- 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. I also don't agree with the idea brought up by Jon to make the fill and the stroke look a little like they fitted into one another. That means unnecessarily losing space.
For gradients etc, it's even more important. You can't fit a visually unambiguous gradient display into such a small space. Note that in practice, not all gradients are black-to-white; a lot of them are much subtler, e.g. from dark green to somewhat lighter green. Making out such a gradient in a tiny swatch is outright impossible. That is why I chose to simply say "L Gradient" in such cases, instead of trying to "represent" the gradient in the swatch - not because I was lazy but because it's actually more informative and _faster_ that way. Just a quick glance, and I know what I want to know.
I do agree: Gradients are hard to see, and there's not need really to display their direction. Still I don't think it's all that important to actually see what the fill and the stroke look like. You can do that on canvas. It's more important that you can easily change them. As for Gradients it would be great to have a tooltip to tell you the name of the used gradient.
- The square hole for stroke makes it even more visually noisy and
more difficult to decypher the display.
Actually I don't agree. I've been using CVS for a while (then switched back to Debian experimental because I couldn't get my font dialogue working) and I found it quite hard to click on the right bar with your way of displaying fill and stroke. Squares are easier to click at! Also I do think that the hole makes it easier to decipher since it visually signals, what we are talking about (stroke) and the user doesn't have to know by location or by reading (you put an F and an S in front of the boxes IIRC).
- The opacity slider _always_ showing checkerboard is also noisy, plus
there's no way to type/look up an opacity value as number. Again, this will result in a lot of frustration along the lines of "is this really 1.0 or maybe 0.99?"
Agreed! So I'd just display a click-able number. When you click you get a slider as for the volume in totem (suggested that in some mail yesterday already).
- The diagonal division and the diagonal red line add further visual
complexity.
It distinctively means "none" to me. It's just what Adobe does. What's the approach of Xara? Checkboards are hard to make out... I like the red dash, but obviously I'm used to it.
- In your version, fill/stroke are spatially separated horizontally.
On a horizontal statusbar filled with other stuff, it makes it harder to quickly distinguish them. The vertical separation as in my variant is faster to get at a glance and more intuitive (fill is closer to the drawing, stroke is more peripheral).
I disagree on this. I think it actually makes it _easier_ because you are trained to distinguish elements horizontally in a statusbar. Als, as said above: it's really important that you can hit them more easily with your mouse. I can't follow your reason about fill being closer to the drawing and stroke more peripheral... it does sound logical, but not intuitive. To me the click-ability of the squares is a very big advantage since I see it as the main reason for this widget to change the fill and stroke by clicking there. This great advantage is stronger than those disadvantages you brought up and which I agree with.
In short, your variant cramps more information, but it makes it much more difficult to get it, and unless you increase the size of the widget significantly compared to the size it currently has, it will be outright frustrating. My version needs just a quick glance, and after some practice, even less than that - by now I can get all I need from it by "peripheral vision", without even looking directly at it. It has become part of my subconscious :)
Well, here is where we differ... I don't think the widget is so much about information but more about interaction.
That's my 0.02 € on this.
David