On Sep 2, 2010, at 7:44 AM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

Some code could be harvested from GIMP, no?

No. At least not as much as one might expect.

One main problem is that the GIMP code is based around the complex GIMP internals (such as their "context" objects) and it is hard to bring code over without large portions of the codebase.

Another main problem is that GIMP is still C while Inkscape is C++ and GtkMM. We really want to keep to the newer language and binding as they give a lot more functionality in a lot less code.

On the other hand, one can look at their code for ideas. But implementing something clean in C++ from the beginning will be less work and function better than copying wholesale and then having to rework most of it.

I wish to strongly disagree about combining the fill and stroke dialogs. I recently started to use a "professional" proprietary software suite for a new job (no choice for me) and have had to learn the interface, some elements which this mockup is trying to imitate.

I absolutely despise the fill/stroke switcher concept. Fill and stroke, while similar, are two entirely separate things. I don't think it makes any sense for them to share the same space. It's really unintuitive, in my opinion. (I don't think I can express my dislike strongly enough without cursing ;) It took me a good bit of time just to figure that out, and have yet to get used to it after several months of active use. And it's a pain to have to pay attention to which of the icons is actually in front, rather than just seeing which tab is active by a quick glance.

It may seem strange, but in this case I definitely prefer having a tab with text explaining what exactly I'm editing.

Besides, I don't think getting rid of the tabs is saving any space; rather, it's adding more used space by adding the stroke styles beneath the whole thing.

I think that whole concept would be a huge step backwards.

JF

On 09/02/2010 01:59 PM, Michael Grosberg wrote:

Alexandre Prokoudine<alexandre.prokoudine@...360...> writes:

...

A blueprint by Oliver Jan Krylow:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape/+spec/ui-improv http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/UI_improvements

Interesting blueprint. I'm willing to create the grayscale set if there's an agreement that it could be added. As for simplifying the shape and color of the existing set, judging by the variety of opinions over the tool icons when I helped with the tango set, it'll be very difficult to reach a consensus. But it can't hurt to have a little... let's not say "contest" but "request for proposals" in which artists could try their hand at a new icon set for the toolbox. Who knows? Perhaps someone will come up with a really polished good looking set that everybody will like.

as for maximizing the working area: I agree with the need, not sure about the proposed solution. I think first and formost something must be done about the size of the widgets. I work on both Windows and Ubuntu and in both the widgets are way oversized, the panels too wide. Now, letting the user customize the UI is always a bonus, but if there's no good default, it's just shifting the responsibility from the developer to the user.

I do like some things about Pablo Lzardo's mockup which is attached to the blueprint. I think the overlapping UI would be a step back, but I like the fact that stroke options are visible at the same time as color options, and the options are nicely concentrated and laid out. Adobe apps have this type of panel where the most common options are always visible, and the less common ones (such as end/center markers) can be expanded by a down arrow on the tab header. That might also be a good idea.

The self-documenting UI: if you're considering this and are looking for real-world examples, you might want to check out the latest version of 3ds max. There's this new ribbon-like thing below the menu (only for a very specific set of mesh editing functions,. for some reason). If you hover over one of the ribbon's icons for a couple of seconds, you'll see a normal tool tip. But, if you keep you mouse for a couple seconds more, the tool tip expands into a longer explanation along with keyboard shortcut, tips, even screenshots. It's a really nice, helpful system. I'm not sure if it's necessary for Inkscape - seems like an overkill. Still, if anyone's looking for an implementation to draw inspiration from it's there.

Lastly I want to remind you that the most important feature missing in the current UI is the ability of making the UI stick between sessions. Open panels should still be open, and in their last set size, the next time you open inkscape.

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I just don't get how it's so much less work - I'm not ignorant by any means, and I easily learn new software, so I'm pretty sure that I haven't missed much. But I haven't found Inkscape to be any more cumbersome to use Fill and Stroke. Quite the opposite.

(BTW, the reason I don't generally use tutorials is that I figure things out very quickly and only need to look up a few tricky parts here and there - the fact that this had me baffled, for however short a time, does not have me convinced that Adobe should be mimicked in this regard - certainly wasn't user friendly, as far as I am concerned.)

Additionally (on a related note), selecting colors in Inkscape is vastly easier, in my opinion, than in Adobeware. (I'm looking forward to improved swatching, however, in Inkscape.)

