- Joakim has the fill and stoke dialog up most of the time. It is space
consuming and he has to move it constantly or hide it in order to see his artwork.
I agree it's big, but what we need much more urgently is:
- a palette at the bottom of the screen, like in Skencil or Xara (see our wiki for screenshots)
- a current color indicator (like the one in the "color selector" in your mockup), except that it must not be in any dialog, but at the bottom of the main toolbar, on on the left of the horizontal palette
With these, 90% of reasons to open fill&stroke will be eliminated, and its size won't matter much anymore.
- He has to do a huge amount of clicks because he moves between fill
style and fill color all the time.
With palette, you click to change fill, shift+click to change stroke (same as the dropper tool now). Again, using fill&stroke for this will be much less frequent, so there's no need to break it up.
- He is working in RBG color space, but has the ability to choose CMYK,
even if the document is not in that color space. This confuses him.
I don't understand this. All graphic apps allow me to switch color modes. Why can't Inkscape?
- He do not use dash pattern at all for this project. This only takes
up space for him.
It does not take much space, it's just a tab. You don't open it if you don't need it.
However another thing which is needed much more frequently than the rest of that tab is stroke width. So a copy of that spinbutton must be placed somewhere in the main interface (selector controls? or somewhere next to the current color widget?)
- The markers are hard to overview (this is not really important for
Joakim right now, but it might be in his next project).
With this I 100% agree, and the marker widget on your mock-up is similar to what I proposed long ago. Someone please implement it!
- If the document is in the cmyk color space, it only shows the cmyk
color settings.
SVGs version 1.1 documents cannot use CMYK at all, so this is irrelevant. The CMYK selector is just a convenience. And then, even if I have a CMYK document of some kind, why on earth can't I use HSV or RGB to find a color I want, and have it converted to CMYK by the program?
- I guessed most people uses the stroke width more than the other
settings in this dialog and put the more rarely used options in an expander.
See above, once you have stroke width in the main interface, the expander is not needed.
- The markers are in their own dialog as well, and structured in a way
that makes them easier to overlook. Names could be displayed when the mouse hoover over a marker.
Separating markers does make sense, though maybe not into a dialog but into a new tab in fill&stroke.
BTW. I know this looks a lot like Adobe Illustrator. And yes, I am very accustomed to the interface of that program, and am a bit inspired by it. But hopefully this can spur some discussion on how to better handle the color and stroke dialog/dialogs
Frankly, I find the interface of AI a disaster. It does not even have a helpful statusbar! :) And all those tiny windows scattered all over the screen make me dizzy. I spend most of the time trying to find what I need among them.
Myself, I'm more influenced by Xara. And the Xara approach is to make the most common tools/options part of the main interface, so they are always at hand. We've been following this principle from the start, and even went further than Xara itself in it, by placing the quick layer selector in the statusbar (and it was a very good idea IMHO, though we need a traditional layers dialog as well). People seem to like this approach, and I very much want to continue it, not Illustratorify the interface without real need.
So: can you please do another mockup, with a palette, current color indicator, and stroke width all in the main window, as described above? Once we have them, I think we can leave fill&stroke more or less as it is - even if clumsy, it's logical.