On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 18:14:30 -0500, Jozsef Mak <j_mak3@...9...> wrote:
I apologize if I sounded too critical; the criticism intended to be constructive.
We appreciate that :)
From the point of view of the designer the dialog boxes, panels, popup windows are always nuisances.
With that I agree, the less dialogs the better
They interrupt the workflow and disrupt concentration.
Not really interrupt, because most of our dialogs are non-modal; they just hang there but do not stop you from working on the canvas. And yet they do take space and may be rather clumsy to handle.
Therefore, it makes sense to design then as inconspicuous as possible.
And to make as much functionality as possible to the canvas, which is what we are doing.
Consider this, each time adobe or macromedia releases a product they always accuse each other of stealing ideas. Recently, if I remember well it was adobe who claimed that the idea of grouping panels was its invention and accused macromedia of stealing it. This shows the importance they attribute to properly developed interface.
Well, there's a much more simpler explanation: lawsuits are started by lawyers, and lawyers just don't see any deeper than the interface :))
My criticism of the Property panel can be illustrated comparing it with Freehand's. In Freehand when I draw, let's say, a square, in the property window I find the following entries; the name
...in obj props, we have ID and will soon have tilte&description metadata...
and the size of the object
...and that need not be in any dialog! We have this in the controls panel for Selector tool, in the main window. And the fields are editable right there. Much more convenient IMHO.
also shows that it is stroked or filled with color; if stroke and fill is present it shows the color of them.
Fill & stroke are not universal; some objects cannot have them. So it makes a lot of sense to separate them into the Fill and Stroke dialog as we did.
Yet, to _watch_ the style of the selected object, we need something simpler and smaller, and I plan to add a "current color widget" to the editing window which will reflect the color of the selected object(s). Later a palette with color swatches will also be added to the bottom of the window, similar to what Skencil and Xara use.
If I want to change the color of any of the properties I just click on the small swatch next to the property's name, the color swatches pops up and I can chose a new color.
And we don't need to click anything. If you have Fill & Stroke open, you just select stuff and drag the RGB/HSV/whatever sliders immediately. Very convenient to not have to go through an additional click stage for each object.
But let's say I want to change the fill to gradient. In the Property window I choose the gradient option and the gradient ramp pops up, not in a separate window
Same here, click the gradient button in Fill&stroke and edit your gradient, nothing additional pops up.
but in the same property panel where I can change every possible parameters of the gradient.
Well, admittedly we also have a separate Gradient Editor dialog, which indeed is a nightmare (don't even bother criticizing it :) It will have to be redesigned. And yet, even as is, it lets you do the stuff you need.
This is just one thing; in the property window I can change, transform and undo virtually every feature that the object can have.
I'm far from convinced that cramming everything into one dialog is such a good idea.
With the examples, I could go on and on.
And I guess I could go on and on responding either, "it's equally if not more convenient here", or "we're already planning to address that" :))
I'm not saying this is useless, of course. When you are specific, it's a pleasure for me to respond to you; this gives me ideas and feedback which I value.
In adobe illustrator the same thing, they only renamed the Property window to Appearances. The property window ideally is the only place where all features and transformations can be edited and undone.
Honestly, I think this introduces an additional abstraction layer which is unnecessary. When I select an object and want to color it blue, my mental process does not go like (1) "aha, i need to change a property of the object, let me go to Properties, and there I need to select Color," etc. Instead, it's much simpler and faster: (2) "I want it blue, blue is color, gimme the color thing!" In Inkscape, the interface is already somewhat closer to the (2) mentality than to (1), and we plan to move it further in that direction by making color feedback and selection even closer and more immediate. What you propose would push us back to (1) which I don't think is a good idea at all.
The font panel. If you open openoffice's font panel and Inkscape's font panel you can see that the layout of the two is very similar. Nothing really wrong with this other than it spoils the look and feel of the program.
I still don't quite see your point, but I want to add that we're planning to make that dialog mostly unnecessary by moving its controls to the Text tool's controls panel (which is still empty now, but that's because we simply did not yet have the resources for filling it).
the way, layout; I noticed that most open source developers handle space very liberally. Rather than economizing spaces and designing small compact windows they end up creating huge ones that one has to keep dragging from side to side on the screen to see the art work underneath. In my estimation the size of the text macromedia uses in its panels about 8 pt. Inkscape font panel uses 11 or 12 pt. I cannot see any reason for this. Simply using smaller fonts would help reducing the size of the panels.
I think it's wrong to force some specific font size on users. If 8pt is readable for you, just change that in your GTK settings and it will affect all GTK apps. I'm sure lots of people will complain loudly if we force our own idea of font size on them, and I think they will be right. (In fact this happened already for some elements of the interface.)
I agree with many of the things you say in the rest of your reply and indeed, I can see the excellent features Inkscape has. Probably, you noticed that I didn't criticize Inkscape because lacking features (other than the swatches that I dearly miss). One of my criticisms aimed at the incomplete implementation of them. Well, even the philosopher said; "No truth is better than half truth."
Well, incomplete implementation is easier to fix than no implementation, right? So please feel free to make any specific suggestions. The chances of a suggestion to be implemented are directly proportional to how well you manage to convince us in its usefulness and inversely proportional to how difficult it is to implement :)
Dreamweaver and so on) Imagine, if all of these programs would have been designed by disregarding usability, and developers would implement features according to their own likings; it would be insane.
That's mostly the way it is. Interfaces of apps are still very different and each one requires some getting used to. And graphic/design apps with innovative UI appear _all the time_ and tend to make quite some buzz. After all, designers and artists have sufficient IQ to master a new interface paradigm if it really is better than what they had before.
You seem to not realize that "according to their own likings" is not necessarily bad. A program is unusable not when it's designed to its developer's liking, but when it's just badly designed - when it's not "liked" well enough even by its creator. _I_ love Inkscape and I use it for real design every day, and I also spend a lot of effort on its usability to make it maximally likeable _for myself_. And I think this shows. Though on the other hand, our resources are limited and things don't progress as fast as I would like, and this also shows.
As for borrowing from "industry standard" apps, we have this simple policy in effect: When you don't know or don't care how to do something, copy Illustrator. When you _do_ care and _do_ use and test some feature extensively and _do_ have ideas for how to do it in the best way possible, go ahead and implement your vision, no matter how different from Adobe it will end up looking.
And one last thing. I haven't used Freehand, but I have used Illustrator a lot. I don't consider it very usable at all. It's very clumsy, indirect, and unintuitive. There are much better designed programs out there, such as Xara X which (I admit) has influenced Inkscape (through me). And by now, _in some areas_ I consider Inkscape to be noticeably more convenient to use than even Xara :)