Here's a little tweak I got in at the last minute for the next version of Inkscape.
Bulia had been annoyed by a few aspects of the palette there at the bottom of the UI. After talking some things over with him this past week I realized that the first bit of his issues could be addressed by adding an option to change the color swatches from square to some user-specified shape instead. The popup menu that allows choosing size, etc. now has a submenu to go thinner or wider.
Also he brought up some information on how the sizes ("tiny", "small", etc.) were being calculated, so I was able to fix a bug with that. (Prior to this things would behave as desired on my systems, but not for others if their current theme had different behavior).
And then the final bit was to tune the code a bit so that when the palette fits on the UI all at once the space for the scrollbar would no longer be used.
The end result is what you see here. You can now use a palette with over 400 colors and have it all visible at once. Of course, that does get a little hard to click on, so you can bring things up a little larger.
This window is currently the narrowest that 0.46 goes on my system, and the palette is the Inkscape default one, which has around 431 swaches.
It's interesting how just combining a few minor tweaks can result in nice bumps in options and usability.
The end result is what you see here. You can now use a palette with over 400 colors and have it all visible at once. Of course, that does get a little hard to click on, so you can bring things up a little larger.
This window is currently the narrowest that 0.46 goes on my system, and the palette is the Inkscape default one, which has around 431 swaches.
It's interesting how just combining a few minor tweaks can result in nice bumps in options and usability.
7 comments:
can wait to see more swatches work keep me updated
just playing with this in SVN, looks pretty cool.
Looks pretty good!! But I have just one question: Will be there an "empty fill" button? Because everytime I need delete the color, I need to open the fill dialog to do that!
Cheers!
Obviously couldn't be done for this release, but you could get the usability of seeing more swatches and easy clicking by bringing up a zoomed-in magnifying glass type view when you hover over a certain area of the palette. It would probably be tricky to get just right, but might be worth it.
For the "none" or "empty fill", we have a wishlist bug/RFE
"No color" swatch in color palette
Launchpad bug 171178
So it's in the list to get addressed. Unfortunately the enhanced tablet support turned out a little more intersting. :-)
looks great. for some future version, maybe you could address the problem of narrow displays (like that of the eeepc) by having a swatch with very narrow colors but with parabolic zooming when the mouse moves over the swatch :-)
A couple ideas that might make it a little easier:
1) Keep the primary colors on the left the "normal" squares.
2) Have a "color history" area with the last (4/8/16) colors used. This would be especially handy as the eyedropper tends to be fickle at times. kzftugq
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