I agree that it should not be removed. I think that the odd shapes should be integrated into an objects button on the primary toolbar.
Thus after clicking that tool, the 2ndary tool should have the spiral, the star, and maybe a polygon tool of some sort for n-th sided polygons. That would seem more useful...the default tool would be the polygon tool.
The square and circle though should remain on the right hand side.
But I understand that having a majority in jabber of developers makes decision-making very easy, but many of these FEATURES might be better put to users and developers before decisions made.
Jon
On Wed, 2003-12-17 at 13:20, bulia byak wrote:
The argument was made on Jabber that this was a pretty useless tool. We couldn't recall instances that it had been used or heard from users that were using it for anything more than curiousity. It probably would have been good to mention this on the mailing list before removing the feature; I suppose the thinking was that probably nobody cared one way or the other.
It is very strange reasoning!!! I STRONGLY DISAGREE.
Sorry guys but we represent a very small share of the program's users, and even smaller of its potential users, both quantitatively (in number) and qualitatively (in not being professional designers). We should not take any serious feature decisions without as wide discussion as possible, and especially when we REMOVE something. Jabber is fine for quickly discussing small things, but this is a serious change which requires a balanced, slow, thorough discission. Jabber is not suited for this kind of discussions.
Lauris did not invent this tool too; he copied it from other vector editors. Why do you think you better understand the needs of artists than, for example, creators of Macromedia Freehand (among others) which has the spiral tool???
Does anyone use the spiral shape for anything?
Hell YES, if only to amuse my 5 y.o. daughter! She will be BITTERLY disappointer by your decision.
And seriously, I once spent an hour in Xara drawing a spiral by hand for one of my designs (Xara does not have a spiral tool), and it turned out to be so difficult that I quit, launched Freehand, created a spiral there, exported into EPS and then imported into Xara. So for me, the Inkscape's spiral tool is one of its very real advantages over Xara. I even mentioned it as such just a couple days ago to my wife, when she asked what was that new drawing tool I'm spending my time with recently!
Even all that aside, how do you feel killing a feature which has almost 1000 lines of code, is well thought out, complete and convenient? There's simply no limitations to the kinds of spirals it can create - don't you appreciate that? Yes it has a bug, but show me a tool which has none! Were you seriously planning to add to the release notes, for example, "Answering many requests from impatient users, we finally managed to remove one the biggest Sodipodi's annoyances, the spiral tool?" Come on! It's just beyond me what kind of reasoning might lead to a decision like that.
Perhaps since we're not too crowded for space yet, and since the bug now has a solution, that it would be prudent to let the spiral tool remain until Nathan has a replacement for it?
Yes, and only if that replacement is a strict superset.
Sorry for sounding harsh, but this desicion really appalled me. I hope I convinced you to revert this decision, and moreover I hope you don't take decisions that suddenly kill almost a thousand lines of good code without a serious reason and a good discussion.
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