These are some ideas I came across with as I was painting, is nothing really important and hardly interesting I would guess , but for future generations years from now, it may "spark" other ideas or concepts.

The main idea is to have a pop-up palette that can handle a bit more of the current, the development branch already have controls for the canvas interaction like zooming, mirroring and rotation. Is making me think that a tiny bit more functions would let us use it as a place to reach for tools, controls and settings while in "canvas-only" mode or on any workspace or customized UI.

The concept is to have a pop-up palette that can stay open if desired; a "painter-mode" button, when clicked will keep the palette even after clicking on its components like the presets or the history color ring. But would allow for the right-click or a short cut to still open it or close it, in short, no left-click closure.

The reasoning behind this is that a easy to reach set of controls would likely deliver a smoother workflow, specially for those who a times are only painting without using much of the other features. the "canvas-only' mode is excellent for this, and I'm thinking this idea as an extension of it. This would allow to click continuously on it with out the need to right click only to change brushes. or colors, many a times we "second-think" the brush/color we just pick, and go back to change it. Getting access to the future canvas controls would also be quick, the pop-up palette can be placed anywhere in the canvas (as it is now with the right-click or shortcut) where the user can easily reach it with the cursor.

The first state of the pop-up palette could have all controls hidden, as I show in the top of the mock-up picture, where buttons (distributed symmetrically across the corners of the pop-up palette), are use to access the controls and settings, as it is now with the HUD, make them also easy to reach and moving them (the controls, not the buttons) out of the way at will.

The active color indicator wouldn't be as currently is, since opening the pop-up palette already show the foreground color that is active by highlighting it, thus in this idea as shown in the picture below, only the background color would show through a inner ring, (whit a proper tool-tip to mention what it is).

Extra, and this I don't even know if is reasonable (even as an idea), there could be a button/shortcut to switch the presets for the brush tips, this will present the tips instead of the brush icons in the pop-up palette, for easy access (switching also the tag button to show the tips tags), clicking or using the same shortcut will bring back the presets as usual.

This is cool idea but developers too busy to do something like this. Though the good news is that you will be able to do it yourself then Python scripting will be added. I have similar idea but I rather want to create my own pop-up palette and make it more comfortable but probably more ugly