UI is completely askew
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Inkscape |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
First use and I am not impressed.
I noted the bug about dialogs appearing on the other monitor. They also don't take cues about the size of the monitor before drawing so can have their top and bottom off the screen.
But the dialogs don't obey even their default preferences. I just open the 'preference' dialog, at the bottom of the edit menu (wrong location) but there seems to be an option to remember size and location, always default to the wrong selection; big and remember where you were last time? Every time I started inkspace the print dialog was there, making the program unusable as I couldn't get the dialog to close! until I unplugged a monitor. Start simple, not the last programmer's defaults.
I realize it's a drawing application and many user will have two monitors but they may not be the same size. You need to query the screen for it's size before drawing dialogs. If a dialog is so busy it wont fit top to bottom on a fairly standard laptop screen the dialog is too busy, to many things in it. Did no one read the Apple UI guidelines from the late 90's? It's quite instructive about good UI design.
Also when a new application opens and an inkspace menu is open, it should not appear above the new application. The menu is attached to the inkspace window only, like every other application. In fact every other application closes the menu when the their application is sent back behind another application.
So far, just getting by the cluttered UI, I've had nothing to say in praise of Inkspace. I want to make a colored four point star and I'm two hours into trying to get the UI to behave properly. Gimp 1.5 was better than this and their UI was pretty screwy too.
| prkos (prkos) wrote | #1 |
| Brynn (brynn4inks-deactivatedaccount) wrote | #2 |
| kmFE3zFW (howe-steven) wrote Re: [Bug 1645034] Re: UI is completely askew | #3 |
| Jabiertxof (jabiertxof) wrote | #4 |
| prkos (prkos) wrote | #5 |
Thank you for reporting your experience! Without user testing and filing bugs we can't fix what is wrong. Not all users/devs have all possible platform configurations to test various behaviours so some bugs may slip through the cracks if users don't test and report their findings.
What is your Inkscape version and what is your OS?
We don't have enough devs dedicated to packaging Inkscape for different platforms, if you can please jump in and help! (I assume you're on Apple machine.)
Some UI preferences have been added and worked on relatively recently, so it would help if you could report bugs and test so they can be ironed out.
For me the Page is zoomed in so the top and bottom are cut off on 0.92pre3 (114%), but I see full page in Inkscape 0.92+devel 15261 (39%). It doesn't bother me much because it's so easy to change zoom, Inkscape has the best zooming shortcuts I've seen.
Create two objects in a new document, leave one object selected, then try all the numbers from 1 - 6 to see different zoom levels, they can depend on the selection, drawing, and general settings. And with ` key you can cycle between last used zooms, very convenient during the drawing process when you have to focus in on details but often view what it looks like in the whole drawing, zoomed out.
Why do you think Preferences dialogue doesn't belong under Edit? Most applications on Linux do, and it makes sense, those are are something to Edit. On Windows I remember having those under Tools, even though that doesn't seem like the best placement. But I do agree we should follow each platform guidelines to avoid confusion.
I'm not sure if all your window issues are related, but it might help to report a separate bug for each and provide more information about your platform and relevant configuration.