Re: It's cool!

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Re: It's cool!
by Macavity on Wednesday 22/Jun/2005, @04:03

>I would like to have one single master toolwindow, one that you can add as few/many tools to as you like, in the form of tabs for instance.

I seccond that :-) Except i think it should be more like the kind of "tabs" you see in Konq or Amarok out on the left. Having just *one* narrow and tall window at the left, with one-click acces groups of tools, layers, colour chooser, plugins/script extentions, coffee machine etc, would realy make my day. It saves screen real estate, and would work in both "crammed" and "exploded" mode :-)

I'll go work on making a mock-up right away!

~macavity

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Re: It's cool!
by Boudewijn on Wednesday 22/Jun/2005, @09:29

I'd like to see your mockup but I have to warn you... I have started coding a system of dockers where the user can drag & drop tabs between dockers, and where there are two kinds of tabs: the toolbox kind (as in Qt Designer, hope that class doesn't get axed for Qt 4) and the tab kind. So, if you want all the palettes in one big panel, you just drag all of 'em to a toolbox pannel, and bob's your uncle

Curiously enough, the all palettes in one big docker was the approach of Krita when I started hacking the semi-abandoned codebase, and I found it didn't work for me. We've had a lot of grief with developing the dockers. Qt's QDockWindow's have some nasty bugs, Kivio's sliding dockers have other bugs and a home-grown solution has the disadvantage that maintaining it takes precious time from real development. I notice that Bibble Pro (a really great image editor) uses Qt and has the same problems with their dockers as Krita has.

Anyway, about four floating palettes seems to be what Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, Corel Painter, Acrylic and Procreate Painter have standardized on, so I decided to stop fighting Qt, and just go with the flow.

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Re: It's cool!
by Macavity on Thursday 23/Jun/2005, @09:13

>Anyway, about four floating palettes seems to be what Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, Corel Painter, Acrylic and Procreate Painter have standardized on, so I decided to stop fighting Qt, and just go with the flow.

Yes.. I've been surfing screenshots of that too. So far it looks just like that, except I keep all four in one window, with konq-sidebar-tabs ("dockers?") on the left.

What I'm doing right now, is that making some dummy-work and then try and imagine (clicking on the drawings of the UI) what I would have to do to get the same job done using my approach. However it became clear quite fast that this approach translates to [a lot] more mouse clicks in exchange for the extra screen space. I'm no coder myself [yet], so I don't know if Qt/KDE allows a window in focus to "send" the keyboard shortcuts it detects to another window.. but if this is the case it would be truely KDE-like-kick-arse to just bind the "side-tabs" to [1], [2], [3] & [4] (except in text-layer-mode), to allow for maximum-screen-space-dual-hand-krita-hyper-productivity-operation ;-)

>but I have to warn you... I have started coding a system of dockers where the user can drag & drop tabs between dockers, and where there are two kinds of tabs: the toolbox kind (as in Qt Designer, hope that class doesn't get axed for Qt 4) and the tab kind.

Again.. I'm no hacker but this doesnt sound as if it contradicts with my idea (is it "generic", "selfcontained" and "re-usable"?). In fact it sounds like this kind of work is axactly what is needed to make it possible to extend and re-configure my idea to fit everyone. It would be truely awesome if Krita is to be the first 100% custamizable IMP.. as every one seem to have their own take on how theese programs should look. If it too was all D'N'D, with 3-click profile management.. well.. that would be kind of devastating to any competitior :-) (If this was on side-tab 5 it could be done in 2 clicks)

I will post on looky sometime next week.

Happy Midsummer everyone :-)

~Macavity

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Re: It's cool!
by macavity on Thursday 23/Jun/2005, @09:45

WOW! Amarok-SVN has *exactly* the kind of side-tabs im thinking of! In fact the entire left side of Amarok is pretty much like what I had in mind.. that will make the production of my mock-ups much easyer :-)

~Macavity

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Re: It's cool!
by Boudewijn Rempt on Thursday 23/Jun/2005, @10:59

Don't forget to mail me -- I might miss it otherwise.

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