Re: [Inkscape-devel] Suggestion for the preferences dialog
On Tue, 28 Dec 2004, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
What approach did you use to create this mockup?
I gave a shot at trying to mock up something with glade, but with disappointing results. However this definitely looks doable.
Bryce
Well, I used the Gimp...
Cool, it looks really good. I'm not sure if we'll be able to replicate it exactly, but I think we should strive to get as close as we can - this looks extremely good.
I am trying to learn Glade, but so far, all my attempts have been unsuccesfull.
Yeah same here, I thought it might provide a shortcut to having to implement the tree management stuff, but no such luck. It does not appear to generate code for managing tree widgets, and the stuff that it can do well is reasonably straightforward to do by hand.
Anyway, so I'd say, stick with gimp. ;-)
I do really hope that I have not created an uncodable monster here. :)
- Andreas Nilsson
Nah, it'll just be a considerable challenge. :-)
In fact, I had noticed earlier that we needed tree-oriented editing dialogs for several other purposes - the XML tree, layers, extensions, and possibly keyboard layouts. I was going to emulate the XML editor design, but what you've done for the preferences dialog looks like it provides the same basic capabilities, and I'm thinking that if we can implement this design, we can reuse it in at least 4 places.
One alteration I'm considering in order to support the other kinds of dialogs is a toolbar on the top of the dialog (see the XML editor). For the XML editor this is used for adding/moving/deleting nodes. How do you think we could use this in the preferences dialog? Perhaps the help button could be moved up there (saving some space on the bottom of the screen?) Perhaps an 'export preferences' function? 'restore defaults'?
The other thing I'm wondering is that some people are going to really like the extra space between widgets in the dialog (and it helps us adhere to the HIG, as you point out), however others will prefer more concise use of space in order to maximize the dialogs they can have open at once. Preferences are unlikely to be something people will want to have up all the time, and same with extensions, however with the XML editor and layers I'm not as sure - what do you think?
Bryce
Am Dienstag, den 28.12.2004, 09:56 -0800 schrieb Bryce Harrington:
On Tue, 28 Dec 2004, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
What approach did you use to create this mockup?
I gave a shot at trying to mock up something with glade, but with disappointing results. However this definitely looks doable.
Bryce
Well, I used the Gimp...
Cool, it looks really good. I'm not sure if we'll be able to replicate it exactly, but I think we should strive to get as close as we can - this looks extremely good.
I am trying to learn Glade, but so far, all my attempts have been unsuccesfull.
I even played with with Gimp and Glade, here are my results: http://hagemaenner.de/stuff/inkscape/preferences/
MfG Tobias
On Tue, 28 Dec 2004, Tobias Jakobs wrote:
Am Dienstag, den 28.12.2004, 09:56 -0800 schrieb Bryce Harrington:
On Tue, 28 Dec 2004, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
What approach did you use to create this mockup?
I gave a shot at trying to mock up something with glade, but with disappointing results. However this definitely looks doable.
Bryce
Well, I used the Gimp...
Cool, it looks really good. I'm not sure if we'll be able to replicate it exactly, but I think we should strive to get as close as we can - this looks extremely good.
I am trying to learn Glade, but so far, all my attempts have been unsuccesfull.
I even played with with Gimp and Glade, here are my results: http://hagemaenner.de/stuff/inkscape/preferences/
Ah, excellent - can you export the code in C++?
Bryce
Am Dienstag, den 28.12.2004, 13:00 -0800 schrieb Bryce Harrington:
On Tue, 28 Dec 2004, Tobias Jakobs wrote:
Am Dienstag, den 28.12.2004, 09:56 -0800 schrieb Bryce Harrington:
On Tue, 28 Dec 2004, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
What approach did you use to create this mockup?
I gave a shot at trying to mock up something with glade, but with disappointing results. However this definitely looks doable.
Bryce
Well, I used the Gimp...
Cool, it looks really good. I'm not sure if we'll be able to replicate it exactly, but I think we should strive to get as close as we can - this looks extremely good.
I am trying to learn Glade, but so far, all my attempts have been unsuccesfull.
I even played with with Gimp and Glade, here are my results: http://hagemaenner.de/stuff/inkscape/preferences/
Ah, excellent - can you export the code in C++?
No, I don't have glade-- and even no idea in wich Debian packet it is. :-( Btw, the image is NOT a screenshot, it is just a mockup made with Gimp. But you can download the glade files and try it your self.
