MenTaLguY wrote:
On Sun, 2006-01-08 at 13:53 +0100, David Christian Berg wrote:
- Squares have much smaller area than my horizontal-stretched
swatches. Even for flat colors, this matters: I can't get the good idea of a color from a tiny swatch.
I don't actually think your area is way bigger,as for the fill at least.
Well, it depends on what you mean by "area". The square may actually be larger in the width*height sense, but the longer shape can have a larger "visual footprint".
I have actually found color selection to be one of the more difficult things to work with at present. To start with, it is hard to locate within the UI - I instinctively look to my left or right, or for a dialog at the top to find my color selection, not the bottom of the screen. The other problem is the large footprint of the rectangles, which creates scrolling problems - but it is /very/ nice to be able to see a larger area of color rather than trying to locate a one-pixel selection and /then/ have it displayed (Photoshop/Macromedia/GIMP) or have tiny swatches as per Illustrator. Even Illustrator has to use a popup/pop-out dialog to select Pantone swatches, or the usual color wheel with a larger square for selected previous/new color.
Scrolling through the color selection is at present frustratingly slow, and there seems to be no way to enlarge / flatten the color selection area; even when using Inkscape at full screen, the selection area is the same size. Perhaps this works differently on GTK - at present I'm stuck on my Windows ME and XP boxen (which I like testing on as I'm interested in porting / promoting Free Software to Windows for your everyday user who is a bit nervous as yet of installing GNU/Linux).
One thing I do miss is being able to drag my cursor through shades - again, the one-pixel selection problem, but I'm used to it, and sometimes wish to go ever so slightly more towards cyan / magenta / alpha / whatever...
A seperate popup dialog would be nice imho, with selected background and foreground color displayed somewhere on the main screen as a reminder? (perhaps top of screen, as already exists with the gradient selection; or alternatively, a 'selected foreground/background' swapper as per the main toolbar on Photoshop).
yeah... I know I'm asking a lot here... but its one of the things i've found more cumbersome... a designer won't know where to look for color selection with the present UI, and may well give up before locating it :(...
The speed of scrolling does need to be addressed too.. even on my machine it is strangely slow (I'm working on a P4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb DDR RAM).
mC~