One thing that Xara will always have on inkscape (unless some enlightened individual does something about it) is their...
Sliders....and also the way changes happen in real time....Plus the gradated transparencies ETC..... (plus the feather slider ETC).....

These things simply MUST BE EMULATED...or even surpassed....

if inkscape can not at least match xara with respect to these things they will forever be in their shaddow in many ways...
I hope someone gets into this ASAP.

And while were on this topic i will give you my ideas on this:

I noticed how all vector apps now have what i call an "active content bar" IE that useful area up top that updates when you select an object or tool and serves up properties and tools that are pertinent and useful to the situation ETC.......(an excellent way to compact the user interface)...

Anyway my idea expands on this a little...i would like to see a UNIVERSAL SLIDER......

IE a big slider on the top bar that would not be only for one single purpose but would be a mainstay of the UI (user interface)that would "morph" and update to suit the situation......in the same way the active properties area does now...

Some ways i envisage a universal slider could be utilized:

1)So that if you selected the zoom tool this slider would update and become the zoom level slider....
2)when you select the layer tool it would morph to become a layer indicator...so that each layer would be shown as a tag along the line(like a timeline) and moving the slider would show show or hide only those layers that would be before the marker.... IE like selecting a snipet from a scene on a DVD editing program ETC....or you could click on the tags drag to re-arange ECT..
3)view quality..... again same as "2" you could right click on the bar and create tags to any view options you wanted IE one for only bitmap art....another for bimap art shown with all objects only outlines..... ETC...ie you could taylor this so that you could specify your favourite view options in any sequence you wanted.. then drag the slider across to trigger them in sequence.......
4) IE to adjust any filter......
as most filters and parameters require some kind of adjustment usually a number in a box.....with an up or down button ETC...

Again a universal slider could be used to adjust ANY (and every) parameter system wide with a short cut key or some kind of mouse action....
I.E imagine if from any parameter box (iE that you would normally click in and type a number) if you could just (say click and hold or use some other short cut key ETC) which would lock your cursor in place over the box whilst dragging the mouse from left to right would move the UNIVERSAL SLIDER which would then be used as a graphical representation of any property...
I.E alot of property boxes in programs now actually are implementing mini sliders on their boxes ETC...my idea expands on this as i find mini sliders annoying...their just to finicky and small.....
Why not have one big UNIVERSAL SLIDER?

If I remember correctly some of the Inkscape developers were on the xara development team, or at least just heavy users. I think I read somewhere that some Inkscape features resemble xara because of it. Maybe they can provide more input on this slider thingy.

As far as I understood one of the Inkscape's toolbars already behaves similarly, it changes to the currently selected tools options. It may not have all you suggested but I guess it's a matter of GUI organization, for example representing layers and their objects graphically in a dock has had some preparation done. Your idea seems to be to have one toolbar that would contain all the parameters one could alter within a tool. That probably isn't possible to do, have you seen the Filters dialogue? It can be huge even for a small filter with lots of sliders and boxes to tweak.

I've never used Xara so I'm not sure we are talking about the same features but in Inkscape things also happen in real time, and there are transparent gradients, not sure what the feather slider does, if it's similar to raster editors feather I think it can probably be done with filters.

btw in a volunteer project there is nothing that must be done and especially not asap I appreciate your ardency for certain features, maybe you can use it to contribute some improvements to Inkscape? I think it's good to have various applications so you can choose one that fits your needs best, it's impossible to have everything you can imagine in one single application.

cool thats true..also i dont mind if my ideas are already possible...that way i have just learned something...
I am i new user... but i do appreciate how xara has a few sliders right on top of the UI which are immediately on hand to move with-out having to dig into the menus ETC....

My Univeral slider idea is kind of an extension of this principal...its like saying "sliders are so useful generally, why not just have one big one?"
IE that you would not even have to move over to, to effect..ie from any property you could hold down the mouse and the cursor would stay in position but moving the mouse left or right would effect this slider so as it could be a visual short cut to adjust anything and would be on top and visible right on top of the UI........