If keyboard shortcuts are the only thing you're saying is better, why don't we just add similar shortcuts? Or maybe do it better(er) somehow?

My intention is not to start a flame war - simply to strongly urge that we don't go that direction, because there has got to be a better way, even if we just adapt what we already have.

JF

On 09/02/2010 05:49 PM, Chris Mohler wrote:

On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 4:31 PM, Joshua Facemyer<jfacemyer@...400...> wrote:

...

I wish to strongly disagree about combining the fill and stroke dialogs. I recently started to use a "professional" proprietary software suite for a new job (no choice for me) and have had to learn the interface, some elements which this mockup is trying to imitate.

You can Adobe-bash all you want to but the Fill-Stroke in Illustrator is vastly easier to use than current Inkscape. The rest of the interface might in fact be a nightmare, but:

'x' key - toggle fill/stroke active 'X' key - switch fill/stroke '/' key - remove either fill or stroke (whichever is active) Perhaps these keys will help you with your new job ;) Also lynda.com offers pretty good (paid) tutorials on AI, and there are tons of free ones out there.

Not to mention AI F/S parallels the FG/BG concept used by GIMP, Photoshop, et al.

Don't get me wrong - Inkscape does quite a few things better than AI. However, F/S is not one of them, Way, way too many steps involved to manage the appearance of an object. All IMO of course :)

Chris

Well, the Holy war was prophesied by Alexandre... :) But I will try to give some insight. In some of the side research I did at the uni, it turned out that actually Illustrator has it completely wrong. Truly, so wrong to the point of expression Joshua Facemyer is reluctant to write ;) ... I've been Illustrator user since v7, uhhh... but I can stop... so, please, no hard feelings ;).

a) The first find was that the appearance of the fill/outline icon indicator in Illustrator suggests those are Front and back colors, which is not the case. They don't have anything to do with front and back colors... Actually, that icon seems to be an in-house rip-off of the Photoshop icon for a real front/back color icon indicator. Maybe someone was thinking that would make a 'consistent UI'?

b) The other thing is that it is unclear why they decided to put 2 color spaces on that icon indicator and then make users switch them. In most cases it was observed that users use, well more than two colors and that the majority of graphics do not have a need to switch those two colors, but to pick the RIGHT color :) As it is now, in Illustrator you have only a 50-50 chance to use the right color, no matter how much you try ;)... So a typical scenario was: User needs some other color, so she/he picks the color. Starts drawing. Ayayay! the outline and the fill are switched! (here comes Joshua's expletive)... So, Adobe provided shortcuts that Chris mentioned, to somehow deal with those two colors, but it feels like a dirty fix for something that seems to be a really lousy UI design. There should not have been a possibility for user to make that error in the first place.

c) one more problem, maybe not relevant so much here, is... that the outline/fill icon indicator and the color mixer often are quite distanced from each other in real world situations. So, you mix color on one end of the screen, click on it to choose it, and the indicator for that change is somewhere else, on a toolbar! Almost no-one bothers to double check to see if the front/back color order is OK. And besides, it's tedious to make such a check every time. The reason is that the toolbar is often moved around, so we don't have a unique place of reference. (Admittedly, advanced users double-click on the outline/fill indicator icon directly to access the color panel, but it's still a bit messy. And, also there is a color indicator on the mixer, but it lacks some functionality, so it gets ignored a lot, and renders one of those redundant.)

We all have some experience on how big companies are trying to make their products cheaper even to the point of jeopardizing the functionality and purpose. From my experience, the UI design departments are no exception. FLOSS has the freedom and capacity to use the good existing solutions and develop new, better ones. There is no need to always follow what the big guys do. ...

So, one really simple solution for the 'user awareness' of the loaded color would be to put the color indicator directly on the tool cursor. even a small patch not bigger than 4*4px would give enough visual feedback and get rid of a much bigger piece of screen somewhere else. For example, when you take the rectangle tool, the cursor icon on the lower right changes to indicate this tool choice, right? Why it wouldn't indicate the color, too? So that you can see: a red circle, or a green rectangle... It would be OK semantically, since the purpose of that little icon by the cursor is 'reference'.

