Thursday, June 19, 2008

The vertical block is finally gone

It's finally gone!!!

The main tools toolbar has been forced into a stock GtkToolbar. Now that it is no longer a limiting factor, Inkscape is much more usable on screens 1024x768 or smaller. Any tools that don't show up in what space the toolbar does get just end up under the popup menu at the bottom.

On the setup I'd been checking size on previously this now shrinks the minimum size down to 535x469 (and on my Eee PC that hight is down to 460... very usable there).

Also in all the cleanup I was able to get in some needed fixes to floating out the toolbars.

Previously I'd whittled things down from 652x735 to 600x583. So it's over 36% shorter than before.

Overlaying this new size on top of the previous comparison really shows the difference.

I avoided some of the work of changing legacy code over by wrapping things in a simple Gtk::Action subclass (yay C++) so was able to get things functional much sooner than I'd hoped. Now it's time to add a few more things... especially since the cleanup I did manage to do put things in place to have string-based UI.

4 comments:

jegHegy said...

Great job! What would work well with this new behavior is a way to configure the order tools are presented in on the bar. This would allow a small screen display but not cripple usability if the most frequently used tools are customizable to be on top.

heathenx said...

Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! This is something that I needed for screencasting Inkscape and anytime that I'm running 800x600 res in A VM. Can't wait for it to be implemented.

Thank-you. :)

Anonymous said...

Huge one man applause from .cz :)

carlos said...

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Can't wait to use inkscape .47