Better pop-up palette thumbnails
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Description

Currently thumbnails of painttop presets assigned to the "favorites" ring appear in a slice of a circle. Since this slice even rotates, this is inconsistent, unpredictable, it wastes a lot of the square thumbnail area and the safe area is a small irregular polygon between the center and the top-left corner. It is often hard to tell which preset is shown. These issues are outlined in the following picture:

Given this actually impacts usability, I believe it can be considered an issue rather than a wish.

My proposal for a much better solution is using circular thumbnails, similar to a revolver's drum. A circle is simple, consistent, predictable, unaffected by rotation, provides a large safe area and in my opinion even looks nice and clean. It is also not too complicated to calculate.

I created the following mockup to showcase this solution:

The change in the number of slots can be handled in a few ways in order to avoid huge thumbnails with the number of slots set to few:

  • Setting a minimum to the number of slots. Unused slots may disappear leaving an empty space without slot size change, or display an empty slot.
  • Maximizing the size of the slots will stop them from becoming too large. In case of too few slots they can be added next to each other in a circular direction, or distributed evenly around.

As the number of slots increase over a certain number, they can become smaller to accommodate the space around the circle, or optionally a second set could appear in an outer circle after a point. Size of the pop-up palette is not a big concern since it only displays on the screen when it is actually used, so it doesn't take away user space.

Storm created this task.Jan 31 2016, 12:05 AM
Restricted Application added a subscriber: woltherav. · View Herald TranscriptJan 31 2016, 12:05 AM