Considering the UI suggestions shown, I really like all that was written in the Wiki, it is concise, exact and smart. The implementations are for a discussion, though. But knowing the 'possibilities' of gtk, they look very good, and a lot of work and thinking has been put in them. All the efforts are great. Speaking of gtk, excuse my ignorance, but is there anything we can do to make this gtk thingy better, or is it a done deal, you-get-what-you-get? Can we create new UI modules? Some modules more appropriate for the purposes here? Or can we switch to something less restrictive? Will this question start a holy war, too? ;) If yes, can you ignore the question? :)

About the shortcuts, there is something that is closer to the way the people think or correlate with the tools and functions. Human brain seems to work much better with full words :) or even with syllables than 1 letter chunks. Words are much better mnemonics than 1 letter shortcuts. Blender 2.5 uses this fact with a beautiful implementation. Providing a meta-shortcut (tab or space or...) user has an access to a small 'command line' like text entry box where she/he can start typing the wanted tool or a function. Tools and functions that are contextually acceptable and that fit the typed letters, show up in a list below the text-entry box. mouse click on the right one activates the tool or a function. It might seem that it is slower to type a few letters than just one. That would be true, but in the long run, not true. How many shortcuts can you remember? And how many function and tool names can you remember? I'd bet more than shortcuts, right? Using meta-shortcut you can access all of them. That is where you save time. Another goodie is that the current shortcut approach and this meta-shortcut approach can coexist with no conflict. If you did not try it yet in Blender 2.5, please try! Just press space in the viewport and start typing... Smooth...

Cheers,

Alex.

I actually liked this idea, as I've always been slightly surprised by the initial result whenever I start drawing something in Inkscape, and this would make that absolutely clear. So I've made an initial patch that implements this (if I missed a tool, it's easy to add one, just needs a small change to TOOL-context.cpp and some recoloring of cursor-TOOL.xpm).

I'm interested in people's experiences, so I've attached a patch and uploaded a Windows build to: http://home.hccnet.nl/th.v.d.gronde/inkscape-color-cursor.zip (just inkscape.exe, so backup your current inkscape.exe, extract the zip and your good to go)

One of the main glitches it currently has is that the "preview" doesn't change if you select a different color (you have to reselect the tool). Any ideas on fixing that would be appreciated (just reply to the devel list only).

Wow! So fast. Magic! :) I would love to hear feedback, too. Especially, since I did not test it (mac...)

Alex

On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 4:48 AM, Aleksandar Kovac <alex.open.design@...400...> wrote:

[...]Actually, that icon seems to be an in-house rip-off of the Photoshop icon for a real front/back color icon indicator. Maybe someone was thinking that would make a 'consistent UI'?

Yeah - that seems likely :) Again I wish to state that the AI F/S is not fantastic (pretty bad actually) but it does work better than current Inkscape F/S in practice. Without any formal tests I estimate changing an object's color takes me two or three times longer in Inkscape. Which is not that much longer (maybe ~1 second) but I find it annoying.

b) The other thing is that it is unclear why they decided to put 2 color spaces on that icon indicator and then make users switch them. In most cases it was observed that users use, well more than two colors and that the majority of graphics do not have a need to switch those two colors, but to pick the RIGHT color :) As it is now, in Illustrator you have only a 50-50 chance to use the right color, no matter how much you try ;)[...]

Well that's the thing: any given vector object has two color properties. How to present this fact to the user is tricky at best. I don't have a solution, but think that a combined "Appearance" panel would make Inkscape easier to work with. Changing F/S should be one of the easiest/quickest operations in Inkscape. The current tabs involve too much clicking IMO.

I've been racking my brain for a better representation of F/S (as opposed to the AI method), but like I said before it's quite tricky.

c) one more problem, maybe not relevant so much here, is... that the outline/fill icon indicator and the color mixer often are quite distanced from each other in real world situations. So, you mix color on one end of the screen, click on it to choose it, and the indicator for that change is somewhere else, on a toolbar! [...]

In AI I see the F/S in two places 100% of the time: bottom of the toolbar (which I never, ever click on) and the color panel. My workspace places the Stroke dialog directly beneath Color and it's open all of the time (unless I need to mess with gradients or transparency) and swatches hang out to the left side of the Color panel. Point being: at any given time I can 1) see an object's F/S (or current F/S for a new object) in two places, 2) change an object's F/S without having to click on anything except the color mixer or a swatch and 3) create a mixed color or swatch that's tightly grouped on screen with the Color panel (so I don't run into the situation you describe above). F/S also appears in the Appearance panel but I can't say that I ever use that for editing.