Tobias
Tobias Jakobs wrote:
I even played with with Gimp and Glade, here are my results:
http://hagemaenner.de/stuff/inkscape/preferences/
MfG Tobias
Ok, here is version number three of the new Preferences dialog. This one is a little smaller than the other previous one and should therefore be nicer to users with small screen size. It also has better proportions between height and width of the window. I have also added Tobias idea of a icon in the right corner, even if I didnt use his borders (they added only noise, spacing is probably better to use for separating content). I have also added a "reset to defaults button" so if you totally screw up the settings, you can always go back to the normal mode. I have not done any space on top of the dialog (for reusing with the xml and layers dialog) because I agree with Alan that dialogs similar to the ones in gimp would work better for those.
Here it is: http://ramnet.se/~nisse/diverse/temp/inkscape_new_prefs_mockup3.png
- Andreas
On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 01:03:03 +0100, Andreas Nilsson <nisses.mail@...563...> wrote:
Here it is: http://ramnet.se/~nisse/diverse/temp/inkscape_new_prefs_mockup3.png
And again :) If Pencil stands for freehand drawing, what does Pen stand for? :)
Alexandre
Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 01:03:03 +0100, Andreas Nilsson <nisses.mail@...563...> wrote:
Here it is: http://ramnet.se/~nisse/diverse/temp/inkscape_new_prefs_mockup3.png
And again :) If Pencil stands for freehand drawing, what does Pen stand for? :)
Alexandre
Well, that is what it says in the current preferences dialog (in 0.39 anyway...debian testing). Probably it is useless. It will be removed if I make any new mockups. - Andreas
On Fri, 31 Dec 2004, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 01:03:03 +0100 From: Andreas Nilsson <nisses.mail@...563...> To: Inkscape Devel List inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Suggestion for the preferences dialog
Tobias Jakobs wrote:
I even played with with Gimp and Glade, here are my results:
http://hagemaenner.de/stuff/inkscape/preferences/
MfG Tobias
Ok, here is version number three of the new Preferences dialog. This one is a little smaller than the other previous one and should therefore be nicer to users with small screen size.
Excellent, there are still quite a few people using 800x600 (and I've little intention of going beyond 1024x768 because I prefer higher refresh rates to bigger desk area).
It also has better proportions between height and width of the window. I have also added Tobias idea of a icon in the right corner, even if I didnt use his borders (they added only noise, spacing is probably better to use for separating content).
Looks nice, the gimp also has an icon on the top right which presumably is where the idea came from.
I have also added a "reset to defaults button" so if you totally screw up the settings, you can always go back to the normal mode.
There is a stock Reset button you could use, and I'd put it to the left of Close. I'm not sure a seperate reset button for each tool is the best idea but maybe it is, who knows (but it would be a little bit more effort to implement).
I have not done any space on top of the dialog (for reusing with the xml and layers dialog) because I agree with Alan that dialogs similar to the ones in gimp would work better for those.
Here it is: http://ramnet.se/~nisse/diverse/temp/inkscape_new_prefs_mockup3.png
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Free SVG Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org Dia is for Diagrams http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Inkscape, Draw Freely http://inkscape.org Abiword is Awesome http://abisource.com
Alan Horkan wrote:
On Fri, 31 Dec 2004, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 01:03:03 +0100 From: Andreas Nilsson <nisses.mail@...563...> To: Inkscape Devel List inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Suggestion for the preferences dialog
Tobias Jakobs wrote:
I even played with with Gimp and Glade, here are my results:
http://hagemaenner.de/stuff/inkscape/preferences/
MfG Tobias
Ok, here is version number three of the new Preferences dialog. This one is a little smaller than the other previous one and should therefore be nicer to users with small screen size.
Excellent, there are still quite a few people using 800x600 (and I've little intention of going beyond 1024x768 because I prefer higher refresh rates to bigger desk area).
It also has better proportions between height and width of the window. I have also added Tobias idea of a icon in the right corner, even if I didnt use his borders (they added only noise, spacing is probably better to use for separating content).
Looks nice, the gimp also has an icon on the top right which presumably is where the idea came from.
I have also added a "reset to defaults button" so if you totally screw up the settings, you can always go back to the normal mode.
There is a stock Reset button you could use, and I'd put it to the left of Close. I'm not sure a seperate reset button for each tool is the best idea but maybe it is, who knows (but it would be a little bit more effort to implement).
