Hi,
Just tried out the new rect select tool and I have a few comments
which I thought might be appreciated.
First off, thanks to Bill for the work - this is already an
improvement over the old rect select tool, IMHO, apart from one
thing (which I'll get to later).
First, "Show dialog" must go. I'm sure that there are people who
use this dialog, both in the crop tool and here, but it's a
nightmare.
Second, "Adjustable" should be the default. It was very confusing
to me that I saw the shading + handles à la crop tool, and then
as soon as I released, just had a rectangular selection.
The big lacking functionality is the aspect ratio/fixed size
functionality from rect select. Being able to constrain the ratio
of selections during their creation, and also while editing them,
is very useful.
One usability change which would be great, but I know that it is
a lot trickier, is to have the selection be both a selection and
adjustable at the same time. It would be great to be able to drag
the corners (or even, why not, the edges) of a selection to move
it around & resize it dynamically, but have it actually be a
selection if I do something like apply a filter. The question is
whether the adjustableness would only apply to the last element
added to the selection (ellipse, rectangle, or why not,
freehand?) or to the bounding box of the entire active selection.
I haven't thought a whole lot about it.
In short, I think it's good, and if the tool can pick up the last
remaining bits of functionality from the rect select tool, and
the other selection tools behaved similarly (at least the ellipse
tool), I'd be in favour of it being the 2.4 rect select tool. Of
course, if something better comes along in the meantime...
Cheers,
Dave.
--
David Neary,
Lyon, France
E-Mail: bolsh@xxxxxxxx
CV: http://dneary.free.fr/CV/