In fact with the Color panel atop the Stroke panel in AI, I get a rough approximation of the F/S proposed in the blueprint, and while it does have flaws it's easier (for me at least) to use than current F/S in Inkscape.

Now all that being said the AI UI is pretty rotten. Things are very, very cramped - I would say they have the opposite problem compared with Inkscape: instead of huge dialogs eating up tons of space, they've packed so much into a small area it can be quite painful to access what you want (stroke options for example, grr...). I hope there is some middle ground in there somewhere!

FWIW I learned on AI 6/7 and have been a steady user since 9. Therefore I have just as much hate for Adobe UI as the next fellow :) (whoever came up with the CS3 UI needs to be repeatedly smacked with a large fish - but I digress...)

Anyway all I *really* wanted to say before is that (in my mind) F/S are two sides of the same coin and recycling the color sliders for F/S and combining that with stroke/shape options (as in the proposed blueprint) makes a lot of sense to me from a usability standpoint - less clicking to see/modify an object's colors/attributes.

Lastly I think this is more useful discussion than holy war and I'd like to thank everyone who's chimed in thus far. But hey, feel free to flame me to a crisp - no worries ;)

Chris

PS - should we stay with a tabbed F/S would it be feasible/practical to have 3 keys dedicated to Fill, Stroke Paint and Stroke Style tabs, or perhaps one to cycle them?

Integrating stroke paint and style on one panel, like you gentlemen have mentioned, would make a lot of sense and bring some consistency, I think. Also, Inkscape already has one nice UI functionality that could, if redesigned properly, contribute a bit to the solution of tabs/icons dealing with fill/stroke. On the left side of the bottom (status?) bar, clicking on the fill or stroke indicators, you will be switched to the appropriate panel. This piece of UI also integrates some of the functions of the mentioned 'appearance' panel from the Illustrator. I believe it could be designed to better use it's potential.

Alex

On 10-09-04 5:17 , SorinN wrote:

"...should we stay with a tabbed F/S would it be feasible/practical to have 3 keys dedicated to Fill, Stroke Paint and Stroke Style tabs, or perhaps one to cycle them?"

Tabs or icons to switch F/S = the same number of clicks. Probably a single icon for switching F to S and back will gain some space and some better visual feedback, but Stroke style controls exposed on the same panel - at the bottom - will eliminate at least a click with no major drawbacks.

2010/9/4 Chris Mohler <cr33dog@...400... mailto:cr33dog@...400...>

On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 4:48 AM, Aleksandar Kovac
<alex.open.design@...400... <mailto:alex.open.design@...400...>>
wrote:
> [...]Actually,
> that icon seems to be an in-house rip-off of the Photoshop icon
for a real
> front/back color icon indicator. Maybe someone was thinking that
would make
> a 'consistent UI'?

Yeah - that seems likely :)  Again I wish to state that the AI F/S is
not fantastic (pretty bad actually) but it does work better than
current Inkscape F/S in practice.  Without any formal tests I estimate
changing an object's color takes me two or three times longer in
Inkscape.  Which is not that much longer (maybe ~1 second) but I find
it annoying.


> b) The other thing is that it is unclear why they decided to put
2 color
> spaces on that icon indicator and then make users switch them.
In most cases
> it was observed that users use, well more than two colors and
that the
> majority of graphics do not have a need to switch those two
colors, but to
> pick the RIGHT color :) As it is now, in Illustrator you have
only a 50-50
> chance to use the right color, no matter how much you try ;)[...]

Well that's the thing: any given vector object has two color
properties.  How to present this fact to the user is tricky at best.
I don't have a solution, but think that a combined "Appearance" panel
would make Inkscape easier to work with.  Changing F/S should be one
of the easiest/quickest operations in Inkscape.  The current tabs
involve too much clicking IMO.

I've been racking my brain for a better representation of F/S (as
opposed to the AI method), but like I said before it's quite tricky.


> c) one more problem, maybe not relevant so much here, is... that the
> outline/fill icon indicator and the color mixer often are quite
distanced
> from each other in real world situations. So, you mix color on
one end of
> the screen, click on it to choose it, and the indicator for that
change is
> somewhere else, on a toolbar! [...]

