[maemo-developers] Color wheel mockup

[From: Felipe Erias Morandeira]

Hi

A colorwheel would look nice, yes :-) The problem with using it in these
devices is that it is not possible to perform fine adjustments directly,
and that's why it must be complemented by a way to enter/modify numeric
values. There is an interesting disjunctive between selecting a color
quickly vs. doing it precisely.

Looking at other applications (i.e. GIMP), one sees that there are
several acceptable ways of selecting a color, and each one might be
better than the others for certain use cases (or even for certain
users!). So, I began to wonder if it would be possible to offer several
color selectors, maybe through the use of stacked dialogs (horror!) or
tabs (more horror!).

At the end, I settled for more or less the solution represented in the
mockup. There is one fixed area in the right side of the dialog with a
button for selecting the selector (yeah!), the current color, its
HTML-like representation and a "Done" button. The left area is used to
display the different methods for selecting a color.

Tap the selector and you get a set of possible ways for selecting a
color, i.e.:
  - GIMP-like (the one in the mockup)
  - RGB
  - CMYK
  - colorwheel
  - recent colors
  - ...

The interesting part is that changing the selector doesn't change the
currently selected color, so if needed you can combine several
strategies until you get the color that you want.

Additionally, the selected method should be stored (i.e. in a GConf key)
so when you open the color selector again you would be presented with
the last selector that you used. The nice thing about this is that
despite having several ways for selecting a color, if you find one that
suits you well you will only have to set it once :-)


Regards,

Felipe

Cornelius Hald wrote:
> Hi Felipe,
> 
>> I have created a small mockup of a possible
>> HildonExtrasColorChooserDialog. It uses a view in Edit mode (is that the
>> correct term?) to be able to fit the colorwheel in the screen without
>> making it too small. On the left, there is space for the six last used
>> colors. On the right, the use can adjust the selected color in greater
>> detail, even entering the HTML-equivalent code.
>>
>> I thought about adding a way to select the kind of values to be entered
>> (RGB, CMYK, HSL...).
>>
>> What do you think?
> 
> thanks for joining the discussion and for providing the mockup :)
> 
> First, I like that you've not given up on the color wheel. I think it's
> a nice way of selecting a color. The problems is, that it takes quite
> some space, so the idea to use the complete window makes a sense here.
> 
> The problem is, that it seems a bit inconsistent with the rest because
> most of the time simple dialogs are used. For me personally this is not
> a big problem, but it might be for others.
> 
> I think the buttons on the left would not be needed as this dialog would
> already be the "Advanced" view of the simple color chooser. If you
> remove those and save some space on the right, maybe you could fit it
> into a normal dialog?
> 
> It will probably get a bit difficult to find the right "Advanced"
> dialog. But it's great that we already have choice :)
> 
> What do other think about this mockup?
> Conny
> 
> 
> 
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