bulia byak wrote:
On 12/21/05, Jon A. Cruz <jon@...18...> wrote:
If you're interested, take a peek at the update to the "View|Show/ Hide" menu.
This is very important news. Not really "happy-happy-bulia" quite yet, but it's a great first step in that direction :)
I'm not sure how much of the UI fixes you are planning/aware of, so I'll just list the most urgent ones here:
- The tall bar with the useless "X" and the menu of palettes must be
removed. We cannot waste that much vertical space in the main interface. The menu should be available on right-click.
- Only one of the scrollbars must be present, though I'm afraid it
will be the horizontal one (wastes space, but is at least usable). Or, make it configurable which scroll direction the user prefers (but the default is horizontal). If you can make the horizontal scrollbar smaller than the standard size, it will be a bonus.
- Ideally the panel should be resizable, by dragging its top border.
After releasing, its vertical size would snap to the nearest multiple of the swatch height, so there's no half-visible swatches.
- I like the horizontally-stretched shape of the swatches, they look
just like the selected style indicator I just did. But the swatch sizes must be smaller, in both dimensions. The "big" must be like the current "middle", and "small" must be much smaller. (Actually, some months ago we invented, in messages in this list, a rather complex algorithm for sizing and scrolling of swatches. Can you please dig it up?)
I'd like to add something that ties into both the resizeable stuff and the scroll orientation. I think it would be excellent if the swatch panel could also break off like the toolbars. My thought is that way it could be running horizontal across the bottom, running vertical down the side of the document, just a big square of swatches floating on-canvas (for the Illustrator users), or whatever else pleases you. I think the only awkward part would be that it would then need grips on two sides (to snap appropriately to the different locations). Eh, just a thought.
I also do have to give my .02 that Bulia's ideas sound excellent.
-Josh