In AI I see the F/S in two places 100% of the time: bottom of the
toolbar (which I never, ever click on) and the color panel.  My
workspace places the Stroke dialog directly beneath Color and it's
open all of the time (unless I need to mess with gradients or
transparency) and swatches hang out to the left side of the Color
panel.  Point being: at any given time I can 1) see an object's F/S
(or current F/S for a new object) in two places, 2) change an object's
F/S without having to click on anything except the color mixer or a
swatch and 3) create a mixed color or swatch that's tightly grouped on
screen with the Color panel (so I don't run into the situation you
describe above).  F/S also appears in the Appearance panel but I can't
say that I ever use that for editing.

In fact with the Color panel atop the Stroke panel in AI, I get a
rough approximation of the F/S proposed in the blueprint, and while it
does have flaws it's easier (for me at least) to use than current F/S
in Inkscape.

Now all that being said the AI UI is pretty rotten.  Things are very,
very cramped - I would say they have the opposite problem compared
with Inkscape: instead of huge dialogs eating up tons of space,
they've packed so much into a small area it can be quite painful to
access what you want (stroke options for example, grr...).  I hope
there is some middle ground in there somewhere!

FWIW I learned on AI 6/7 and have been a steady user since 9.
Therefore I have just as much hate for Adobe UI as the next fellow :)
(whoever came up with the CS3 UI needs to be repeatedly smacked with a
large fish - but I digress...)

Anyway all I *really* wanted to say before is that (in my mind) F/S
are two sides of the same coin and recycling the color sliders for F/S
and combining that with stroke/shape options (as in the proposed
blueprint) makes a lot of sense to me from a usability standpoint -
less clicking to see/modify an object's colors/attributes.

Lastly I think this is more useful discussion than holy war and I'd
like to thank everyone who's chimed in thus far.  But hey, feel free
to flame me to a crisp - no worries ;)

Chris

PS - should we stay with a tabbed F/S would it be feasible/practical
to have 3 keys dedicated to Fill, Stroke Paint and Stroke Style tabs,
or perhaps one to cycle them?

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On 2010-09-04 08:39, Aleksandar Kovač wrote:

... There are many directions for the brainstorm on untangling this trickiness you mentioned, I think. For example:

• 'natural analogy'... i.e. What is happening in the real world when we

deal with color?

• 'direct manipulation'... i.e. Can we just ignore the panels and manage

the color directly, on object?

• 'color as metadata'... i.e. Treating color as a 'tag' that can be

stuck on any object. Even several of them, and then just selecting the one we like?

• You come up with some more... ;)

I think you're going in the right direction here, we need to zoom out a bit and look at the bigger picture, not just try to improve the fill and stroke dialog.

Personally I had been thinking about perhaps extending the gradient tool to become a "color" tool (or shading tool, or whatever general name we'd like to use). Currently we can already create either a linear or a radial gradient on canvas, but why not also a flat color or a pattern? Then we could simply have a single color picker to modify the color of whatever is selected. (Note that currently this sort of works with gradient handles, but is a little awkward as we don't really have a single dedicated color picker.)

btw, I have been working on my own, on a concept for a fundamentally different approach to graphic app paradigm. But I am not sure if it would be coherent at all with the Inkscape's paradigm, but if anyone's interested I will be more than happy to share some thoughts, maybe you could find a way to fuse it, or just give me a reality check. ;)

Bring it on :)

On Sep 5, 2010, at 9:00 PM, Aleksandar Kovac wrote:

If I understand you correctly, that sounds like a very consistent thinking about the color. And it would add a good deal of creative possibilities, without adding any extra elements to the UI. Yes, to me that sounds good. An elegant way to apply color, I must say. :)

Just to complicate your life a little more...

;-)

In SVG we have different concepts.

Once concept is "color"

Another concept is "paint"

Often where one is thinking "color", it really is an application of "paint".

I absolutely despise the fill/stroke switcher concept. Fill and stroke, while similar, are two entirely separate things. I don't think it makes any sense for them to share the same space. It's really unintuitive, in my opinion. (I don't think I can express my dislike strongly enough without cursing ;) It took me a good bit of time just to figure that out, and have yet to get used to it after several months of active use.

