On 2009-September-14 , at 07:53 , Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
but let's face it -- Inkscape is a tortoise crawling uphill to die at the top of Kilimanjaro. This really should stop.
I am sorry to concur that this is indeed a very big problem. When I first used Inkscape (6 years ago), it felt lean and to the point. Sure it was limited. But the things it could do, it did fast and efficiently UI-wise. Now, I hate to say that, but Inkscape often feels bloated. It has a wealth of new features, many of which were repeatedly asked for, but sometimes it feels like too many, too fast. Some of it is due to things being added and added again to the UI without a general overhaul (which leaves Inkscape with 3 toolbars, a larger bottom bar, less screen real estate for the actual drawing, so many tools that they don't fit on a decent 1280x800 screen etc.). Most of the feeling of bloatiness, however, seems to actually come from slowness. Many new features make Inkscape so slow that they soon become unusable (blur, some LPEs, numerous snapping possibilites etc.). This is probably exacerbated on my system because I use Inkscape on a laptop (still, a top of the line one) and the X server on OS X is not very efficient. Yet it looks like a very real problem on other systems and platforms too...
My message probably does not seem very constructive. I sure don't mean to upset anyone (especially not those who already worked on speeding up the rendering of blurs, disentangling the snapping possibilites etc.). I guess that many of the core coders of Inkscape are aware of the issues and even know where the bottlenecks are. I would just like to stress, as a user, that: - speed is a feature, - because of a lack of speed, some of the very cool new features of Inkscape are not used to their full potential (and sometimes not even used at all), which is really too bad.
Working on speed improvements is probably more tedious and less rewarding than coding an all new feature but maybe this "ungrateful" message, and others like it, could motivate more people to continue tackling these issues.
Thanks in advance,
PS: I am still VERY grateful for Inkscape ;)
JiHO --- http://maururu.net