🚀 go-pugleaf

I would dearly love to see a pallette well in Illustrator 11 (Which will
probably be named IllustratorX like everything else these days).

A pallette well is needed in AI as much (if not more so) than it was needed
in Photoshop. Surely the rationale for introducing it in Photoshop is
convincing enough? There certainly needs to be a better way of reducing
pallette clutter, and Photoshop's pallette well has proved invaluable.

Docking and tabbing pallettes is fine, but it doesn't really break the back
of the clutter problem. There are far too many pallettes in AI and InDesign
which contain only one or two functions. Do we really need a whole separate
pallette for transparency, for example? Wouldn't this be better incorporated
into the Layers pallette or something? Photoshop's solution is elegant and
clutter-free. (Beats me why text runaround needs a separate pallette in
InDesign - surely this could be incorporated into the Paragraph pallette?

I can understand the problems with introducing an Options Bar along with a
pallette well. It would be a complicated (but much welcomed) programming
feat to create a context-sensitive bar like Photoshop has. But the
feasibility of an Options Bar has NOTHING to do with the pallette well.  If
we can't have an Options Bar with pallette well, just give us the pallette
well! The two don't need to go together!

One idea might be to incorporate a *non-contextual* bar with the well. For
example, the Info pallette could be transformed into a bar which also holds
the pallette well. This surely wouldn't be too hard to implement, especially
since the code has already been written.

Another reason the pallette well is necessary - Adobe products are supposed
to share the same UI. This isn't just for ease of use. It's also to increase
efficiency. What works in one app should be shared with all the other apps,
as far as possible. (For example, InDesign would also benefit hugely from a
pallette well.) Photoshop's File Browser is another great tool which should
be implemented throughout the Adobe Product line. Either with app-specific
tweaks, or by making it a 'universal' browser that understands the metadata
in other Adobe files.

The various UI teams for Photoshop, ImageReady, Illustrator and InDesign
should be working together. It's silly for one team to have to duplicate the
work of another. It's even sillier when the end-users have to beg and plead
for them to do so!

;-Peter