On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 23:06, bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...> wrote:
On 9/14/09, JiHO <jo.lists@...400...> wrote:
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.).
...none of which existed 6 years ago :)
Not to say we don't need to speed it all up of course - but if you hide all toolbars you don't need and use only basic path objects, it's probably going to be just as snappy as those early versions. (Except for startup time, though, which now most directly depends on the number of fonts on your system.)
Thanks for the reply. Indeed, *I* can do that because I know what I need and what to do with the software. A new user would not though. And more importantly, many of these new features are useful (swatches, snapping toolbar, etc.) or very cool (LPEs, etc.) so they make me (and everyone I guess) want to use them ;). However, their accumulation and sometimes their slowness makes for an overall more frustrating experience, e.g. "Inkscape has blur, wicked!... uh oh, it seems I cannot add more than 4 or 5 objects with a large blur before Inky crawls". Similarly, the new behaviour of the dropper tool is very useful, except it is made difficult to reach by the connector tool and flood fill tools that I never use but cannot move out of the way.
Basically I am not saying that new features are bad, and especially those that were added to Inkscape these last 6 years, but that speeding up and better accommodating those features in the UI would be a worth a feature in itself. And, from a few discussions I had with new Inkscape users and the original email of Alexandre, the speed part at least seems to be a commonly acknowledged. People I initially interested into Inkscape are sometimes switching back to AI (Adobe Illustrator, no less than this pack of ... !!) because Inkscape cannot handle their thousand-paths drawing smoothly (which is common when importing graphs from other software). It hurts. ;)
JiHO --- http://maururu.net