On 18-04-11 17:47, Aslak Karsi wrote:
Hi!
I'm glad to announce that the final product of our project is now ready. We would have liked to conduct some usability testing on our UI prototypes with real Inkscape users, but unfortunately we are running out of time both in terms of working hours and our project deadline.
The blueprint for our suggestion of SVG Filter Editor can be found on Inkscape wiki, at http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/SpecFilterEditorUI
We'd appreciate any comments and feedback on the blueprint. Our team is also prepared to answer any questions you might have.
I assume the screenshots are mockups, but do you plan on also doing an actual implementation? (At least of some of your ideas.) In either case, have you thought about ways to overcome some of the technical hurdles? In particular, you suggest to allow applying multiple filters to one image. Do you have any thoughts on how to implement that in terms of SVG representation? (If you also have ideas about how to reuse custom filters in much the same way as filter primitives then I'd love to hear it as well of course.)
As for the proposed interface, I'm not entirely sure I like the idea of splitting it into a basic and complex interface. If the "complex" interface is easy to use, why not make it the only interface? If it is not easy to use, then that might be a problem. I do understand that you don't always want open this huge window just to change a few things, but I can also see different ways of solving that particular problem (for example, instead of having two relatively unrelated dialogs you could make a dialog that can "slide out").
Alternatively, you could try separating "management" of filters from "editing" of filters (which is close, but not quite equivalent to what you did), but I'm not sure that that /is/ desirable. The advantage would be that you have a cleaner separation and no (apparently unnecessary) duplication of functionality, but you still have to deal with two different dialogs. I guess it also depends on how the dialog is integrated (the old gradient editing dialog is a horrible example).
What I DO like is showing sample images, making filter "presets" more accessible and of course a nicer filter editor. I also very much like that you have taken the effort to do this kind of work, I might sound a little critical above, but that's only because there is now something to be critical about :) (Which is way, way better than having nothing.)