From my standpoint, I like this screenshot as a challenge to
attaining
interface flexibility. In other words, I would love it if our
chrome
was reconfigurable enough that we could have *both* our current interface layout, *plus* this one, and that the user could shuffle
UI
elements around to suit his or her desires.
Flexibility is good, but if it is too easy to break the fundamental logic of the UI, flexibility turns into a mess. This mockup seems to totally disregard the distinction between tools and tool controls, and as such is hardly applicable to the current Inkscape UI.
I totally agree with you. No need to break the fundamental logic of one of the best UIs I've used.
However... one exception I see with the classification of tool/tool controls is with the Node editing tools. With Illustrator one nice thing is that you can tear-away all of the tools (doesn't really work with our setup for the most part), but it lets me have the node editing tools always available. Specifically add/remove/modify nodes.
Basically other than the dialogs being dockable, this is the one tool I can definitely see being useful to have those "advanced" functions available all the time. I know it's only one click or keypress to make them available (via the tool controls toolbar), but if you switch tools a lot, it's one less click or keypress to get to the tool I need. Plus all of the switching really adds up when you're working on complex projects (easily would have cut a few thousand clicks out of my last project... ones that were just to make the tools available).
Essentially for the other tools it's mostly parameters and such that are stored in the tool controls, but for the node tools, they're almost fundamentally individual tools... not just functions. Does that make sense?
-Josh