Anyway its good to hear that transparent gradients are possible... i may infact be able to migrate to inkscape sooner than i thought...im a new user on xara also but if inkscape can do these things well also i may just skip xara all together...

I will investigate this TY

David Hewitt wrote:One thing that Xara will always have on inkscape (unless some enlightened individual does something about it) is their...
Sliders....and also the way changes happen in real time....Plus the gradated transparencies ETC..... (plus the feather slider ETC).....

Inkscape has both an Opacity slider and a Blur slider. Both effect your selected object in real time. I know Blur isn't the same as feather, but the SVG standard doesn't describe a feature filter. Inkscape would need to build the effect using a variety of other filters.

Remember that Inkscape is an SVG editor--it's capabilities are confined to the SVG standard. What ever effects Inkscape produces, they must do it in a way that allows any other SVG compliant software to render.

Do you have examples of software that uses a Universal slider? I've never used Xara, but perhaps there are some screenshots?

No i have no living examples actually as the idea is kind of mine but not exactly....(i will explain)
When i first saw xara i actually thought this was how their sliders worked ETC...I made an incorrect assumption....
And i was mightily impressed by this thought...

And then later on i realized that this was actually not the case and i never really stopped thinking about it...

i mean people can always learn to adapt to however a UI is laid out initially I think (when they are willing to learn it)... and when they get used to something they get comfortable and any deviation whatever is a pain to them....

Why i like the idea of the univeral slider is kind of a "conceptual justification".

Because the whole ethos of this idea is that it puts a big slider in the middle of the UI (Like the nose on your face) and because the whole idea of it is that it is "INFINITELY" adaptable (IE that it is designed to be able to adjust anything the user can possibly dream of and to serve up a pertinent use for EVERY CIRCUMSTANCE) it in a way comes to the rescue of the newbie in that it becomes like a rock. Dependable, always pertinent, useful and OMNIpresent.

And also i feel that when one starts to brain storm about an idea like this, one realizes just how much this idea cleans up the UI generally... because when you start to look into how such a slider could aptly behave in any given circumstance you realize that you have just made a quick shortcut that virtually negates the need to open up a dialogue or menu in this case....
And this same thing happens ad-infinitum....I.E it actually becomes a way of tying up a huge amount of functionality into one place.

Let me see if i can just off the top of my head spit-ball over the next few days in consecutive posts on just how many ways and different circumstances this could be use ful.... I'll post again for this...

I may not be qualified to participate in a discussion like this, except as the humble user. But I'm trying to wrap my head around this idea.

Using the Fill and Stroke dialog as an example, or more specifically all the settings which can be set or changed using this dialog, how could all that functionality be reduced to a single slider? Already a lot of color variables can be set using sliders. But how could ALL of them be represented by one slider? In reference to the HSL tab, and the 4 sliders there, I might want to increase L on some objects,, but not touch H, S or A, while for another object I might want to decrease them all. I forget my college statistics, so I can't offer how many different possible arrangements of H, S. L and A are there. But it would be so many as to seem infinite (to me, the humble user).

But then that's not the only tab for color. There's also the RGB and CMYK tabs. Basically, everything one might want to choose for color is represented by all these different sliders and settings. I just can't imagine how it ALL could be represented by just one slider. But then there's also the Blur and Opacity sliders. And plus, besides Fills, there should be color settings for the Stroke, as well as all the various Stroke Style settings.

I guess I don't really know, but it seems to me, even if such a univeresal slider could be implemented, there would still be a need for specialized buttons and what-not, outside the slider. Can you explain how all this various functionality could be reduced to the one single slider? What am I not getting?

How is this universal slider meant to know what aspect of the object you want to manipulate?
I can see it being very difficult to not make it a very frustrating lottery as to what it was effecting, and you'd end up with a lot of confused users.
One of the fundamental principles of inkscape is trying to make our UI easy to pick up, and consistant, this would be very hard to implement whilst maintaining this I think. We also try to do as much as possible on canvas, so you dont even need a slider, you can just grab a handle and adjust.

