On 7/10/07, Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@...400...> wrote:
What do we actually plan to do with Object Properties palette? It looks like it wasn't touched for ages.
Nor does it need to, IMHO.
Recently I had a talk with a newbie user and he told me that he expected seing there more properties, both "global" and "specific". In that particular case he couldn't figure out how to change amount of an already created polygon's sides and he expected to see that in Object Properties palette.
That's fair. And in response, I think we just need to rename it to "Object metadata" and leave it at that.
It was named "properties" in Sodipodi times when it indeed tried to provide access to all, or most, properties of an object. Since then most of that was moved away to better places and this dialog was left to access just the object ID and a couple other little-used bits.
Then there was another feature request to make it possible choosing what properties of selected objects can be changed. E.g. in a selection of 25 objects you can have 12 objects which should not lose either fill or stroke or opacity or any specific for this type of objects property or any combination of the above, when you change it for the whole group. And as you know ;-) Inkscape, unlike Scribus, doesn't store changes per object within a session, so you can't aply changes to a group and then undo it for individual objects.
Just select those objects that need to be changed and leave those that need not. If and when someone implements "named sets" (discussed here recently) it will be very easy to reselect that set even if it cannot be grouped (though in most situations it can). That's the correct way to address this; any other "magic bits" that "lock" some properties on some objects are a straight way to disaster. People will run into this "magic" unexpectedly all the time and it will turn their documents into a mess. You know we already have a constant stream of "I've locked my object, how do I unlock it?" complaints - that will be 10x worse.
In addition to what there already is in that palette we could add two groups of options:
- Global options, i.e. Fill, Stroke, Opacity, Filters.
- Specific options, i.e. the ones from tools options toolbar.
I see absolutely no reason to duplicate all these controls in yet another place. The less we use dialogs of any kind, the better.