So I’ve found myself hacking on agave a bit more lately, and I thought I’d experiment a little bit with some different UI ideas. Any thoughts and comments are welcome, of course.
Keep in mind that this is just at an experimental stage at the moment, so I may just throw it away if I decide that it doesn’t work well. I do think it gives a better sense of how the colors are related, though.
In any case, it’s been fun playing around a little bit with cairomm for once. In the end though, I’d probably want to implement this using some sort of canvas library, but I haven’t done enough research on the options that are currently available.
Agave is one of my favorite little programs. I like what your doing to the interface. It seems to be more “tangible” interface.
How about using an SVG document to describe the layout? I think Inkscape has a feature where instead of using specific colours for objects you can name them, then colour the names (or some such). Basically, like CSS and HTML.
This would be nice because then people could create different colour swatch layout templates, and folks could use Agave to explore the different colour combos.
For example, it would be nice to see a layout where the boxes are overlapping, to get a better idea of how the colours work in combination.
Another idea: How about having a feature where you could import a photograph and then Agave would automatically choose a colour scheme based on the colours used in it.
The photograph would be shown alongsidse the swatches. You would define how many colours you need, and then you could explore different combinations to get different feels, such as ‘corporate’ or ‘fun’.
Another idea: a way to compare two colour schemes side-by-side. The back button is great, but it would be even more helpful if it was possible to hit the ‘random’ button until an interesting combo appeared, ‘pin’ it, then generate more random combos. As you pin the interesting ones you can compare them on screen.
There might be many interesting colour palletes, but you only need one for your application so the job is to choose between them and for that a way to compare them at the same time would be ideal.
Thanks!
Cannot believe you are still using the term Favorites in a GTK app. Horribly inconsistent with everone else using Bookmarks, or anything else but Favorites.
That colour wheel looks pretty good though
Maybe you should borrow some ideas from Adobe’s Kuler? http://kuler.adobe.com/
thanks for the pointer to Adobe Kuler, there’s definitely some interesting stuff there.