On Mon, 29 Jan 2007, bulia byak wrote:
On 1/29/07, jmak <jozmak@...155...> wrote:
That is efficiency. Because if you spend half of your time say dragging dialog boxes from side to side to be able to see the piece you are working on it is not only inefficient way of working but annoying as well.
Excellent point. And guess what, the layer widget in the statusbar is one of the ways to achieve exactly this - avoid dragging dialog boxes around and get better access to your drawing.
That can be taken as an argument for allowing dialogs/palettes to be docked or stuck on to the main window.
What I see and can assess is the final result, the UI of their products. And needless to say, I can identify many horrendously braindead interface choices in most of these "researched" products.
Great, if things are braindead it should be easy for you to point out why exactly they are braindead and you shouldn't have a problem copying the other bits. Even so there are still advantages to giving users what they have come to expect and doing things just different enough to be better without being so different to create whole new problems. Microsoft particularly have a talent for plucking features from other applications and refining them for their own use (see the recent debacle about Visual Studio features copied from BlueJ or the draw table widget in Microsoft word that WordPerfect had before they did).
As for innovation you are not immune to hyperbole, all to happy to claim node sclupting as "innovative" (sic) rather than an evolutionary improvement on the warp nodes feature Adobe Illustrator offers, which isn't to say it isn't a significant improvement it just isn't innovative.
Interestingly, the level of clunkiness seems to be somehow directly proportional to the market share that the product holds (just compare Adobe Illustrator and Xara, or Windows and OSX).
I think you are wrong here.
Really?
He was talking about the layer drop down.
If you want to talk about clunkiness Inkscape is fairly clunkey, Xara isn't all that pretty either, there is something that feels old about it.
The double scrollbars used to provide the colour palette aren't pretty. A two line status bar is also particularly unusual and makes the interface look very busy and cramped. The mix of markup in the status bar messages is overkill and adds to the visual noise. The menu item labels are overly verbose ("Layer, <Action> (more words) Layer", rather than simply "Layer, <Action>") adding to the clunky feeling and the menus themselves are still a little disorganised. There are things like Input Devices which would be better served by a section in preferences than a menu item because I certainly hope it isn't something users need to change very often.
Can you honestly defend Illustrator's way of handling gradients, as compared to Xara/Inkscape's? And this is just one basic example, I can give tons more.
Total straw man argument. Fireworks has live on canvas gradients, it just doesn't happen to do them through a completely seperate tool. More relevant is the fact that you brought gradients into the discussion that was about the redundant layers dropdown and you also admitted the status bar was cramped you are only disagreeing on how best to improve the situation. I'd be interested to hear what MentalGuy has to say on the subject given that he implemented the Layers dialog and if he really intended for the Layer dropdown to live on after.