On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 01:31:03AM +0000, k.healy@...1918... wrote:
On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 03:02:29PM +0000, Bryce Harrington
wrote:
These are interesting ideas, and I don't recall seeing
them proposed
before. You could check in the Request For Enhancement
(RFE) tracker
through the website, and see if this has already been
proposed; if so,
add your thoughts to it, or if not, add a new request for
it.
Thanks for filling me in on all this. When I get a chance, I'll have a look through the RFE tracker and add/amend entries on these.
Good, thanks.
Yeah, it looks like it could be Windows-specific alright...I'll have to check out the Linux version to see. The problem I was having was more that the minimum size of the dialogs was very big (e.g. the document prefs dialog had a minimum width of about 1/5 the screen - this is at 1600x1200 with Windows XP "normal" font sizes). A lot of the text input fields seemed much wider than necessary, so it might be something to do with calculating the width of these text fields.
Sounds odd, and likely windows specific, and also likely already known, but can't hurt to doublecheck.
Thinking about lining up the dialogs again, my motivation for this was that since all windows are rectangular, and you're most likely going to have a drawing window and more than one dialog on the screen at any one time, there's going to be "dead" space unless the dialogs share the same width or height.
The picture I have is of several dialogs of the same width down one side of the screen, and optionally dialogs of the same height across the top/bottom, with the drawing window using the remainder of the screen.
(Of course this wouldn't be the best for people with small screens)
A nice way to offer this to the user might be to have a "Tile Dialogs" option, like the "Tile Windows" you often see in multi-document GUI apps. I'll put in an RFE for something like this too if there's nothing similar already.
The direction that development has gone is actually to try to *eliminate* the dialogs, by instead moving the more commonly used ones into the UI proper. Or, at least the more commonly used aspects of the dialogs.
For instance, the new text toolbar will make the text dialog less necessary. The swatches panel will make both the swatch dialog and fill and stroke dialog somewhat less ncessary, etc.
Of course, for every one feature that gets moved to the main UI, we're gaining two more great new features. So we'll probably never be able to eliminate the dialogs, and so ideas like yours for better organizing the dialogs are good!
Some other random observations...which I'll also keep an eye out for in the RFE tracker...
You'll find pretty much all of these have been known or suggested by others for a very long time. Just waiting for someone to work on them.
Bryce
- Marker color really should change with that of the path to
which it is attached
More control over marker size would be great
Is it right to always center the markers on the end nodes
of the line? It is for circular markers, but not for arrows (think of a flow diagram with arrows connecting boxes), and sometimes not for other shapes.
- The drop-down list for selecting markers is pretty
cumbersome, this would be much better as a 2d grid (with the marker names left out, or else popping up as tooltips). Even better might be to have a separate dialog like the swatches dialog for markers.
- If you are editing a document created elsewhere with fonts
that are unavailable (e.g. editing on Windows, document created on Linux with Ghostscript fonts), the text tool will not pick up the font size, so making any edit to the text will change the font size to whatever is currently set in the text tool.
- When editing baseline-adjusted text, the baseline-adjust
is not maintained logically, e.g. if the text was "Vout" where "out" is baseline-adjusted, it is not possible to replace the "o" with another character without the baseline being reset for the new character.
- Probably too specialised to be used very often, but a
CAD-style snap-to- tangent / end-point / mid-point / center / etc. would be nice.
- It should be possible to edit the stroke settings for a
group (at least if the settings for all objects in the group are the same)
Regards, Ken
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