hi, For those who haven't seen it yet, Jon Nordby is doing some interesting work on his palette branch, which is getting some shape now:
http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MyPaint/Features/Palette There are two unique features that the palette has: automatic on-the-fly generation of color gradients, and a canvas-like click behaviour (click to paint, color picker to pick, eraser to remove). Below I have some comments and concerns about its current usability (as of git commit f62de96). Palette creation: - Gradient generation works nicely; this turned out to be a good idea. - Red borders are be hard to distinguish, use thickness or double-borders? - It is strange to get a gradients towards white after choosing the first color. This is distracting if the user only needs the left half of the available slots. Maybe undefined colors could be filled with with the transparency checkerboard pattern? - There should be an easy way/button to open a color selector directly from/with the palette window. - If it should feel like canvas painting, then the color should appear already on button press, not on button release. Color picking: - It's a bit ugly that you can also pick up window decoration and border colors by accident; but that's the way the color picker works, where it is an useful feature if you have a reference image. A rather special behaviour is that the palette works similar to the canvas. We did discuss this in IRC before it got implemented and I also thought it could be a good idea, but I'm not so convinced any more. Maybe some things can be done to fix it, or maybe it can stay as an alternative, or maybe it was just a bad idea after all. Here are the issues: - Users are forced to learn about eraser mode and color picking hotkeys before they are able to use the palette. I don't like this at all. There should be some intuitive way for users with only basic painting needs to use the palette, without forcing them to learn/use unrelated features. - I guess the main reason why some people seem to want undo for the palette is because it is so easy to click-destroy a color by accident. - Users with a limited number of keys (tablet PC, or keyboard moved away) certainly want a way to select colors from the palette with a click only. There are actually two different "use modes" for the palette: picking a color from it (quickly, in the middle of painting) and editing the palette (not so often, maybe just saving the current color into the palette, but more likely doing several changes to it). Maybe it is worth to have two different appearances of the palette for those cases? There is no need to show any buttons or the difference between auto-selected and generated colors when the user is just picking. (Just an idea; the question remains how those two modes would interact.) Window behaviour: - At the first start (./mypaint -c /tmp/new-config-directory) it always (re)appears in the same location, even after I move it. After that, it appears centered at the mouse (which is nice). - Making the window appear/disappear with one single keystroke would be more useful if the user didn't need to press another key in-between to pick a color from it. Ideally it would also support clickless operation, like the "v" color changer: hold down the key, point at the color to select, release the key. - Currently the only reasonable way to use it is to leave the window open. This is not so bad, except in fullscreen mode, where (at least with my WM) the window moves behind when I start painting. It probably should be marked as an utility window; this will also remove it from the taskbar. Other windows have the same problem, and there is commented-out code (gui/brushselectionwindow.py) that does this. The drawback is that such windows stay in top of every other window (brush settings...) but maybe that can be fixed... bye, Martin _______________________________________________ Mypaint-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/mypaint-discuss
