On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 4:48 AM, Aleksandar Kovac
<alex.open.design@...1063....> 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?