On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 20:00:49 +0000 (GMT), Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> wrote:
That is very cool. There is a bit of lag between the spot/handle and when the axis/spokes move which makes it feel a bit sluggish
Yeah, I know. I hope to fix this today, I think I now know how.
The old gradient position widget in Fill&stroke remains for now (and still works), but I plan to remove it as soon as the new on-canvas editing is sufficiently tested. I would welcome any feedback on the new feature.
I expect you can safely remove most of it but it might be useful to have a more controlled way to adjust gradients in addition to the interactive editing...
Hmm. What is "more controlled" about it? It's significanly less precise and much harder to control, in all aspects. (I will only remove the position control, of course, not the gradient list.)
By the way, not only is the old gradient position widget outrageously inconvenient, it was also significuntly less straightforward to program and therefore more prone to nasty surprises. I consider it a prime example of how NOT to borrow ideas from commercial software, because apparently the only reason for its existence was the fact that CorelDraw edits gradients the same way. Such an awful amount of programmer's effort and users' frustration went into it, it's mindboggling... even though better interfaces (Xara) already existed when Sodipodi started.
My version of on-screen editing is vaguely similar to Xara, but already improves on it in some ways (e.g. Xara cannot merge gradient handles).
While I'm taking a few minutes to try out the latest and greatest test build I have noticed a few unrelated oddities: There definately should not be ((parenthesis)) used in menu labels. Singular or plural, pick one (one or more can be implied).
Is there a style rule for this somewhere, or is it your opinion?
Document Preferences could be labelled as "Document Properties" or simply Properties (it is in the file menu so it is implied that it is the Properties of the current file). It would help disambiguate it from the standard Preferences (and allow a more terse label).
I disagree. "Preferences" and "properties" sound like synonyms. Having them side-by-side is very confusing. "Inkscape preferences" and "Document preferences" explain exactly what they are, stress both their similarity and their difference, and are totally unambiguous.