Backlogs and Real Life

The last three months have been a bit crazy, with far too much "real life" hitting us upside the head. Things have finally settled in a bit so that I'll be able to get my head above water and surface again. Aside from diving head first at the new day job and surviving the holidays, much had happened in the tech world.

I still haven't had time to finish my writeup of SVG Open (partly since I accepted the new day job while I was attending it up in Mountain View). Then there was the Google Summer of Code Mentors' summit. Great things happened there. Then I had to prep for our visit to New Zealand as co-organizer for a Libre Graphics Day miniconf and as a speaker at the main linux.conf.au. Then we had SCALE8x come 'round where I presented yet another talk and then also run the Inkscape booth on the show floor. Toss in getting a new tech (adaptive UI) going, starting a new project with other CREATE guys, and doing battle across the board to help get proper CMYK support out for end users everywhere.

Whew!

On top of all that was work for Inkscape and trying to get new features solid for the next release, 0.48. Thankfully I was able to squeeze the time in to finish up the basic support and UI for per-document color/swatch palettes. This allows for basic colors to be stored as a set in a given document, but also for gradients to be included in that. One big thing that inclusion accomplishes is breaking down the artificial barriers software engineers have imposed on artists for far too long. Assets had been artificially separated by their *implementation*, without regard for how artists actually are used to working. This also enabled many workflow enhancements including making art recoloring easier, indicating which swatches are in use on the selected object, etc.

Work on the new input devices dialog also came through. Aside from more end users getting their hands on tablets and such, we had a push in that the ugly outdated GTK+ dialog is being removed. And just in the nick of time we had Krzysztof step up and investigate some of the win32 tablet bugs and get some insight on the problem with Aiptek and others showing up with broken names. I was able to help refine the fixups there wile getting them set to be reimplemented in the new dialog.

And then there is the basic work on adaptive UI. This is a very promising area, and is just beginning to show the tip of the iceberg. I'm implementing internals based in part on Michael Terry's work with INGIMP he has presented at LGM. Though 0.48 will only expose a tiny bit of what can go on, the support in Inkscape will give it some very useful functionality in even the near term. We're looking at only giving 0.48 a few set layout modes, but with some handy logic behind the scenes to assist users getting what they need without having to think as much.

Unfortunately, though, we were unable to find time to work in support for Wii remotes, joysticks, and the SpaceNavigator someone at LCA lent me. We are on track to get more in, and 0.49 might even see some of that. Some of this (like using guitar game controllers) might sound a bit silly. However there are some very interesting ways these can be worked in and give Inkscape some nice functionality for average users. And, of course, more hardware toys always makes the geeks happier.

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Inkscape 'shell' patch

I'm not sure why, but you can now launch Inkscape in a mode with a simple interactive shell. Someone submitted a patch a few weeks back that presented a "server" mode so they could run multiple Inkscape commands without actually relaunching the application.

I wasn't sure myself of where this would be most useful, but a few of our guys said it could help in some cases. I finally had time to clean up the bits of the implementation (though there still might be some lingering Windows issues) and get it submitted. There's a warning that pops up when exiting, but otherwise it seems ready to start using. We probably need to give a little thought to tweaks like the character or string for the prompt, etc. A bit more refinement is probably good.

It takes the same command format as the command-line interface that has been in Inkscape for some time. We might need to add a bit more, but finding out how people use it and what they run up against will probably shake all that out.

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Smaller Extension Preferences

Alexandre asked this week if it would be possible to use combo boxes instead of radio buttons in the preferences UI for extension dialogs. Aside from that being a good suggestion for UI improvement, there were a few good factors in its favor. First of all, things have been cleanly abstracted enough so that hooking in such a change would not be much work (thanks, Ted). So a good UI benefit with minimal coding effort is generally a good thing. Second is that I've done things like this before, and have been thinking about general ways to improve the dynamic UI like this. So I've already had my mind wrapped around the problem. That's always a big hurdle to starting a coding project, even one as small as this. And finally, this just happens to line up exactly with my plans for world domination via XForms implementation. Moving forward on world domination is good, so it became a requirement for me to code it on up. :-) Here it is: On this one dialog the vertical size shrank about 30%, which seems quite helpful. I think the Eee PC users will gain some benefit here too. The other dialog I tried it on changed from 700 pixels tall to only 530, saving about 25%. More important than the percentage, though, is that this case will help those running at 1024x768 (aka LCD monitor users and such). The C++ part of implementation was not too much at all, and seems rather trivial to me (maybe around 75 lines of code). Using the change, however, is very simple. Just add appearance="minimal" to an existing optiongroup in a .inx file and it will switch over to the combo instead of radio buttons. That's the beauty of XForms... it's mainly a way to use existing technology to gain strong benefits. And on the subject of XForms, I find Micah Dubinko's "O'Reilly XForms Essentials" a very good book on XForms specifically and on lightweight UI design in general.

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