On 5/17/06, Kevin Cannon <kevin@...1281...> wrote:
The one thing I'm concerned about is the UI. I'm a web designer by trade and while Inkscape is quite full featured, the UI is a bit of a leap to what I'm used to, which makes transition very hard.
You seem to be assuming that everyone would be transitioning from AI. This seems to be so much taken for granted by you that you don't even mention AI when you speak about "transitioning". But, fortunately, AI is not (yet) the only game in town. Users of, for example, CorelDraw will feel _much_ more at home when using Inkscape.
In general, I have nothing against changing our UI to become compatible with someone else - but only if this improves Inkscape too. That is, if it adds some convenience that we didn't have before, or at least does not break the other conveniences we have and the general consistency of our UI. And even if it breaks some things, I can be convinced if enough people voice their preference. For example, I'm afraid we will eventually bow to the pressure and enable Space to switch to Hand tool, at least as an option (the only problem being that we don't need and therefore don't have a Hand tool, and adding it is not exactly a one-line change).
Kevin, I just wanted you to know my position from the start, because you will likely hear from me if you continue this discussion. Also please keep in mind that I'm just one of the developers, not the top authority on UI, and other developers may have other opinions.
That said, I didn't see any specific proposals in your message except for the Space-for-Hand. If you have more suggestions, we'd definitely like to hear them.
I read your wiki, and I understand wanting an Inkscape specific UI is important and I agree that just aiming to be an Illustrator clone wouldn't be a worthy goal. However, I think you could win a lot of hearts and minds by conforming to general UI elements that are used in graphics packages.
If the plural of "graphics packages" is correct, i.e. you refer to something that indeed more than one vector editor have in common but Inkscape does not, then we're even more interested to hear. If, however, your "graphics packages" is just an emphatic reference to AI alone, then our interest, understandably, is lower (but not zero, of course :)
I would strongly suggest you make designers feel more at home when they give Inkscape a try. Things like pressing spacebar to pan around a page is a de facto standard amongst image editing tools.
CorelDraw and Xara do not comply to this "standard", for example.
trivial to make Inkscape work in the same manner. Similarly, your path nodes/handles tool are the same as the 'white arrow' tool in other apps.
Oh come on. Again, "apps" in plural :) The whole concept of the "white arrow" is so entirely AI-specific. We have a Node tool that edits nodes, and we don't care about the color of the arrow :)
Changing that so it matches would again dramatically increase the accessibility of the software, and I believe seriously increase your usage figures.
I'm not sure what you mean by "match". But I just want to say that our Node tool is, by now, one of the most powerful things in Inkscape, whereas AI's node "tool" (actually a collection of small tools) is one of the worst things in it, UI-wise. Our two approaches in this area, I'm afraid, are hardly compatible.