My only niggle with Paint.NET

[mgillespie]

Wondering if this is the place to discuss, but I find the default tool, the pen to be an odd choice.

I naturarly expect it to be the select tool, and every time I open Paint.NET, and expect to drag an area to select, it draws a line.

Anyone else have this problem? Seems my natural expectation is for the select tool to be the default...

[aatwo]

The pen tool is pretty much all I use and definitely the first thing i use. I love it.

[BoltBait]

Think about the total no0b...

You are smart enough to change the tool, they may not be. They run a paint program and want to start painting.

Let them discover the selection tool on their own.

[barkbark00]

I think that the no0b and the expert could be satisfied by being able to select the default tool. The program default could be set to the paintbrush, and then anyone who wanted to could change it as they "discover" the other tools.

[SearedIce]

Wow...this has been discussed so many times before...

I know that almost every time I open up PDN, I accidentally draw a little line with the brush, but if it were the select tool, I'd probably be accidentally selecting things and/or moving them around. My left hand is my Ctrl+Z hand...it's a 1/2 second operation to undo any accidental edits and maybe a 3/2 second operation to switch to a new tool.

Either way, I do think this should be a preference thing...I just don't know where the preference setting would fit into the PDN interface. Maybe now that we have the tool dropdown thing in the menubar area, we could have a checkbox/radiobutton next to the dropdown that says something like "Default Tool" or "Startup Tool"...

[Rick Brewster]

I'm hoping to address this in a similar way to how I've done the color palettes feature (or maybe it won't be similar). I've got that Tool drop down in the toolbar that I plan on using for something interesting.

In the interim, as a workaround, just press S to jump to the rectangle selection tool.

[Rick Brewster]

What about something like ... (and yes it's rough draft, it says "PdnBaseForm" at the top, just bear with me)

This solves a few things:

* People always ask me to change the default tool to the selection tool. This lets them set it to whatever they want.

* Even more often, people ask me why the paint bucket or magic wand won't work. The reason is they accidentally set the tolerance to 0 or 100%. In 2.xx the tolerance setting is 'sticky'. With this dialog the setting is not automatically sticky and you must set the default manually.

* Same for alpha blending and antialiasing settings: in 2.xx they are sticky but people constantly disable them by accident and I get e-mails and questions about why the drawing quality is so horrid.

[Illnab1024]

And these settings could just be thrown into pdncrash.log? Or perhaps put in a plaint text config file.

Nice solution, though.

[Rick Brewster]

... why would they go into pdncrash.log ?

[Illnab1024]

When bugs do come up for this (which they do for new features)

[Rick Brewster]

Nah the only real problem here should be if the settings get corrupt or invalid somehow. And I detect that when loading and just revert to all defaults.

[trickman]

I don't like it. It is much easier as it is: a toolbar that changes everytime a tool is changed. It is way easier if you are always changing the font size, like me.

[barkbark00]

trickman: cool thing about this is nothing has to change for people who like it the way it is, we'll still have the custom toolbars eveytime the tool changes. this is just a way to set some defaults for those toolbars. from what it looks like, you could leave the defaults the way they are and nothing would change for you....

[trickman]

Oh! =)

[SearedIce]

Looks good, Rick. It'll be a somewhat new thing for PDN to have a dialog dedicated to config/preferenes. I do like, however, that this is something only experienced/"advanced" users would ever need/want to touch...it shouldn't get in the way of PDN being easy to use.

[BoltBait]

Wait a minute, Rick. Are you saying that you are thinking of adding an Options screen?

I'm sure if I spent a minute or two I could dig up a post of yours where you state that you would NEVER do that.

Now for a serious comment: I like the tollerance being sticky. But, I suppose I could live with the abililty to change the default to 31%.

[Rick Brewster]

Well, in this case there is a real conflict between simplicity and preference.

I dont want the tool choice to simply be sticky between sessions. That would end up having PDN open w/ the Clone Stamp (for instance) if you closed it with the Clone Stamp tool active. So that would not solve "I want selection to be the default tool."

The toolbar items have reasonable defaults, but if you don't provide a way to preserve their changed settings then for many users it becomes annoying to start up Paint.NET and have to go and change 4-5 things to the values that are always used.

This also solves accidentally changing settings to undesirable values and essentially being locked out of functionality. I really am serious that I get e-mails all the time about the magic wand and paint bucket being "broken" because the user went to go click on a shape tool or the color swatch but accidentally nicked the Tolerance bar. Same thing for the antialiasing/alpha blending toggle buttons. (I've even seen this happen in person!)

This way, a user cannot 'break' the paint bucket forever. If they nick the tolerance to 0% on accident, it'll be back to 50% the next time they start Paint.NET. The only way to set this to always be 0% is to go into a dialog, set it to 0% and then press Save -- it's much harder to accidentally do that.

It's not really a "options dialog" per se, although this could just be me arguing semantics to uphold previous canon. It's not like I've got tabs and spinny buttons for configuring scratch disks and thumbnail update latency and stuff. Nobody really cares about that stuff, although for those who do they can just get the source code.

Other parts of the UI will continue to adhere to the "toaster philosophy" of remembering settings in an intuitive fashion. You know, kinda like how a toaster just remembers the positions of its knobs for controlling toast lightness/darkness ("toastiness) but doesn't provide microwave-esque functionality for configuring 85 other things -- it's very simple, but also completely and blatantly obvious what's going on and how to use it even for someone who's never used a toaster before. When's the last time you met someone who couldn't use a toaster ... and, now, when's the last time you were confused by a microwave that you weren't used to?

[BoltBait]

Well, I'm a computer programmer so that may not be a fair question...

I never could figure out how keep my toast from burning.

[Illnab1024]

... and, now, when's the last time you were confused by a microwave that you weren't used to?

My last microwave was different than the other 10 year old one I had before (hand me downs are fun, eh?), I got very confused...

This would also bring up another nagging question: Would there be a possibility to program in a drop down for the line/curve tool to select how many nubs there would be? Like 3, 4, 5, and 6?

[Rick Brewster]

I'm not planning to make changes to the Line/Curve tool for 3.0. But that is where it would go, sure.

[mgillespie]

Excellent, the options dialog for tool defaults is very nice idea.

If a user never discovers the options, then they are no better/worse off than currently, so it does not add to the complexity of the application in any way, but does make it better for the casual power user at the same time.