The workbench paradigm

IDEs and other power software tools suffer a tension between power and complexity. A photo editing tool has a dozen menus; each might have a dozen selections, and many of those might have submenus. If you remove all the menus and selection, you remove the tool's power. If you keep them, then finding out how to do the thing you want to do next means searching for the right command.

Some tools get you around this by letting you type a string that fuzzy-matches to the function that you are looking for. That's better, but still requires quite a bit of fiddling to get the function that you want.

Instead, consider a shop project as a governing paradigm. A skilled craftsman has a workshop full of tools and materials, but for any one task, needs only a few. Before commencing work the craftsman grabs the needed tools and materials, lays them out on the workbench in easy reach, and then sets to work. When possible, a workman prefers materials as close to finished size as possible. He'd prefer already-turned drawer pulls to blocks of raw wood he can turn into pulls.

So, consider building a GUI. The usual method is to go to a palette of components, pick one, place it, then assign properties to it. Then pick the next one, and so on. Instead, pick only the components that you'll need; choose the items in the palette that you want to be visible, and hide the rest; when you've adapted one to size, add it to the palette.

Consider building something with a bunch of icons using Polymer's iron-icons. If we were doing it with a GUI builder, we might pick iron-icon from a palette of iron elemements (there are 35 of them) place it, pull up a property sheet to set its properties, and continue.

One property is the icon image name from an iron-iconset. So we'd choose the icon images that we want. Then on to pick the next icon. If we're a little smart, then instead of picking another icon from the palette we'd duplicate the first one. But we're still left with the task of choosing another image.

Instead, we'd do better to go to a collection of pre-made iron-icons, each with a different image, and use them as our components.

The Polymer library lets us define a collection, and add iron-icon to the collection. But we can only add the raw iron-icon element's definition. And it has another element that contains a set of icon images. But it doesn't have a nice way to subset the images, or to attach a chosen image to an icon instance other than cut and paste with the text editor.