On Sun, 2006-01-08 at 13:53 +0100, David Christian Berg wrote:
- Squares have much smaller area than my horizontal-stretched
swatches. Even for flat colors, this matters: I can't get the good idea of a color from a tiny swatch.
I don't actually think your area is way bigger,as for the fill at least.
Well, it depends on what you mean by "area". The square may actually be larger in the width*height sense, but the longer shape can have a larger "visual footprint".
For gradients etc, it's even more important. You can't fit a visually unambiguous gradient display into such a small space.
That is a problem I encountered while doing the mockup. Even an unambiguous black-to-white gradient is hard to do without some subtle tricks.
I do agree: Gradients are hard to see, and there's not need really to display their direction.
Once you throw gradient direction in, it's just totally impossible to do in a small space. I wasn't intending to try.
- The square hole for stroke makes it even more visually noisy and
more difficult to decypher the display.
Actually I don't agree. I've been using CVS for a while (then switched back to Debian experimental because I couldn't get my font dialogue working) and I found it quite hard to click on the right bar with your way of displaying fill and stroke. Squares are easier to click at!
That's actually been the main thing driving my experimentation here -- I'm finding the narrow strips to be an extremely difficult mouse target. Out of curiousity, bulia, what resolution do you normally run at?
Also I do think that the hole makes it easier to decipher since it visually signals, what we are talking about (stroke) and the user doesn't have to know by location or by reading (you put an F and an S in front of the boxes IIRC).
I do think it's better when you don't have to use text to explain what something is -- particularly in such a compact area.
But the hole does present problems -- you'll notice I didn't include any examples with stroked radial gradients. I haven't figured out how to make that look right.
I may fall back to using text to indicate gradients, though it's obviously harder to do in a square space like that. Rather than a tooltip showing only the gradient name, though, I think it might be better to include a larger and visually unambiguous representation along with it. It'd require a custom tooltip window, but I think it'd be worth it.
- The opacity slider _always_ showing checkerboard is also noisy, plus
there's no way to type/look up an opacity value as number. Again, this will result in a lot of frustration along the lines of "is this really 1.0 or maybe 0.99?"
Agreed! So I'd just display a click-able number. When you click you get a slider as for the volume in totem (suggested that in some mail yesterday already).
Hmm, maybe. I'm not at all happy with my version of the opacity slider.
- The diagonal division and the diagonal red line add further visual
complexity.
It distinctively means "none" to me. It's just what Adobe does. What's the approach of Xara? Checkboards are hard to make out... I like the red dash, but obviously I'm used to it.
I would've punted on checkerboards, except I think bulia got away with it in the existing widget just fine. So I don't think they're a problem in themselves.
As for the slash, it's not just Adobe, Macromedia's done it forever too. I'd say it's a pretty well-established convention for graphics applications. Admittedly, I don't know about Xara...
As noted elsewhere, I think we should represent "unset" using a question mark, just as we do in Fill and Stroke.
As bulia noted, the conflict between the slash and the diagonal divisions is very visually ugly. Since the diagonal division is not normally apparent (and definitely wouldn't be for "none" or "unset"), the slash and division should at least be going the same direction.
- In your version, fill/stroke are spatially separated horizontally.
On a horizontal statusbar filled with other stuff, it makes it harder to quickly distinguish them.
I don't find this to be the case, myself, especially if they are visually distinct from each other and stand out from the other widgets.
The vertical separation as in my variant is faster to get at a glance and more intuitive (fill is closer to the drawing, stroke is more peripheral).
I'm with David on this one. That's logical, but I don't think someone is ever going to pick up on that unless someone explained it to them.
In short, your variant cramps more information, but it makes it much more difficult to get it, and unless you increase the size of the widget significantly compared to the size it currently has, it will be outright frustrating.
I would almost advocate increasing the size of the existing widget. Given its role as a click target, it's frustratingly small, especially with a tablet, where it's hard to "right click" the stylus without moving the tip a few pixels.
My version needs just a quick glance, and after some practice, even less than that - by now I can get all I need from it by "peripheral vision", without even looking directly at it. It has become part of my subconscious :)
In my experience, that becomes true of anything once you get accustomed to it. Bulia, are you sure this part isn't a "because I'm used to it" thing? :)
Anyway, the main reason I'm doing this is because I'm getting really frustrated trying to use the current widget, and I'm trying to prove to myself that there isn't a better way to do it. I may or may not succeed. :)
I don't plan on implementing anything right now, partly because my ideas aren't fully baked, and partly because I have bigger priorities (keybindings + layer dialog, mainly).
-mental