Re:Re: GUI design of 0.7

[C. Ecker]

On Mon, 8 Nov 2004, Joel Biddier wrote:

[]
>
> It will take me some time to digest all the points made in your
> proposal. Hence, give me a couple of days for a response (that is, one
> worthy of the proposal).
Same with me and all the answers I got ...

[...]
> development version (some time ago.). Not having a blank canvas on
> startup is a bit annoying. (I'll comment on this more later.)

>
> As for the proposed variants, I also do not feel very happy with them.
> To make a comparison, they are much like Sodipodi ? which has one very
> large cluttered main ?toolbox? (much in the same vain as xfig.). Inscape
> is much like kontour in it's look (but basicaly Sodipodi underneath.). I
> have yet to form an opinion on that GUI ? off hand, I don't hate it, but
> I don't like it much. The current skencil GUI is in the spirit of
> earlier versions of CorelDraw.

I did think about the toolbox and came to one conclusion: I should keep my
hand from things I am really bad in. Further, it is not worth thinking too
deep about that. It takes only some minutes to change it and is really
just the look.

More important is to clarify the conceptional questions so that we can
start coding:

- What buttons do we need at all ? My idea was that there should be no
buttons at the document window and that all frequent operations should
have buttons (undo/redo, selection, drawing tools, grouping, stacking,
dublicate, ...). The user should be able to do the common things without
touching the keyboard.

- Do we want CSDI or not ? (I do not like that term anyway)

- The role of the toolbox as main window

- ...


I looked at your toolbox drawing and I looked again at my video remote
control and ... I think you are right! It is designed exactly in the way
you are suggesting: matrix like organization, grouped, structured by
leaving some cells empty. OK, I am convinced.

>
> It is my (off the hip) feeling to use multiple menus, but many of them
> tabbed. I did use Illustrator alot in the past (professionally). So I am
Do you mean "menues" or "panels" ? In the current 0.7 there are some
panels with tabs and I changed them to single panels mainly because
of drag and drop (e.g. from property stack to named styles panel) and
because single panels somehow appear "cleaner" to me.

[...]
> need at this stage of the game. Unfortunately, you raise the bar in how
> we exchange proposals and I may not be that ?all together? yet ;-) (so

Hmm, probably I did not get the meaning of this ... .

Maybe the easiest way of making a proposal would be to download the
sources of mine from my page and changing them. I also would like to see
another concept which is worked out. I am currently that much into my own
concept that I can't really imaging that it is possible to make little
changes without changing everything.

Greetings,
Christof