Hi All,
Some time between revisions 15016 and 15387 there were substantial changes to the two rows of icons at the top (the ones just below the file/edit/view/etc.).
I'm not a fan of the new ones.
1. The new icons are larger than the old ones, which is a waste of space. Possibly not an issue if you are using a huge screen. However, I tend to work on small monitors, and Inkscape already uses up a lot of real estate around the drawing, leaving in some cases (my laptop, for instance) a pretty tiny window showing the drawing. My largest display is 1280 x 1024 and with the new larger icons even at full width the "Move patterns" icon is cut off.
2. The object rotate and mirror icons, which were previously excellent, showing transforms of a dark triangle to a grey one) have been replaced with generic looking fuzzy arrows. The rotate 90 degree icon could be the "undo" icon, or vice versa. Double headed arrows like those used for symmetry operations are more commonly used to indicate either sliding or scaling in the direction indicated. I much (much, MUCH) prefer the older ones.
3. The red handles on the new scissors icon draw my eye. When I look at that row for an icon now my eyes go there first, even when I know that isn't the icon I want. Probably this is because the red handles really stand out when compared to the other icons. Not sure what the proper design term is, but the icons should all have the same "visual weight" to avoid this, and for me the scissors is "heavier".
4. Now that I look more closely, there are size changes on the icons on the left and right too. The image in each icon is the same size, but each is now surrounded by a lot more white space. Again, that is a waste of screen space. If I adjust a copy of 15016 so that the select arrow (top of left column) is in the same place as for a copy of 15387, and the bottoms of the outer windows are in the same place, in the older one the last tool visible is the text icon, whereas in the new one it is only the spiral icon. That is, there are 4 less tools shown in the same space. The same problem applies on the right, where again there are 4 more icons visible in the older version than the new.
Sometimes less is more. For drawing programs like this I want the tools and such to take as little space as possible away from the drawing. These need to be big enough to read, but not any larger than that.
(Note, the older version was running on Windows and the newer one on Linux.)
Regards,
David Mathog mathog@...1176... Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech