On Thu, 28 Jul 2005, bulia byak wrote:
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 17:21:42 -0300 From: bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Cc: Inkscape is a vector graphics editor inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: Inkscape Harsh Criticisms
On 7/28/05, Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> wrote:
Hey, rearranging top menu items is as easy as rearranging single lines in interface.cpp. Where are your patches?
Fair point but that only goes so far, I really dont have the time to work on every project I see a problem with even if I would like to help.
This wasn't directed to you personally. Other people have expressed their issues with the menus, and I myself agree that the Edit menu has become unwieldy. Let's fix it!
Releases happen, users criticise. Without a prominent list of Known bugs or Top 10 things we wish were fixed already criticism should be expected and the response be were working on it, which is essentially what has happened after my rant.
In the below responses to your comments, note that I'm not speaking on behalf of all Inkscape developers. I only express my opinion.
My previous comments about getting rid of parenthesis from menu item(s) was ignored.
I see no problem in that whatsoever. It's not new in 0.42 anyway.
I didn't have much time over the past few months and 0.41 and 0.42 merged together for me. I guess because removing the parenthesis was such a simple incidental thing to correct I had hoped someone would do it as part of another change.
I wish I could make all developers understand the learning curve required to get a full build enviroment up and running and then to provide patches (and monkeying around with a relatively locked down network makes it even less pleasant and time consuming for me to get much of anything done). I'm usually okay about filing bug reports but the effort required for a casual user to go out of ones way and provide feedback to a program is actually quite a lot and past experience has trained most user not to even try. I guess I have been spoiled by other programs which have bug-buddy or other automated response systems and gotten even lazier. I guess it is all too easy for me to forget you all have your own work to do but the so much work gets done on Inkscape it is hard to believe you are all only working on it part time :)
Vacuum Defs is still weird. I don't have all the answers but a way to "define styles" and treat defs similarly to predefined styles.
This was already discussed. You didn't convince me and, as far as I remember, others. It's not new in 0.42.
I dont have a better a solution unfortunately, it is still weird and confusing. Expect others to keeping point it out until someone can come up with a better way.
need a submenu "View, Zoom" (short version, long versions will require a little more thought and reorganisation)
May be a good idea, but personally I'm ambivalent. You gain a shorter menu but you lose an extra click. Don't know which wins.
We have several ways of accessing Zoom and something has got to give. I think it is time to try and put some clean structure back into the menus so there is room to grow. Zoom is by far the easiest and most obvious contender. Inkscape also has a hell of a lot of Zoom options more than most programs but yet doesn't have menu items for the standard "Zoom In" "Zoom Out" (more generic and flexible. A sumbmenu creates the room needed to provide a variety of preset Zoom perecentages like other programs do, an alternative approach is to only have a few menu items for Zoom and put the rest under a "Zoom..." dialog.
I was sceptical of Zoom Next, Zoom Previous but it is a feature OpenOffice.org has and it works reasonably well, however the zoom level should (like the rulers, grid, and other parts of the view) should be seperate from the main undo stack.
The most valuable mnemonic is the one you last used, so what I'd like to see would be something like
_View _Zoom _Zoom In Zoom Out --- other zooms ... --- 25 % 50 % 100 % 200 %
etc
keybindings are not configurable, forces developers to try and hardcode defaults for everything cannot please everyone.
In what way is this a regression in 0.42? Everyone agrees this should be done. It's just not done yet.
The reason I mention it is because there is such a variety of reasonable expectations for what keys should Zoom. Gnome users expect both Ctrl++ and Ctrl+= to Zoom In, Ctrl+- to Zoom Out and Ctrl+0 to Zoom 100. Other users will want single letter keybindings.
These are all quite reasonable but the inability to configure them causes a knock on effect of other problems. It is a rare case to be able to identify the root of the problem so I thought it was worth mentioning. Not specific to 0.42 I know but it is all about the expectations.
This mail is long enough already, which is why I changed the subject line and created a seperate thread for this.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/