Paintop preview usuability

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Mon, 27 Jul 2009, Cyrille Berger wrote:

> I have been thinking about a few things that bother me about the paintop 
> preview
> * first, I am wondering if we don't have a discoverability issue, nothing 
> indicates that there is a popup widget, I wonder if we shouldn't have some 
> kind of arrow next to it (the same would apply for brushes and gradients)

Would be nice to have an arrow. I think people in general do get it, though, once
they stop searching for eraser etc. in the toolbox.

> * but more important to me, currently the preview works only for paint paintop 
> (the one that add colors) while for modifying paintop (eraser, filter, smudge, 
> deform, duplicat) the area remains white. What we would need for those paintop 
> is to draw on a non-transparent layer, with some kind of pattern (a checker ?) 
> and to render the layer on a background with a different color so that 
> transparency is visible.
> What I am wondering is wether we want to have different settings of the preview 
> (transparent layer + white background for paint pantop, and pattern for 
> modifying paintop), or we use the same for all paintops ?

Different, I think. If you have a background for a painting paintop, it's difficult
to see what it is actually doing.

Boudewijn