Form & Function
Saturday, July 15th, 2006
All these black and white images are a result of me trying to get into the habit of using my own software again. Jujusketch has potential but still no user interface (unless you count the keyboard as a user interface), and I’m trying to decide what it should look like. Minimal is a word that comes to mind. I don’t want palettes and swatches all over the place, à la Photoshop and Illustrator, and I don’t want a dense heirarchy of menus, à la the execrable Gimp.
Also, I have very little time to spare for this project (or any other right now) so my goal must be: super simple, minimal functionality, non intrusive and somehow very intuitive.
Easy peasy!
July 15th, 2006 at 12:49 am
Sign me up for a better user interface! I want to try it out! Super simple, minimal functionality sounds awesome!
July 15th, 2006 at 1:07 am
Good luck, I’d love to give this a shot too (ever since I saw it a while back in one of your screencasts).
July 15th, 2006 at 5:32 am
yay for jujusketch!!!!!
July 15th, 2006 at 11:51 am
Can you tell us a little bit about what you are thinking for an interface? I’m really curious to see what your thought process is for designing a UI. (and I want to butt in with suggestions, natch.)
-r.
July 16th, 2006 at 1:14 am
When I have something to tell I will :) but I’m definitely thinking about it lately (because I am using it). My thought process usually involves experimenting with code…
Two UI features already in place: auto save and “files as pages”, so you never have to name a file, and you can skip between drawings easily. I use it like a sketchbook
July 18th, 2006 at 4:29 am
Interesting that your thought process involves direct coding. Neat - I would never have guessed. Does the autosave saves each state as a series of pages? In any case, saving multiple pages as a single file is an awesome innovation! I have wanted that for _years_ with Photoshop/Flash.
July 18th, 2006 at 11:23 am
Each page/drawing is saved as a separate file, named by it’s time stamp in a certain folder. When you hit Alt-PgUp or Alt-PgDown it autosaves your current drawing (if necessary) and loads the next/previous drawing in that folder. Early on I tried storing multiple sketches in one file, but decided it made more sense to keep them as separate files (the user will rarely if ever need to open that folder)
July 20th, 2006 at 2:08 am
Thats quite nice. I had been wishing that I could do that with graphics programs (among others) for years.
July 20th, 2006 at 10:28 am
Same paging functionality exists in Jujuedit (great for folders full of php files), although i’ve left out autosave because no one expects a text editor to autosave, and it would be confusing :(