Yes, in this proposal one would have separate reset buttons for each tool (so the user wont lose all his settings if screwing up some setting). Yes, it would probably be some more effort to implent and if that is not possible a global reset left to the close button would do. - Andreas
On Tue, 28 Dec 2004, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2004 09:56:14 -0800 (PST) From: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...> To: Andreas Nilsson <nisses.mail@...563...> Cc: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Suggestion for the preferences dialog
On Tue, 28 Dec 2004, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
What approach did you use to create this mockup?
I gave a shot at trying to mock up something with glade, but with disappointing results. However this definitely looks doable.
It is way too hard to follow the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines. Ideally it should be easy to do the right thing. It shouldn't be any harder to create a graphical user interface for a program than it is to create a web page (which really is just another kind of graphical user interface). You've done a great job by the way, I couldn't have asked for more (but I'll probably try later)!
I've used Borland Delphi once or twice and by comparison it is really difficult to say nice things about Glade except that it should be a pivotal part of the gnome desktop and it should be the easiest to use program there is but unfortunately it is a relatively neglected part of the toolchain (not even in the toolchain in most cases).
Cool, it looks really good. I'm not sure if we'll be able to replicate it exactly, but I think we should strive to get as close as we can - this looks extremely good.
I am trying to learn Glade, but so far, all my attempts have been unsuccesfull.
Took me a while to get my head around using all the boxes for layout and now I can mockup a fairly standard application window with menus and toolbars, haven't tried trees yet though and dialog layout is a whole other ball of wax.
I can understand why people say it is easier to program than to use RAD tools but in the long run I think that is much slower and there are far less people that can help out if you do it that way.
In fact, I had noticed earlier that we needed tree-oriented editing dialogs for several other purposes - the XML tree, layers, extensions, and possibly keyboard layouts.
I was going to emulate the XML editor design,
As the XML Editor is likely to be gettting some serious work done as a result of GTKMM I suppose now is as good a time as any to say that I dislike it quite a lot but I'd probably be more comfortable with it if it had a menubar and standard toolbar and looked more like seperate application. Mostly I just fire up a text editor with syntax colouring and use that instead so I haven't looked at the XML in any great detail or tried to figure out in detail what I dont like about it.
I've been suggesting the seperating out of the XML Editor several times because there are so many editors that could be used (any text editor, text editors with syntax colouring, XML editors like conglomerate and mlview). (Sorry if this isn't sounding very constructive, I'm trying honest).
but what you've done for the preferences dialog looks like it provides the same basic capabilities, and I'm thinking that if we can implement this design, we can reuse it in at least 4 places.
One alteration I'm considering in order to support the other kinds of dialogs is a toolbar on the top of the dialog (see the XML editor).
Dialogs with toolbars are generally overcomplicated and overcrowded and probably shouldn't be 'dialogs' but should make the move and become proper appliction windows.
The other thing I'm wondering is that some people are going to really like the extra space between widgets in the dialog (and it helps us adhere to the HIG, as you point out),
As I've said already some dialogs aren't really dialogs and should be made into proper application windows.
The HIG best describes Transient Dialogs and should be used for Transient dialogs.
however others will prefer more concise use of space in order to maximize the dialogs they can have open at once.
I prefer to call these kinds of non-transient always on dialogs as Palettes (there may be a better term, let me know if there is). The HIG does not take into account these kinds of dialogs and does not yet specify how best to deal with them and in the absence of specific information the developers of the GNU Image Manipulation Program have done exactly what should be done for these kinds of dialogs.
(I really hope this is informative, it was my primary reason for writing this message)
Preferences are unlikely to be something people will want to have up all the time,
The kinds of preferences that need to get changed a lot are either a bad idea that need to be fixed or belong in the menus somewhere. (like the View menu).
and same with extensions, however with the XML editor and layers I'm not as sure - what do you think?
As Inkscape gets better the XML editor will only be needed occassionally to fix bit and pieces that there is no user interface for yet or where users want to be extremely precise. So while at the moment developers might be using it a lot and want to keep it open all the time I wouldn't think that would be the best design for users.
As for Layers I'd think an onscreen palette/dialog would be needed. If you really want to keep as many users happy as possible it should be possible to do most of the functions available in the dialog using alternative transient dialogs. (Adobe Photoshop has a Layers Palette but also has a transient New Layer Dialog so if you are determined to turn off the palette and save screen space the system is still workable. I'd point to it as a reasonably good example of having it both ways).
Hope that helps
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
On Tue, 2004-12-28 at 23:49, Alan Horkan wrote:
I've used Borland Delphi once or twice and by comparison it is really difficult to say nice things about Glade except that it should be a pivotal part of the gnome desktop and it should be the easiest to use program there is but unfortunately it is a relatively neglected part of the toolchain (not even in the toolchain in most cases).
