Shading palettes
Tool palettes have always been a problem with Krita. Or rather, with Qt and KDE. There's simply no good widget that offers the following features:
- Can dock to the inside border of a widget.
- Can dock to each other.
- Can shade to the height of the title bar.
- Can contain tabs that can be dragged to other dockers, or into thin air where they magically form the first tab of a new docker.
- Have an extensible array of widgets that can be added to the right-top corner.
- Don't stutter when dragged from a docked position to a floating position (QDockWindow quickly moves to application (0,0)).
- Has window decorations taken from the current theme, but smaller.
- And, most importantly, don't take focus from the main window when floating so all shortcuts in the main window still work.
For a while, Krita has used Kivio's sliding dockers. Quite clever little things that slide back into the window border when the mouse leaves them. But they posed some unpleasant usability issues and hard-to-solve bugs, so for the moment, I've gone back to QDockWindow-based dockers. In Qt 4, the stuttering appears to have been solved, at least, even if the other problems persist. But I've added a shade button, so even people with small screens (say 1600x1200...) can use Krita without having two columns of dockers.
The future will learn whether we'll keep this arrangement... Krita already has had many attempts at solving the problem of where to keep tool options and palettes -- take a look at the screenshots at our screenshot page. But I don't want to spend too much time at an issue that is in fact a library problem and has little to do with making a paint app.
Anyway, here's a piccy of Krita with most dockers shaded:
And here's the download of the cvs binary snapshot with this feature:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/krita-cvs-current.tar.bz2
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