Hi Christine,

True enough, I definitely did not realize many designers prefer working at sub-1280 resolutions. I'm not a professional user of Photoshop, working with it on a daily basis, so my comments are offered with that in mind. But, I do feel that even in light of my limited perspective, my opinions still merit consideration (not to imply you said otherwise).

My favorite example, if not obvious already, is that regarding mobility-impaired individuals. Why? Because even though I cannot fully appreciate their difficulties since I have no such problems to deal with myself, I can appreciate how something as simple as toolbars could greatly simplify their tasks in using Photoshop and enhance their opportunities to explore their own creative visions. One individual who uses my PhotoBars supplement wrote how grateful they were to have back their buttons/toolbars after Extensis deleted them from Phototools. I forget now whether they only had one hand or not, but basically they were limited to one usable hand, and they usually resorted to normal menu access in lieu of keyboard shortcuts for executing Photoshop commands. Having a toolbar of buttons allowed them to work a bit more quickly and feel more productive. As you can imagine, that was a very nice letter to receive.

I know you said that customizable toolbars are fine, so you're not really disputing what I said so much as offering more food for thought on this topic. And I do agree that customization can get out of hand if one isn't mindful of what they're doing. But, after getting that one letter, I guess I nearly feel I've stepped onto a new platform of supporting such ideas that can benefit even a scant few such users of Photoshop. Last night I even began to wonder how a person might proceed to enter text if typing on a keyboard is difficult for them. Speech recognition came to mind, so I gave that a shot...using WinXP's capabilities to dictate text into Word, then cut it with a click and paste it into PSCS. That worked fine, save for not being able to dictate the Cut command...I think there's a way to do that.

Pardon this extra rambling...I realize I'm getting off track from the basics of the topic.

Anyway, yes, customization can get out of control and surely could introduce problems into the software code that just make a complex application all the more error-prone. I'm also in agreement that the PSP approach with pop-up toolbars is not something I'd want to see arise in Photoshop. Your comment about InDesign is interesting in that you say "learning the program as it was designed". Considering that customizable options are part of "as it was designed", then putting those features to use is doing what the designers intended...making it fit one's usage preferences.

I'm not too fond of the idea of being able to change capabilities that are prone to becoming fouled up in their operation. For example, if Adobe provided toolbars and buttons for every menu option as is done with PhotoBars, then I'd be happen to see those buttons all be "rigid" and not changeable. Toolbar content would be flexible to the user's whims, but a toolbar is merely a container and not something that controls any operations within the application. Again by example, I don't care how I move around the buttons in the Word toolbars...each button still performs the task it was intended for, while the toolbar it resides in has merely changed for a different organization that I prefer.

User customization would then be more for creating new buttons specific to other capabilities. Another example: Let's say I create 10 actions that I use frequently in my workflow (hobbyflow?) and I assign them to the F1-F10 keys. Looking at the keys, I see meaningless labels...F1, F2, etc. But, what if I instead created a button icon that was quickly recognizable for each of those 10 actions, and then grouped them onto a toolbar? Hmmmm...maybe now I can just hide that Actions palette and use a more space-conscious toolbar. What about the palette buttons mode though?...well, sure, but it still takes up more space than I care to give up. Oh, and those other 90 actions I've got? I like this...I could group them into toolbars to be enabled/disabled according to the tasks for which they are used, and perhaps even save the toolbar states as part of my Workspace presets. Things could indeed get confusing, but I think there could also be a wealth of efficiency offered to power users of Photoshop. Of course, other considerations still factor in...those actions mapped into each toolbar are only valid if the related action set has been loaded, thus redefining F1-F10 appropriately. That leads to even more ideas...but I'll stop there. Ha!

This is an engineer brainstorming for a moment on capabilities he'd likely never use, or rarely so. But, where one person has an idea they might never use, another may see that as something they could exploit to great benefit...if it were only truly available.

As for your comment about those small icons in my example earlier, I wonder if you were viewing that image at full scale? If you're using IE6 as your browser, it may be autoscaling the image to fit your the window and indeed the icons would be unreadable. Although the icons are still smallish when the image is viewed at its full 1280px width, that size works well for me. Obviously they'd appear larger on lower-res screen settings. So long as buttons can be readily distiguished from one another and are large enough to readily select, I think they can often be kept smaller than one would think. What happens over time is that you simply learn to associate the look of the button with the command it invokes, and the actual detail of the button image is secondary. But, it still more readily triggers the memory as to what command is executed than would an "F1", "F2", etc. Similarly, a "back" or "forward" button is visually much more intuitive and less demanding on one's memory than is "Alt-Ctrl-Z" or "Shift-Ctrl-Z". Then again, clicking on an earlier history state is pretty darn easy too. :)

By the way, while I do like easily recognizable buttons, there are quite a few icons I created for PhotoBars that remain rather nondescript. For example, I don't believe anyone would say these buttons appear intuitive... <http://jazzdiver.com/photoshop/artistic_filters.jpg> :)

For providing quick access to existing commands in Photoshop, PhotoBars works great. For providing truly custom-defined keys for keystroke sequences, Extensis outright failed in that effort and never provided a solution.

Christine, I might say "you're happy with your piano"...and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. No matter what sheet of music is laid before you, you know which keys to play and where they're found. It is as efficient as you need it to be. Still others will enjoy taking that same sheet music over to their electric keyboard...it powers up and sounds and plays like a piano, but they have the option of making it sound like whatever instrument better serves their own tastes.

Anybody think maybe this is a dull Thursday night for me? HA!

Cheers,

Daryl

Bev_Merson

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Photoshop toolbar issues