On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 11:56 PM, peter sikking <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > OK, first the 5-slot color history: > >> So far, no one has given any feedback on the idea, or indeed any >> acknowledgement of it. This disappoints me > > > Sorry, I had to think about it more before stepping in to this, > doing that yesterday would have been too fast. > 127> I see we need to maintain the following iron compatibility, > with tools, scripts and users: > > - there needs to be a foreground color and an alternate, > call them fg and alt, and they always need to have a value. > > - swapping fg and alt is very important. the magic-X is > holy for usability sake. in the heat of painting it can > be pressed with a surprising high frequency, so giving > any meaning to clicking X twice is not possible. Yes (although, in case there is any confusion: it's impossible to swap colors while painting. Oddly, it's NOT impossible for colors to change during painting (do something like, open a gimp-python console and run "import time;time.sleep (10.0);gimp.set_foreground(127,255,0)" and start painting (hold the mouse button down) for about 15 seconds -- the color will change and glitching occurs (brush apparently becomes a square block of similar size when you are painting the second color) ) > > - the color of fg can be changed (color selector, eyedropper). > this cannot change the value of alt. Yeah ;( > > - assigning the default black + white to fg and alt needs to stay. > way to much meaning behind that, mask painting for instance. > > disappointing conclusion: there is not much we can change about > the current fg + bg, except renaming it to fg + alt, and fiddle with > how it is used for instance in Edit->Fill with ..., or for creating > new layers. The 5-slot color history can only work for fg, alt is > not part of that (drag and drop of colors from history to alt could > work, however). fg+history need another key-press than X to cycle > through. Hmm, this idea deserves some consideration. FG+history. I do really think we need to reduce the role of alt/BG/whatever we call it -- visually I mean -- since it's mainly used for corner cases and thus has less importance. I think we could benefit somewhat from changing the toolbox color status display to look like this: FFFFFF FFFFFF rBBBBx where F=FG B=BG and r/x = reset/swap (A variation on the design I posted earlier related to color history) This has also the advantage of making the FG area a better click target. > > the whole 5-slot color history (plus a pop-up with a lot of more (49?) > older history) can be packed in the current fg/bg color dockable > toolbox: no, I do not think so. I admit I'm out of touch there -- I never have that little status display enabled :) Anyway if BG/alt is required, then there's no reason to make any such modification, yes. > > yesterday I said: >> I can only see this change as an UI >> improvement if it means getting rid of the bg color swatch. >> Only then we can reach the goal of less user thinking, >> instead of more. > > > hmmm, bg (call it alt) is not going to go away; > getting the bg color disconnected from file flattening during export > is ruined by edge cases; > and the layers always having an alpha: actually, why is that not > simply so today? I thought it was simply a matter of efficiency, alpha channel inflating layer memory requirements by 33% minimum (RGB) up to 100% maximum (GRAY / INDEXED) David _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
