On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 4:56 PM, Kris De Gussem <kris.degussem@...400...> wrote:
So why can not we add an extra tab in the preferences, where you can modify the number of selectable colour palettes.
And then add another extra tab, where you can modify the number of such extra tabs... :)
It's a road to nowhere. We must work out something that works for newbies but does not make the life of pros any harder (it's hard enough already).
in favour of being able to select the available colour palettes in the installer (which is far far to simple for the program that Inkscape actually is: we do an aesome amount of work on the program, but what do we do with the installer?). This way you address the complexity for both new users as well as the needs for power users.
In what way do the extra palettes hurt anyone? I'm sure 99% of users never even click that tiny button and are blissfully unaware of their existence. It's not like they are pushed on you.
Secondly, I agree to the fact that the default palette is far too big (the scrollbar is really distracting).
Scrollbar is ugly, I agree. But curing this problem by removing most of the palette is like curing headache by guillotine :)
Therefore I would focus on adding a button to the right of the colour palette bar to access a new dialog consisting of part of the Fill and stroke dialog (I stress "part" because of interface complexity).
I think that's a cure that is much worse than the disease. Instead of the mild inconvenience of scrolling, you will have a major inconvenience of a whole new dialog, confusingly similar but-not-quite to an existing dialog.
the new dialog window would default to show the colour wheel (the other three colour selection methods RGB, CMYK, and HSV would be present as well in tabs).
You seem to miss the point of a palette. It's not there to provide you access to _any_ color. If that was so, indeed a single color wheel would work better. But the palette is there to give you _reproducible_ color points. If you clicked some color, you can remember what you clicked and click it again for the exact same color. That is something color wheel cannot do.
This is why I agree that we should shorten the single-hue palettes, where the differences between adjacent colors are too small and therefore remembering where exactly you clicked is almost impossible. But in the default palette, despite its size, it is possible and easy. Its way of grouping colors per h/s/l, with s groupings of unequal length, makes visual orientation and "swatch memory" quite natural.