You Can't Please Everyone

If there's one thing I've learned in designing GUI's and websites is you can't please everyone. One person's favorite part is another's "worst idea ever".

Same goes for Pinta. Some people want to be able to move the various widget pads away from their canvas. Others want them to always be visible and easy to reach.

For Pinta 0.4, we're going to try to please as many people as possible. To do that, we've brought in MonoDevelop's incredibly awesome docking library. This allows you to resize, move, close, float, and autohide pads.

Here's the default:


Here's an example of a customized layout:


Hopefully this will please 90% of our users! Many thanks to the MonoDevelop team for such as awesome (and small!) library!

Comments

Justin said…
Jonathan, your work on Pinta is inspiring. I realize that Cairo is doing a lot of the heavy lifting but Pinta may be the best example yet of how productive Mono can be as a platform.

People complain about the size of the framework but Pinta shows how much punch you can pack into a small binary that uses .NET/GTK#.

I also realize that Pinta is no GIMP but, at the rate you are going, is not hard to imagine that changing before we know it.

I love the panels in MonoDevelop. Gotta love open source where code from your IDE can be leveraged directly in your app.

I also love that I can use Pinta on Linux, Windows, and Mac. How did I ever get by without it?
June 2, 2010 at 7:48 PM
Anonymous said…
Amazing. Just like in KDE/Qt programs. I like it.
June 2, 2010 at 11:36 PM
N8 said…
This application looks great. I'm thoroughly impressed with the speed at which this is moving along. I do app development day in day out and it trudges along at a snails pace sometimes. Great work.
June 3, 2010 at 1:16 AM
Whitemice Consulting said…
Nice. Is there any documentation somewhere concerning Monodevelop.Dock ?
June 3, 2010 at 6:29 AM
prokoudine said…
How about build system instead? :)
June 3, 2010 at 7:26 AM
Jonathan Pobst said…
@Whitemouse: Unfortunately, there is not. You can go by how Pinta uses it:

http://github.com/jpobst/Pinta/blob/master/Pinta/MainWindow.cs

@prokoudine: Not sure what you mean by that. If you want an autotools build system, that's been added to git as well.
June 3, 2010 at 8:31 AM
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