On 9/7/07, Andy Fitzsimon <andyfitz@...400...> wrote:
Someone new has started here in Brisbane who comes from a heavy illustrator background. During her first day using Inkscape she's written up this short document mentioning her initial reactions.
Thanks, very interesting! The scrollbar troubles make me think you gave her an Inkscape with scrollbars hidden, and she mistook the palette scrollbar for a canvas scrollbar. That was cruel of you :) Poor Illustrator souls have very few ways to pan apart from scrollbars, so they really need them in Inkscape.
Using Shift+minus (i.e. underscore) is actually a good idea, I'll add it... for those who don't want to use the big and convenient numpad +/- :)
Using dropper for style (as opposed to color) - why? We have Paste style for that.
How come she didn't find the z-order operations? They are on the toolbar, and in the menu, and have convenient one-key shortcuts...
I wonder why she keeps calling the selected style indicator "a swatch". Did you hide the swatch palette too? It would be so much easier for "just selecting a color".
I really don't know how to make the second-click-for-rotation more obvious for Illustrator sufferers. It's explained everywhere, including in the scrollbar. I'm afraid Illustrator users will always have problems with that no matter what we do.
I can understand that an Illustrator user would want us to highlight the contour of every selected object, as AI does. Well, not "object" - indeed AI has nothing but paths, so even the concept of objects as something more generic than paths is something of a difficulty for her. But I always found that intrusive contouring extremely noisy and annoying in AI. I don't want to see the nodes unless I edit them, and in most cases, even then I don't want to have the path itself between the nodes highlighted. Our object boxes are just fine for object selection, IMHO.
Of course you need to select an object before you can select its nodes. Sounds logical to me. But a single click on object in Node tool selects it. Not much of a "slow down" is it?
Drawing circle with Ctrl: indeed it creates not just a circle but any integer-ratio ellipse (1:1, 1:2, 1:3 etc). A little more manual control required in exchange for a little more power - typical for Inkscape.
Suggestions for the Zoom tool do make sense - except that few people I think even use that tool, as we have so many convenient shortcuts :)