usability feedback.

[Alan Horkan]

On Fri, 5 Aug 2005, Thomas Zander wrote:

> From: Thomas Zander <zander at kde.org>

> On Friday 5 August 2005 01:16, you wrote:
> > > Consider adding 'Control-R' to the 'show ruler' just like in
> > > Photoshop.
> >
> > Call me sceptic but I happen to think that is a horrible waste of a
> > keybinding for something you shouldn't need to toggle on and off very
> > often.  Is it really something which artist need to toggle on a
> > regularly basis?
>
> Probably not; I use it in Photoshop quite a lot, but I might not be the
> target audience.

In my opinion you probably are or should be the target audience (as a user
familiar with existing graphics software and likely to use Krita in a
compliment to those other tools).

> I only mentioned these two keybindings because I use them in Photoshop and
> missed them in Krita.

Sorry if I sounded too critical, your opinion provides a very valuable
point of view similar to my own which I am very glad the Krita developers
are interested in considering.

Krita and Koffice have a wonderful advantage, they have a system which
allows users to relatively easily add their own keybindings so it is not
an absolute necessity to have default keybindings for everything (which
would be terribly cluttered and make changes and additions difficult later
on).  It would still be very good to have default keybindings for most
items particularly for the features a large group of users expect from
several other programs.

I consider rulers and guides more useful for techincal drawing and very
precise graphic design rather than more creative Artwork and something I
immediately turn off (and prefer to have off by default for the slightly
cleaner aesthetic and greater screen space.  Karbon 14 has some annoying
jerking behaviour when turning rules on and off, the whole user interface
seems to get reconfigured).  I have utterly failed on several occassions
to convince developers to hide their rulers by default.

I also try to entirely avoid manually placing guides as it is crude and
imprecise.  I prefer to use a dialog that allows me to add them at
carefully specified postions.  (I have written scripts for another program
which didn't not include such functionality (menu items/dialogs) for
guides by default and now includes some of my scripts for adding and
clearing guides[1].)

Some programs depend heavily on guides for slicing an image and they do
not include dedicated tools for slicing and exporting images in a
streamlined way.  (Allegedly Adobe ImageReady was created because
Macromedia Fireworks did such a good job of streamlining the process of
creating Web Graphics including slicing and saving.)
As an application primarily dedicated to painting Krita might want to
encourage some of the KDE graphics applications to provide more web
oriented image slicing and export functionality if they do not already
so that Krita can remain more clear and focussed on painting.

I'll try and get back to you about the keyboard shortcuts soon (hopefully
later today) with a subset of shortcuts common to both Adobe Photoshop
and Macromedia Fireworks that will hopefully uncontraversial.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Inkscape http://inkscape.org
Abiword http://www.abisource.com
Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/
Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org

Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

[1] See the various Guides scripts
http://matrix.netsoc.tcd.ie/~horkana/dev/gnome/gimp/script-fu/script-fu.html