On Mon, 29 Jan 2007, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 12:09:29 -0800 From: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...983...> To: Inkscape User Community inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net Cc: inkscape-devel@...84... Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] [Inkscape-user] Baffling UI
Thanks Olivier for providing feedback on this.
On Sun, Jan 28, 2007 at 11:52:09PM +0100, Olivier Lefevre wrote:
Thanks for the explanations. So if I create the rectangle and immediately switch to the select tool yes I get to see its properties and change them. It did not occur to me to try the selector because the object seemed to have disappeared as soon as I clicked elsewhere. I'll be damned if I know why it was white: I have _viewed_ some SVG documents in Inkscape before but this is my first stab at creating one.
In the status bar I would suggest not using F and S but spelling out
Always avoid abbreviations (and acronyms, and annoying alliteration also).
Fill and Stroke in full: there is enough space for that and if you are a newcomer and both F and S say "N/A" it is not obvious what they refer to. Besides it seems weird for the stroke to be N/A: I can understand
seems weirder to me that the foreground and background colour indicators are repeated on both the tool options bar and the status bar. doing the same thing in two different places is generally discouraged by usability guidelines (there are exceptions where it may be worthwhile but that's guidelines for you).
If you really wanted to include the labels there would be enough room to include the full words Fill and Stroke, in the toolbar but not in the status bar.
Would it perhaps be clearer to get rid of the labels entirely and just show a rectangle or other shape in the fill color, with a border in the stroke color (if any)? Then we could eliminate the need to localize at all, which could be beneficial in languages where the translation for 'fill' or 'stroke' may end up being a longer word.
If you don't entirely get rid of it wouldn't "None" be a clearer label than "N/A"? I realise that it might not be pedantically accurate to the underlying implementation but making things clear to the user is more important right? Also real words are much easier to translate than acronyms or abbreviations.
In place of the single letter "O" for opacity it might be better to use a checkboard icon like GIMP does for the "Lock Alpha Channel" checkbox in the layers palette.