Joshua, some of us just do vector design for many years, using all possible graphic design software (including Flash) - in all possible OS-es. I do icon design, logo design, vector portraits & heraldic symbols, website UI, software GUI, banners, books, magazines, journals, packages, frame-by-frame flash movies, etc. and I consider I have enough experience (I cross thru a lot of very specific situations) so I can value this change as positive.

You say you are not ignorant but you just ignore that fact that you don't cross thru all possible design situations yet - in some situations you will need this 1 or 2 clicks economy (for example when you work on complex graphics with multiple layers with many small shapes in a small area) more than you need air. You will feel that.

If you have just few shapes and few points ans also you have time enough ..all OK, ..no question ask. But when you have do modify thousands of shapes / day you will appreciate a click less / operation, so they discuss here not about if panel should be changed - but how the workflow can be improved without introducing more complexity.

Oliver Jan Krylow mock-up also put the stroke controls on the same tab with Colors control and this is a plus over actual panel, because reduce the Stroke Style tab (a click less), facilitating a direct view and access to the Shape style controls.

Now the problem is how to deal with the switcher button (F/S). In the case when Inkscape don't have a very specific Line / Shape selector tool (just a node tool) AND that panel will integrate the stroke control tools as in Oliver mockup, then we can have the same functionality (switching between Fill and Stroke fill) using tabs / radio buttons / simply buttons. A new control like GIMP FG/BG widget for F/S switch probably will introduce a new complexity. All in all, the integration of Shape styles in this panel is a good step forward.

2010/9/3 Joshua Facemyer <jfacemyer@...400...>:

I just don't get how it's so much less work - I'm not ignorant by any means, and I easily learn new software, so I'm pretty sure that I haven't missed much.  But I haven't found Inkscape to be any more cumbersome to use Fill and Stroke.  Quite the opposite.

(BTW, the reason I don't generally use tutorials is that I figure things out very quickly and only need to look up a few tricky parts here and there - the fact that this had me baffled, for however short a time, does not have me convinced that Adobe should be mimicked in this regard

• certainly wasn't user friendly, as far as I am concerned.)

Additionally (on a related note), selecting colors in Inkscape is vastly easier, in my opinion, than in Adobeware.  (I'm looking forward to improved swatching, however, in Inkscape.)

If keyboard shortcuts are the only thing you're saying is better, why don't we just add similar shortcuts?  Or maybe do it better(er) somehow?

My intention is not to start a flame war - simply to strongly urge that we don't go that direction, because there has got to be a better way, even if we just adapt what we already have.

JF

On 09/02/2010 05:49 PM, Chris Mohler wrote:

...

On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 4:31 PM, Joshua Facemyer<jfacemyer@...400...>  wrote:

...

I wish to strongly disagree about combining the fill and stroke dialogs.  I recently started to use a "professional" proprietary software suite for a new job (no choice for me) and have had to learn the interface, some elements which this mockup is trying to imitate.

You can Adobe-bash all you want to but the Fill-Stroke in Illustrator is vastly easier to use than current Inkscape.  The rest of the interface might in fact be a nightmare, but:

'x' key - toggle fill/stroke active 'X' key - switch fill/stroke '/' key - remove either fill or stroke (whichever is active) Perhaps these keys will help you with your new job ;)  Also lynda.com offers pretty good (paid) tutorials on AI, and there are tons of free ones out there.

Not to mention AI F/S parallels the FG/BG concept used by GIMP, Photoshop, et al.

Don't get me wrong - Inkscape does quite a few things better than AI.   However, F/S is not one of them,  Way, way too many steps involved to manage the appearance of an object.  All IMO of course :)

Chris

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to have as much of the interface available at the same time. If it is somehow possible to make the stroke style properties - or at least the most common (width and dash) visible at all times without increasing the panel size - I think that would be a great improvement.

+10

I find myself spending a lot of time switching between fill/stroke/stroke-style. I'd be very much in favor of stroke-width+dash being made accessible globally along with blur/opacity.

- Bryan

On Sep 2, 2010, at 10:59 AM, Michael Grosberg wrote:

Lastly I want to remind you that the most important feature missing in the current UI is the ability of making the UI stick between sessions. Open panels should still be open, and in their last set size, the next time you open inkscape.

I already have work underway to address that. That is the "adaptive UI" stuff. At the moment the overall solution looks to take on cascading properties, which you can think of as similar to CSS for the UI layout.