From: bulia byak
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P.S. As a "usability hall of shame" footnote, in the same situation (clicking on a color swatch with nothing selected) Xara always displays a "do you want to set the color as default for new objects" dialog. This used to drive me mad.
But it gives exactly what Tavmjong is asking for.
So (obviously) I'll disagree that there's anything wrong with this way of doing things. We believe it's better and here's why. We only did it this way after looking at how users use the product (and competitor products), and after long and hard discussion as to the merits of all approaches. The bottom line is that it is a reasonable expectation that user want to work the way Tavmjong does.
So our eventual approach satisfies all camps. A) You can configure Xara so that 'last applied style become current' so it acts like Illustrator and Inkscape. When you draw new things they take on the style of the last thing you drew. But this is not always a good thing or what you want.
So, you can do it the other way;
That all new objects are drawn in the 'default' style which you can define.
B) If you change any attribute (e.g. select a color) when no object is selected, the user is obviously trying to do something. So I could argue that the hall of shame should be an application that ignores the fact the user is trying to do something, or disables controls with no obvious reason why (or worse disables some style controls and not others - I admit we have our fair share of these as well)
So really all we're doing is prompting the user 'hey you just did something and I'm not sure what you want.' and we give them these choices; [ Set ] Sets the selected attribute the be the default for all new objects [ Cancel ] Oops, sorry I didn't mean to do that, go away [ Quiet ] Please shut-up and stop asking me this damn question (just for Bulia so it doesn't drive him mad any more) [ Help ] So we can explain what on earth this is all about.
So the idea was that this satisfies everyone.
Take the case of the text tool - the same point applies. We default to 10pt Arial, but this is a very personal thing of course. Just because you changed the font of a small bit of text somewhere, does that really mean you want all new text to appear in that style? (I see Inkscape is inconsistent here. Edit the colour of an object and this becomes the colour for all new objects, whether you like it or not. Edit the font, and this does not become the new font.)
So Xara has a simple, global rule; try to apply any style or attribute with nothing selected and you can make it the default new style (font, colour, fill style, whatever). So we have a orthogonal model, that is actually easier to use than Inkscape (less to learn and less case-specific UI) and is more powerful (it does what Tavmjong is wanting, and gives the user the choice as to how they work, even Bulia's way)
I see Inkscape has, for example, as 'Set as default' button in the text dialog. So does this mean that I have different UI for setting the default style or attribute for each of the possible styles or attribute? That's not good surely?
Charles