"...should we stay with a tabbed F/S would it be feasible/practical to have 3 keys dedicated to Fill, Stroke Paint and Stroke Style tabs, or perhaps one to cycle them?"
Tabs or icons to switch F/S = the same number of clicks. Probably a single icon for switching F to S and back will gain some space and some better visual feedback, but Stroke style controls exposed on the same panel - at the bottom - will eliminate at least a click with no major drawbacks.
2010/9/4 Chris Mohler <cr33dog@...400...>
On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 4:48 AM, Aleksandar Kovac <alex.open.design@...400...> wrote:
[...]Actually, that icon seems to be an in-house rip-off of the Photoshop icon for a
real
front/back color icon indicator. Maybe someone was thinking that would
make
a 'consistent UI'?
Yeah - that seems likely :) Again I wish to state that the AI F/S is not fantastic (pretty bad actually) but it does work better than current Inkscape F/S in practice. Without any formal tests I estimate changing an object's color takes me two or three times longer in Inkscape. Which is not that much longer (maybe ~1 second) but I find it annoying.
b) The other thing is that it is unclear why they decided to put 2 color spaces on that icon indicator and then make users switch them. In most
cases
it was observed that users use, well more than two colors and that the majority of graphics do not have a need to switch those two colors, but
to
pick the RIGHT color :) As it is now, in Illustrator you have only a
50-50
chance to use the right color, no matter how much you try ;)[...]
Well that's the thing: any given vector object has two color properties. How to present this fact to the user is tricky at best. I don't have a solution, but think that a combined "Appearance" panel would make Inkscape easier to work with. Changing F/S should be one of the easiest/quickest operations in Inkscape. The current tabs involve too much clicking IMO.
I've been racking my brain for a better representation of F/S (as opposed to the AI method), but like I said before it's quite tricky.
c) one more problem, maybe not relevant so much here, is... that the outline/fill icon indicator and the color mixer often are quite distanced from each other in real world situations. So, you mix color on one end of the screen, click on it to choose it, and the indicator for that change
is
somewhere else, on a toolbar! [...]
In AI I see the F/S in two places 100% of the time: bottom of the toolbar (which I never, ever click on) and the color panel. My workspace places the Stroke dialog directly beneath Color and it's open all of the time (unless I need to mess with gradients or transparency) and swatches hang out to the left side of the Color panel. Point being: at any given time I can 1) see an object's F/S (or current F/S for a new object) in two places, 2) change an object's F/S without having to click on anything except the color mixer or a swatch and 3) create a mixed color or swatch that's tightly grouped on screen with the Color panel (so I don't run into the situation you describe above). F/S also appears in the Appearance panel but I can't say that I ever use that for editing.
In fact with the Color panel atop the Stroke panel in AI, I get a rough approximation of the F/S proposed in the blueprint, and while it does have flaws it's easier (for me at least) to use than current F/S in Inkscape.
Now all that being said the AI UI is pretty rotten. Things are very, very cramped - I would say they have the opposite problem compared with Inkscape: instead of huge dialogs eating up tons of space, they've packed so much into a small area it can be quite painful to access what you want (stroke options for example, grr...). I hope there is some middle ground in there somewhere!
FWIW I learned on AI 6/7 and have been a steady user since 9. Therefore I have just as much hate for Adobe UI as the next fellow :) (whoever came up with the CS3 UI needs to be repeatedly smacked with a large fish - but I digress...)
Anyway all I *really* wanted to say before is that (in my mind) F/S are two sides of the same coin and recycling the color sliders for F/S and combining that with stroke/shape options (as in the proposed blueprint) makes a lot of sense to me from a usability standpoint - less clicking to see/modify an object's colors/attributes.
Lastly I think this is more useful discussion than holy war and I'd like to thank everyone who's chimed in thus far. But hey, feel free to flame me to a crisp - no worries ;)
Chris
PS - should we stay with a tabbed F/S would it be feasible/practical to have 3 keys dedicated to Fill, Stroke Paint and Stroke Style tabs, or perhaps one to cycle them?
This SF.net Dev2Dev email is sponsored by:
Show off your parallel programming skills. Enter the Intel(R) Threading Challenge 2010. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-thread-sfd _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel