On Thu, 2005-02-24 at 10:23 -0800, William Skaggs wrote: >A) Use a dialog similar in general appearance to the Crop Tool dialog, >and allow the user either by checking a Tool Option or by pressing a >modifier key to enable/disable showing the dialog. Of course the >actual contents of the dialog are subject to improvement. >Personally, of the two, I favor A Let me do a quick workflow, erm, "analysis". :) Feel free to ignore. Popup window ------------ 1) I want to do interactive select. If I have the popup window option selected it is quite disturbing as it steals focus and gets in the way between me and my canvas. If it's off, I can work straight away. 2) I want to be precise and enter the dimensions. I have to click on the canvas to bring up the dialog and enter the numerical size. If I eventually want to move the selection around interactively after typing in dimensions, which I do quite often to fine tune the soon-to-be crop, I have to move the dialog away first. If the tool option for the dialog is off, I have to toggle it on first and then continue as outlined above. Tool options ------------ 1) If I want to work interactively, Nothing gets in the way. 2) The tool option dock is something I have open all the time. If I need to enter precise dimensions I have to move away from the canvas. Additional interactive tweaks mean moving the pointer back to canvas. So if I had just the two options, I would favor B actually. But the above comes from the fact I use the interactive mode a lot more than the numerical one. Interactive interface along with snapping to grid and enough visual feedback about the position and dimensions (statusbar) can get faster results than entering numbers. It would perhaps be good to enhance the grid functionality to take actual zoom ratio into consideration to make it even more useful. For more information about view-dependent snapping, see this Inkscape thread - http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=6533898&forum_id=37513 cheers -- Jakub Steiner <jimmac@xxxxxxxxxx> Novell, Inc.
