Dia and UI.

[thristian atdot org]

Well, I just downloaded and had a little play with Dia 0.85 (as
helix-update told me it might be an idea) and I've taken it upon
myself to do a little UI review.

Overall, it's very nice. Obviously, a lot of the interface was copied
from the GIMP (famous for having a less-than-obvious UI) but there's a
few things that ruined the experience for me, a little:

I thought the interface was a little sparse at first, because the data
window looked a little sparse. Eventually I figured out that the
entire main interface for the application was hidden in a context
menu, and after that I was fine. Recommendation: put a little
drop-down for the menu in the top-left between the Rulers, like the
GIMP.

The main menu also doesn't have a little tear-off, so you can't pin it
to the desktop like you can in the GIMP. I don't use this feature
much, even in the GIMP, but it's helpful to know it's there if I need
it.

View|Zoom > in GIMP gives scale ratios (3:1, 2:1, 1:1, 1:2, 1:3, etc),
but Dia gives percentages - this probably should be standardised, but
I'm not sure which is better. 

For that matter, what are we scaling? I've had a reasonably thorough
examination of the various prefs dialog boxes, and can't find a
"units" setting anywhere.

On the main palette, there is a nicely extensible notebook control
containing a tab for every "category" of symbols you can use. Problem
- the default palette is ~320 pixels wide, and even when labelled in
8-pt Tahoma, I only see the first three tabs. When I choose
"Pnuematic/Hydraulic", I can only see one. There are *fourteen* tabs,
and that's just in the default distribution. I would strongly
recommend that at the very least this tab control is replaced with a
drop-down list.

Something I just noticed: to my surprise, the "object delete" key is
not "Delete" or even the Emacsoid/Gimpish "Ctrl-K". Again this should
probably be standardised somewhere.

The move tool in the main palette: is used for scrolling. The gimp's
middle-drag would probably be a more efficient use of space. 

Properties dialog - if you bring it up when no objects are selected,
it says "Object has no properties - [OK] [Apply] [Cancel]" - I guess
that's more of a bug than a simple misunderstanding. 

Also, I was rather expecting the Properties dialog to automatically
change itself to show the properties of whatever item is selected, so
I could leave it lying around like Gimp's Tool Options and so forth.
This doesn't work. 

I do like the Layers dialog box, though. But some suggestions: use the
same pixmaps as GIMP for the buttons, and have an option to "remember
the location of dialogs on startup" - Gimp 1.2 is much better than 1.0
for this exact reason.

Another idea: the arrowhead/linestyle options perhaps should be in the
Properties of line objects, not in the toolbox (since they aren't
tools). But wait! Foreground/background colour are in the toolbox
too, as per tradition.

OK, arrow-heads & linestyle (and colour) are already in properties
(hint: these items in properties should be nice and graphical like
they are in the toolbox, for ease of recognition!), and line-thickness
and so forth. I would then take away the arrow-head controls from the
toolbox, as they are applicable only to lines, whereas everything else
you draw will have an outline/fill colour, an outline-thickness, and
an outline-style.

That's about it, really. Some questions - is Dia going to stay a
specialised Diagram editor, or will it grow towards, oh, Corel, or
perhaps a CAD style program? Just wondering how closely I'll need to
watch it..

That's one thing I really noticed about the latest releases of various
GNOME Office programs - Abiword, GIMP, Dia and Gnumeric - they're all
beginning to look a bit more like a team. :) Now we hope for a little
more backend support - so that Abi and Dia can directly import any
image GIMP can open, everyone can render to [Gh|P]ostScript if
necessary, and of course lots of Bonobo goodness. :)

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