they have to be easy to hide temporarily during performed operation. My reason is that when displayed, indicators, are "becoming a part of design" thus "disturbing it" and in some cases forcing designer to readjust changes made only a seconds ago because "numbers/guides/handles" distorted his/her judgement when to stop.
Definitely. There needs to be a way for designers to close or hide displays when necessary. As I understand it, the escape key normally fills this purpose (closing pop-ups), but we could also have another, more visible, mouse-driven method, like a small close button on the display itself. Another option is to only have the dialogs for tools [not the notifications] only display on hover, or only when actively modifying something [in the case of, say, the selection or crop tools]. That still could prevent users from seeing certain parts of the canvas, but I think it might be an improvement over always-displayed ones.
I hope, if we were to start using on-canvas displays for a lot of commands [Not just notifications and dimensions, but also tool settings and the like, the user would be able to set which commands should display pop-ups at all, whether they should only appear on hover, and what information they should display. That way, users who don't want a particular pop-up wouldn't have to close it every time they ran the associated command.
Some quick mockups of how this could look in GIMP.
On Jan 27, 2012, at 4:06 AM, Bogdan Szczurek <thebodzio@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 3:30 PM, c55 inator <c55inator@xxxxxxxxx
>> <mailto:c55inator@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
>>
>> Error messages and warnings in the status bar are incredibly easy to
>> ignore... I would suggest something like pixelmator [screen capture]
>> <http://cl.ly/3D16450D2W2k2H2J042I>, which displays overlays on the
>> canvas [here shown with keyboard shortcuts, but the same model can
>> be applied to other notifications]. Displaying information with
>> on-canvas pop-ups like this works well in my experience, as they
>> don't waste any screen space while being there when needed. Example
>> of a pop-up used for dimensions <http://cl.ly/2N3O141d3u3h1U3M1B40>.
>>
>>
>> I'm in favor of this general model. MyPaint has recently got canvas
>> overlays, and they're, so far, used to display zoom level changes. I
>> find them both very readable, noticable, and also non-obtrusive. I think
>> a lot of the instructions and information we currently put in the status
>> bar could be usefully moved to an overlay -- tool usage instructions are
>> a prime example, look at the paths tool for an example of something
>> that'll really benefit hugely; and 'wrong mode' info is something I have
>> to deal with a fair bit, it would also be good there.
>>
>> One other thing is, if we are going to be informing the user that the
>> image mode is wrong, we should offer them a chance to easily correct it.
>
> I generally agree with idea of "on canvas" indicators with one objection: they have to be easy to hide temporarily during performed operation. My reason is that when displayed, indicators, are "becoming a part of design" thus "disturbing it" and in some cases forcing designer to readjust changes made only a seconds ago because "numbers/guides/handles" distorted his/her judgement when to stop.
>
> My best!
> thebodzio
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