shicmap, our developer is interested in improving popup pallete.
She asked me to start thread so here we go.

My opinion is like this:

Current way is that you have to add brush engines to pallete.
I'm lazy so my pallete is always empty and I use combo box in toolbar.

I suggested to fill the pallete at the start with 12 most useful brush engines. We would make some selection (e.g. curve brush as the most important one! ). Lazy user has bonus - radial menu with brush engines.
And it still should be customizable, so that you can remove some engine and add your preffered one.

Some icons are hard to remember, so maybe make it fix the possitions of the brush engines somehow? That way you remember the position of the brush engines in the wheel.

Shicmap suggested to make it work like with recent colors. Personally I'm not sure -- maybe have this as optional behaviour?

What are your ideas artists, developers?

Actually I didn't even notice the brush "palette" system.
Now that you talk about it I've noticed the "save to palette" button, but I don't find how to show that palette.

I've always used brush engine selector and settings and presets selector to switch tools.

so I don't have much advice on this now. Make it the best you think .

The palette shows up when you right click with the freehand tool.

but I don't find how to show that palette.

right click on your canvas

I think the best idea is the one shicmap proposed on IRC: to make brush behave like recently used colors. So, if I understand correctly, the 12 last used brush presets would be shown by order of last use. I think it'll make the workflow very efficient, as it's rare to use more than 12 different kind of brush in one illustration. One could even paint an entire illustration without moving the stylus outside the canvas !

One problem to solve is that more informations are needed to distinguish brushes (a tooltip when the icon is hovered ? an "info" overlay over the canvas ? a preview of the brush tip ? ...) because then their position in the Quick Palette may change often.

To be honest, the biggest problem for using the palette... is that right click is kind of broken with a stylus at the moment.

I am not convinced by the idea of automatically using the last used settings. From what I have understood, many artists have a fixed set of color they use in a palette, so I would suppose the same would apply for brush settings.

Lastly, the "save to palette" button desperately need a tool type, something like "This save the current settings to the palette that you can access by right-clicking on the canvas".

Now that I understand more what it is about, my opinion about this is that it would be cool to can select favorite presets from this palette (with possibly several times the same brush engine with various settings).And show them with the "preview icon" associated .

(By the way here the Stylus right click works to show the pop up palette.. I just didn't notice before that I could select tools from here as there was no tools saved in it before..)

in mypaint there is a area with favourite brushes (presets). you can drag and drop anything you want there.

http://imagebin.ca/view/mPTbb9iD.html

if every brush preset has a sample stroke or a bitmap etc, then it would be very simple to distinguish. it would be also possible to display the name.

also default favourites wouldn't be a problem, if we have some default presets.

Animtim wrote:Now that I understand more what it is about, my opinion about this is that it would be cool to can select favorite presets from this palette (with possibly several times the same brush engine with various settings).And show them with the "preview icon" associated.

I really like this hypothetical set-up, but an optional history with the last 12 selected brushes would be good too for the lazy artists.

cyrille wrote:To be honest, the biggest problem for using the palette... is that right click is kind of broken with a stylus at the moment.

Personally I haven't any problem with the right click of the stylus and the popup palette...

Personally I' just like to see:

1. The pop up palette using presets, the same as when you choose "Save to preset"
2. A system to quickly add and remove from the pop up palette *in* the palette rather than in a separate window (for example a + to add the current settings as a preset and a - to delete the currently selected preset)
3. Some kind of system that to intelligently fill empty spots with useful settings (say the last few tools+settings that you've used to draw more than a couple of lines)
4. Mypaint style previews of the brushes woul rock, but only if there's space to show them decently. Not sure about this...

Being able to make the canvas fullscreen and just use the palette 95% of the time would be a *huge* win imho.

Ok, so here is what I will do:

1. Add a tool tip to 'save to palette'
2. Implement lock system, so users can lock their favourite brushes
3. Implement presets instead of brushes (or would we rather leave it be and provide easy access to brush settings on the canvas?)
4. I want to implement the 'mypaint preview' but Lukas told me that it would be slow.

@kubuntiac: can you upload a mockup of what you would like the palette to do? The last one was very helpful.

Ideas are welcome, thanks for your help.

I'd definitely go for presets here. Though it might be interesting to make the brush engine icons have a sort of pop-out with the last three or four presets used, I think think that selecting from a number of presets is the most useful thing.

If we go for the preset, then we will need to show the brush previews instead of icons.. According to Lukas, it would be slow. I wonder if there is a better way.

We can use maybe the stroke saved in the preset?

Drawing stroke everytime you show pallete would be slow, like when we had the preview of the brush in the toolbar.

The stroke saved in the preset? Hmm, interesting. Do you mind to tell me more about this? Send me an email if it is too long to explain here