I'd be very interested to hear suggestions on how the PI should respond when resized, as I agree it would be much nicer if it didn't have to fix its width and height. Do the controls expand? Which ones? Or does the padding between controls expand?
So glad you popped in! Talking to the source is great.
Here's my take on resizing the palette: It shouldn't do that on its own, it should respect the user's preference. In some apps, the solution is to add a "more" arrow at the right of the row, usually a double angle bracket (">>"), and when clicked, the whole icon group slides left to reveal the right-hand icons that were not previously visible. A "less" icon at the left ("<<") slides the row back to the right again. If the palette is made wide enough to accomodate all the icons, then the more and less arrows are disabled. This allows the user to set their preferred size and still reveal all the options. It's disorienting to have the whole palette change size spontaneously.
If things like the windowShape id field are shortened to fit only a few digits, should increasing the width just increase the empty space?
Yes, leave the space empty. It will look better than the very wide controls that contain little text, especially if the text is all left-aligned.
For the alignment of the checkboxes -- I think they look fine left-aligned with the left side of the fields above them. That's normal on OS X so I'm used to it. It may not be standard on other operating systems, so I guess mileage may vary. Unless you want to vary the layout by OS, I'm not sure how to resolve this.
One thing I'd like to see is a permanent Align icon. It isn't intuitive to only display it when multiple objects are selected. It should enable/disable as needed, but it should always be visible so that users know the PI supports the feature. If it is necessary for some reason that it not be displayed at all times, it should at least appear at the right side of the row rather than the left. The displacement of the expected icon order is unexpected and not where users will likely notice it. At least, I didn't until it was pointed out to me. Consistent layout is an important useability feature; users will memorize that "the Basic pane is always the first item at the left" and if you tinker with that you've introduced disorientation.
Richmond's idea to have a "both" option for the icons is what I'd like to see too. Then I don't have to scan with the mouse to read the (as yet nonworking) tooltips. In fact, with a "both" option you could probably ditch the tooltips entirely.
