Krita UI, painting&sketching

[Alan Horkan]

replying to the digest using gmail, makes it hard to keep the threading,
sorry.

On 8/29/06, kimageshop-request at kde.org <kimageshop-request at kde.org> wrote:

> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. Krita UI, painting&sketching (Ilmari Heikkinen)
>    2. Re: Krita UI, painting&sketching (Casper Boemann)
>    3. Re: Krita UI, painting&sketching (Bart Coppens)
>    4. Re: Krita UI, painting&sketching (Ilmari Heikkinen)
>    5. Re: Krita UI, painting&sketching (Cyrille Berger)
>    6. Re: Krita UI, painting&sketching (Boudewijn Rempt)
>    7. Re: Krita UI, painting&sketching (Bart Coppens)




---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org>
> To: "Krayon \(KImageShop\)" <kimageshop at kde.org>
> Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2006 19:53:47 +0200
> Subject: Re: Krita UI, painting&sketching
> On Monday 28 August 2006 12:24, Ilmari Heikkinen wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Bart Coppens asked me to post these to the mailing list as well, so here
> > goes.
>
> Thanks!
>
> > Maybe I'll try doing one of those too and write down the findings :)
>
> That would be great.
>
> > Basic painting:
> >
> > [ui issues]
> > - ctrl-+ & ctrl-- default zoom controls too far from usual hand
> >   position. As replacement, z and shift-z would be one possibility.
>
> We might want to add two shortcuts for zooming, since we cannot disregard
> the
> KDE standard shortcuts.


Glad you said that.  It is very hard to please everyone/anyone with Zoom
shortcuts and you invariably need to have more than two.

> - no "press down - pan around"-key (e.g. MMB in GIMP)
> >   makes pan take more actions than optimal
> >   ("drag with MMB" vs. "space down&up, LMB drag, space down&up.")
>
> We might want to dedicate MMB to this, but that should be coordinated with
> the
> other apps in KOffice, for consistency's sake. (I tried to do what
> Photoshop
> did, spacebar down, LMB drag, spacebar up, but Qt fought me all the way!)


I would be very careful about copying features like that.  There have been
users requesting spacebar panning for quite a while and is very likely the
GIMP will adopt it eventually.  Keep in mind tablet users and others who
dont have a mouse let alone a middle mouse button (MMB) so even if it was
implemented this way alternatives would need to be provided.


> > - tool shortcuts spread all over the keyboard (instead of being in the
> >   vicinity left hand home), makes head-up operation difficult (not
> >   looking at kb when changing tools and navigating the image)
>
> Good point. We just allocated the shortcuts based on a mnemonic for the
> name
> of the tool. Here again, I suspect we might want two shortcuts per tool:
> one
> for right-handed people like you, and one for left-handed people like me.


If Krita (and Karbon) supported switching between multiple different set of
keybindings I might be interested to put together a set of Photoshop style
keybindings for Krita as well as revisiting my previous attemtps at nudging
the defaults further in that direction as much as possible.

I recently helped add sets of keybindings in the style of Adobe Illustrator
and Macromedia Freehand to Inkscape.  It is somewhat tedious work and might
take a while but I work I would be willing to do the same to help out Krita
and Karbon if I thought there would be someone interested in providing the
necessary graphical interface for switching between full sets of
keybindings.

> - numbers controlling brush opacity would be nice too (1 = 10%, 2 =
> >   20%, ...,  0 = 100%)
>
> You mean as shortcuts?


Seem like an unusual one to set by default but making it possible for users
to assign their own keys to these actions sounds interesting.

> Layers:
> >
> > - new layer button shows menu of adding different sorts of layers, but
> >   layer palette has lots of free space. moving the buttons to the
> >   palette would take one search+click away and make the UI more visible
>

hmm.  "layer palette has lots of free space" not sure I agree with that.
feels about right to me, putting in a drop down for layer types would use up
more space and make things even more cramped
(i prefer smaller displays with higher resolutions, I expect you have a
desktop size far in excess of 1024x768)

> - creating new layer shows a layer dialog, this is needed maybe 1% of
> >   the time. Better just create a new layer directly and let user summon
> >   dialog afterwards if needed
>
> I'll give both these points a try.


I see now how the two requests fit together you want to push the options to
the palette making that part of the interface more visible and then avoid
bringing up the dialog to make that part of the interface less visible.

There was a discussion similar to this on the gimp lists a while back about
not bringing up the layers dialog by default.  You can read more of that
discussion here:
http://www.mail-archive.com/gimp-developer@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/msg11143.html

For beginners it was better to show the dialog and present the options in an
easily discoverable manner and give enough feedback show them things were
actually happening.  (Just adding another layer in the layers dialog is too
subtle, especially if the layers dialog is closed.)

For more advanced users there is the option to shift click on the new layer
button which creates a new layer using the defaults.

This approach in Gimp 2 is the reverse of what was used in Gimp 1 where the
default was to quietly to create a new layer and shift clicking the new
layer button brought up a dialog the dialog but this was not something
beginners ever discovered.  Admittedly gimp 1 was a lot more cumbersome
since it didn't have a New Layer* menu item though, let alone one with the
convenient Ctrl+Shift+N shortcut.

(* techincally it did but it was buried in a context menu of the layers
dialog with a shortcut that only worked when that dialog was in focus)

I understand the Krita developers may want to do thing entirely differently
but hopefully then can take all issues into account and make an informed
decision.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
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