[scribus-dev] Who is going to kill the style dialog ? Urban renewal

[Gregory Pittman]

On 11/10/2010 09:55 AM, dbolack at electricmulch.com wrote:
>>> The values are always visible and accessible. They are in the Properties
>>> Palette. The one issue to solve here is to put in the PP all the settings
>>> that are only available into the actual Style Manager.
>
> I'm that wacky class of user who finds those side palettes distracting and
> wasteful of screen real estate.

GUI DESIGN AS URBAN PLANNING

The PP has already become an overcrowded ghetto of functions that may 
have seemed like a good idea at the time, but have created a succession 
of cramming of information and choices into a dialog which would 
realistically need to crowd out the document display to easily show 
everything in it.

The answer is to find the philosophical approach that can serve as some 
sort of urban renewal, finding a new home for squatters on this precious 
real estate. At this point, if you're going to live in the PP, you have 
to justify your existence, either in terms of importance or kind of task 
you perform. I would propose that anything which is a simple toggle, a 
yes/no, check/uncheck, is a prime candidate for eviction to some other 
place, maybe a Context menu. (this brings up an interesting possibility 
of a Context Menu coming out of right-clicking the PP)

Only after some ground has been cleared, the remaining bits reorganized, 
are we in a position to putting more things in there, but even they 
would have to abide by the new paradigm.

The weakest argument for keeping something in the PP is that "it's been 
there since version 0.x". In software development, the only constant is 
change.

So here is my challenge: look at _every_ _single_ item in _every_ _tab_ 
of the PP and ask, "Does this need to be here?"

Greg