On Thu, 4 May 2006, Tavmjong Bah wrote:
- The release notes uses "Extensions" while the menu label in the GUI
is "Effects".
Extensions are a superset of Effects. Extensions are anything that extends Inkscape. So, input and output extensions are used to handle different file formats. Effect extensions are used to modify a document and they are (most of them) placed in the "Effects" menu for use by the user.
The new organization of the Effects in submenus is great improvement! I think I would have approached the problem of implementation differently. Rather than embed menu structure inside the effects, it might of been more interesting to extract the menu structure from a directory structure, obtaining the names of the menus and of the effects from the names of the directories and the inx files respectively. For example, the Fretboard effects would be place in a directory named Fretboard_Designer inside a directory named Render. The first Fretboard effect would have an inx file with the name: Single_Length_Equal_Temperament. If would then be easy for a user to add their own effects or to move them around. Of course, one would still have to come up with a method to handle translations. The code could be reused to organize the Templates menu.
While interesting, this wouldn't work for a couple of reasons. Not all effects are necissarily put into the effects menu, and not all effects are created from INX files in the file system. Effects can be created that aren't in the effects menu, and the reason for this would be so that the effects interface could be used to build functionality that might be more correctly placed in the "File" menu, or replace currently available functionality. Some effects are created using interally defined INX files, the most noteable of these are "Blur Edge" and "Grid".
--Ted