous gradient display into such a small space. Note that in practice, not all gradients are black-to-white; a lot of them are much subtler, e.g. from dark green to somewhat lighter green. Making out such a gradient in a tiny swatch is outright impossible. That is why I chose to simply say "L Gradient" in such cases, instead of trying to "represent" the gradient in the swatch - not because I was lazy but because it's actually more informative and _faster_ that way. Just a quick glance, and I know what I want to know.
- The square hole for stroke makes it even more visually noisy and more difficult to decypher the display.
- The opacity slider _always_ showing checkerboard is also noisy, plus there's no way to type/look up an opacity value as number. Again, this will result in a lot of frustration along the lines of "is this really 1.0 or maybe 0.99?"
- The diagonal division and the diagonal red line add further visual complexity.
- In your version, fill/stroke are spatially separated horizontally. On a horizontal statusbar filled with other stuff, it makes it harder to quickly distinguish them. The vertical separation as in my variant is faster to get at a glance and more intuitive (fill is closer to the drawing, stroke is more peripheral).
In short, your variant cramps more information, but it makes it much more difficult to get it, and unless you increase the size of the widget significantly compared to the size it currently has, it will be outright frustrating. My version needs just a quick glance, and after some practice, even less than that - by now I can get all I need from it by "peripheral vision", without even looking directly at it. It has become part of my subconscious :)
With your proposal, it requires a good long direct look, and often a mouseover "to make sure it's really what I think it is". With such a basic and always-on indicator, every millisecond counts!
Note that I was thinking about this indicator for years. I started from something very similar to your mockup, but could never force myself to do actual coding for it. It just didn't feel enticing enough. I put it into different parts of the interface, varied size and design, but no go. I just didn't want it to be like that, though I always felt the most urgent and dire need for something to get current style from. Finally I was fed up and said to myself, come on, let's think out of the box. Let's forget what other programs use. What do I REALLY need from it? Most importantly, I want to see the colors, and I want them BIG. Small swatches are useless. But I can't have them big in both dimensions. Will stretching them in one dimension do? That's where I ran into the old (Lauris') color preview widget, crisp and small and simple. I just cleaned it from some cruft such as margins and borders, and fell in love with it immediately. In a few hours, the style indicator was working. By now I consider the design of this indicator a very important advantage of Inkscape's UI.
-- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org