My feelings on Glade are pretty much summed up in one word: don't.
I think it's pretty telling that nearly every project I've ever seen that has started out using Glade has eventually abandoned it. I was around for the de-Glading of Sodipodi, and I really don't want to reintroduce a libglade dependency in Inkscape.
Not because it's hard to use or anything like that, but because it makes makes reorganization and refactoring of code that incorporates it very difficult (except in the one sense that you don't need to care about where in the widget hierarchy a widget is to find it, but if you're writing your code properly that shouldn't be an issue anyway).
Glade also (in my own experience with older versions, anyway) places a strong temptation in front of designer to set fixed pixel dimensions for widgets.
Just my few cents... admittedly much of the GUI code in Inkscape we inherited is an example of how _not_ to do things manually, but we can do better with the gtkmm rewrite.
-mental
Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 16:14:46 -0500 From: MenTaLguY <mental@...3...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Cc: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...>, Andreas Nilsson <nisses.mail@...563...>, Inkscape ML inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Suggestion for the preferences dialog
On Tue, 2004-12-28 at 23:49, Alan Horkan wrote:
I've used Borland Delphi once or twice and by comparison it is really difficult to say nice things about Glade except that it should be a pivotal part of the gnome desktop and it should be the easiest to use program there is but unfortunately it is a relatively neglected part of the toolchain (not even in the toolchain in most cases).
My feelings on Glade are pretty much summed up in one word: don't.
I do not doubt that many projects have used Glade badly and I am certain it does not do enough to make it easy to do things correctly. However it seems to be working well for Abiword and Gnumeric. (I dont think they use libglade, they do not generate the user interface at runtime).
Not because it's hard to use or anything like that, but because it makes makes reorganization and refactoring of code that incorporates it very difficult (except in the one sense that you don't need to care about where in the widget hierarchy a widget is to find it, but if you're writing your code properly that shouldn't be an issue anyway).
I cannot argue with that and like you said it is important to have well structured code. Abiword had the benefit of distinct seperation of the Model View Controller (MVC) long before they started using glade.
Glade also (in my own experience with older versions, anyway) places a strong temptation in front of designer to set fixed pixel dimensions for widgets.
The Gnome HIG does too unfortunately, I'd be inclined to blame the toolkit Java had a lot more built-in layouts so there wasn't much need for crudely specifying things manually using pixels. Web page design has influenced me too, and I think applications needs to resize and reflow just as web pages need to.
Just my few cents... admittedly much of the GUI code in Inkscape we inherited is an example of how _not_ to do things manually, but we can do better with the gtkmm rewrite.
I accept it isn't going to happen for Inkscape but I'm still trying to learn glade as mockups as I think it might be at least as useful as being able to put together graphic mockups.
- Alan
On Wed, 29 Dec 2004, MenTaLguY wrote:
My feelings on Glade are pretty much summed up in one word: don't.
I think it's pretty telling that nearly every project I've ever seen that has started out using Glade has eventually abandoned it. I was around for the de-Glading of Sodipodi, and I really don't want to reintroduce a libglade dependency in Inkscape.
Yup, I remember that.
Not because it's hard to use or anything like that, but because it makes makes reorganization and refactoring of code that incorporates it very difficult (except in the one sense that you don't need to care about where in the widget hierarchy a widget is to find it, but if you're writing your code properly that shouldn't be an issue anyway).
Just my few cents... admittedly much of the GUI code in Inkscape we inherited is an example of how _not_ to do things manually, but we can do better with the gtkmm rewrite.
Ironically, I think a large measure of the motivation to move to Gtkmm is due to the problems we've had with the historically glade-generated code.
If you think about it, the areas where glade would pay off - being able to generate masses of highly repetitive code - are exactly the sorts of things that Gtkmm enables us to eliminate. Instead of having to generate a lot of repetitive code, we can abstract it into a base class.
However, I wanted to give Glade another try, since it's been a few years, and because Murray wrote some encouraging words on our Gtkmmification page about using it. However after spending an evening struggling with it, my previous opinions are reaffirmed. In fact, now I am even skeptical of glade's usefulness for doing mockups; it's kind of a pain to use.
Bryce
participants (6)
-
Alan Horkan -
Alexandre Prokoudine -
Andreas Nilsson -
Bryce Harrington -
MenTaLguY -
Tobias Jakobs