On Feb 10, 2013 6:55 PM, "Jon Cruz" <jon@...18...> wrote:
On Feb 10, 2013, at 6:24 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 6:17 AM, Jon Cruz wrote:
I believe that in the abstract we will have need of both the toolbar
and a dialog.
Even if we get on-canvas spellchecking?
Yes, even then.
Not really with the current set of redundant features... that's all that we're losing at this point. It's still not a huge loss considering it is (or at least was) not common to see on-canvas spell checking in other design programs).
One thing we should keep in mind is that different people work from
different mental models. One main example of this is contrasting the people who write down a list of turns when taking directions vs. those who draw out a map.
We can't accommodate *every* workflow. Editing on-canvas should always be the goal where possible. I can create a list of directions or a map on the canvas with what we have now...
Another use case might be if someone has the text/font dialog detached
and floating. Given that we'd have context-sensitive toolbars, some people like to keep more visible by leveraging a floating palette/dialog. In the past I've even worked with someone who hit the limit on simultaneous open windows/buffers in one of the updates to emacs. Just because my brain doesn't happen to work that way does not always mean nobody else's brain does.
Seriously? Inkscape is not emacs (most of our users want the same workflow or shortcuts that every other application they have uses). I personally think we need to embrace the designer community before the hacker community... hackers always find ways to improve for their own preferences. For designers and most average users, they will really prefer a simple and streamlined workflow. We live in a world of touch ui and having duplicate ways of doing things or making them cumbersome will lose more users than it will gain.
One point we want to be sure to avoid is the GNOME-type
oversimplification where they've confused eliminating options as the same as making a UI easier to use. We might call that "simpler vs. simplistic". With a simpler UI it is easier to get things done, but with a simplistic UI one gets blocked from doing advanced things.
Here, we're not trying to remove functionality to reduce confusion... To me, we're removing redundancy. If the dialog were reimplemented from scratch to give awesome new features, that would rock... but having it offer nothing really beneficial over the text tool is just creating maintenance overhead as it currently exists.
I would honestly prefer to see us go a hybrid approach of what we have now plus GIMP's floating text controls. Get all of the common/basic controls into the floating control box and then only use the text tool control bar for advanced formatting features.
Cheers, Josh
P.S. Dammit Jon, what's with bringing non-plain text into the conversation? ;)