Hi all,
I've been following Inkscape's development for some time, and it's always looked like it had quite a lot of promise. I was looking for an open source vector tool to recommend to someone today and thought I'd download it to see how it's coming along. I'm happy to say that it's improved a lot since I last used it. I've very impressed.
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. 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.
During Firefox's early development, they made the conscious decision to match some of IE's shortcuts (alt+d, backspace for example) and some of it's conventions. The aim was to reduce the barrier to entry, and to make it feel more familiar, and it was one of the factors in it's success.
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. I'd say it would be 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. Changing that so it matches would again dramatically increase the accessibility of the software, and I believe seriously increase your usage figures.
These are some small examples of what I'm talking about. As a designer, I'm designing interfaces every day, and creating a low barrier to entry is crucial for my clients. I innovate in certain areas, but know that some things need to stick to conventions or else people will never use the sites I build. Inkscape is a great tool, but it's broken some of those conventions, and that will frustrate and annoy users when they try to apply their current knowledge to this application, and that is a waste. You needn't lose potential users when Inkscape is so very good, just because they're confused.
I would strongly suggest that you make efforts to remove those barriers while staying true to your goals. I'm not a coder so I cannot offer my services in that regard, but if you want to change some things to make the UI more friendly to new users, then I will happily offer my services in identifying issues.
I sincerely hope you'll take me up on my offer,
Kind Regards,
- Kevin Cannon