It would be nice to see your idea in practice, but if a single slider could control so much, then I agree with Simarilius that it sounds like it would be confusing. People might think it's going to change the object opacity, but then scales the object--"the last time it change opacity, why isn't that happening this time?" By having separate controls for separate functions there is little chance you'll confuse what they'll do.

perhaps it is naive of me to think that one slider could do so much....but:
I still believe That one slider could be used on the active content bar...one that would be alot bigger and have alot more uses..

Some of which are in my original post...
zooming, Why not.... display quality, opacity, ETC ETC....

The active content bar already serves up different types of tools why not make more and better use of the slider...
and i would love to see a super sized one with some unique and powerful options.....

And although seasoned inkscape users may not appreciate how alluring this is...
I believe that this is a BIG component of why newbies are 10 times more impressed with xara than they ever would be with inkscape in the crucial first encounters....

Having a slider in your face on the UI as xara does to adjust feathering and display quality ETC without having to dig into menus eTC is very nice....
the wow of such things can not be underestimated...

• If its a lot bigger its taking up space other things could use
• Zooming has 2 sets of always visible controls already in the window, that always zoom, why do we need a 3rd that sometimes zooms?
• Opacity is always visible, and always affects opacity...
• Display quality in inkscape only has 3 states if your refering to modes, a toggle button on the top toolbar would make more sense

incidentally, I'm found the xara ui confusing as hell when i tried it, which was pre inkscape, so I think its a matter of perception...

also with regards to your first post, we do gradients with transparancies, and you can do alpha masks as well, and pretty much everything updates live as you do it, so I'm not sure what some of those statements about us missing those features are about.

I guess different people find different things confusing...
and i have to admit some things about xara are confusing but also some things about inkscape are a bit odd.
Personally i find the way the last object becomes the default is throwing me off a bit but that is not a criticism so much as that i am not used to it....

with regards to the first post that was when i first stumbled across inkscape so i was probing that one as this was what impressed me about xara but also the way that this functionality was right ontop of the UI with a slider...
personally i like this....

And also there are alot of people, some have already said on this list that there is a perception out there (not really deserved) that inkscape is a bit dinky...

Perhaps its the icons that are throwing people off...I dont know but i cant help but feel there is a little more to it than that....

You said "Zooming has 2 sets of always visible controls already in the window, that always zoom, why do we need a 3rd that sometimes zooms?"
Well I assume you mean the magnifying icon and the set of 3 icons up the top for preset views....?

You dont think that a slider that actively zooms in as you move it is not an improvement?

Its better than a few presets.....And it has a big wow factor...(just my view)

David Hewitt wrote:You said "Zooming has 2 sets of always visible controls already in the window, that always zoom, why do we need a 3rd that sometimes zooms?"
Well I assume you mean the magnifying icon and the set of 3 icons up the top for preset views....?

You dont think that a slider that actively zooms in as you move it is not an improvement?

Its better than a few presets.....And it has a big wow factor...(just my view)

I'd like to see the value in the spinbox get the bulia click and drag treatment, but to be honest 3 presets, plus a spinbox, plus wheel mouse, plus keyboard shortcuts covers it fairly well for me. I tend to use the wheel on the mouse, dont even need to move it to grab a slider then...
so no, no major wow factor from my perspective.

i guess the main thing is that the functionality exists and is easy to execute...
Having been informed about the mouse wheel functionality for zooming with respect to the zoom box on the bottom right in inkscape...I'm satisfied with that and no-longer desire the zoom slider....

I did like this idea but mainly for functionality's sake not so much because i was otherwise obsessed with the idea of a slider for this in particular...(maybe i was a bit)

Although having thrashed this idea out a bit i am going cold on now....I don't mind changing my opinion and turning corners...
provided it can be done and easily i'm happy.... especially as its on the "Front line" of the UI which was the main driving force and justification for the thing......