On 5/17/06, Kevin Cannon <kevin@...1281...> wrote:
This is a fair point. I'd like to point out though that the people who have the problem with it just never bother using Inkscape again.
Sorry, I just don't believe that a person who has been using program X and is now trying program Y will give up when the first shortcut he tries turns out to be different. All of our shortcuts are extensively documented and listed in the menu (for menu commands), many of them are even shown in the statusbar. It's not difficult to figure them out. If you're curious enough to try a new program, your curioosity should suffice for looking up its basic shortcuts as well. I don't know how to make our shortcuts more discoverable than they are now, short of adding a Clippy :)
kind of person you're targetting (at least in part) doesn't know much about programming or sourceforge works. They probably wouldn't even think to mail developers. Just because you're not hearing a lot of complaints, doesn't necessarily mean there's not a problem.
Yet we do hear a lot about space-for-drag.
I would class discovering things via status bar as a means of tertiary means of leaning about a program. e.g. Little extras like keyboard shortcuts. It shouldn't be a means of finding out a primary feature like rotation. I would suggest putting a rotate tool in the toolbar. It will have minimal effect on current users but will seriously help beginners.
I'm afraid this is out of the question. It's not like changing a shortcut or an icon. We do not have a rotate tool, and we cannot really add it, this would disrupt the UI and codebase too much. Everything in Inkscape is built around the simple and intuitive assumption that all kinds of transformation are done by the Selector tool. We cannot break the tool in two, it will be a too painful operation for too little gain.
As a silly but possible comrpomise, does AI has a keyboard shortcut for its rotate tool? Is it "r"? If it is, I can easily add that shortcut so that in Selector, it does the same as the "second click", i.e. switches the handles to rotate mode.
Oh, and of course let's not forget that unlike any other vector editor, Inkscape also has keys for rotating selection: [ and ] (or with Ctrl for rotating by 90 degrees, or with Alt for pixel-sized rotation). I use them 99% of the time I need to rotate anything, and I honestly don't understand how the poor users of other apps can live without this basic convenience.
Well, it's really rare that I'd ever want to rotate something in increments like that, but I could see how it would be useful to some.
What increments are you talking about? Alt+[] rotates by one screen pixel, so the closer you zoom the more precision you get. With this I actually get better rotation precision than with mouse.
And I am quite confident that if I learn Inkscape I would get around those problems. However, I didn't mail you because of me. I mailed you because of all the other people out there who won't take the time to learn it. Now if you're goal is to become quite popular, you have to cater for everyday users. I'd say that out of every users who downloads Inkscape, you have about 5-10 minutes of them using it before they decide if they'll ever use it again.
That really depends on which program is this. If the user is starting to learn AI which he never tried before, I doubt he will give it up after 10 minutes. He will likely spend weeks trying to wrap his mind around this usability disaster of a vector editor, and whenever he can't figure out something, he will likely blame himself, not Adobe.
Why can't we expect a comparable level of commitment? Because we are "new and untested"? But Inkscape is already perfectly usable and used for lots of things.
I'm not saying we should not try to make migration easier for AI users. Of course we must do all we reasonably can for that. But we ALSO must do all we can to promote it as a powerful program in its own right, to assert that its being different is actually being better (for the most part), and to demonstrate its applicability to a wide variety of tasks. If we succeed in "making a name" for Inkscape, I'm sure new users will NOT give up after 10 minutes.
For a program like Inkscape, most of the distribution is done by word of mouth, in person-to-person mode. For example, you mentioned you were going to recommend it to someone. So, instead of just sending them a URL, why not show them interactively the cool shortcuts you've learned, or at least why not mention that they exist and that it is indeed possible to do in Inkscape all that they did before in AI, so that the person would be more motivated to discover those ways on his own. That's how new and better programs take over the world: someone gets excited and shares his excitement with others. There's no other way. I think Inkscape is well worth the extra time you would spend on this.
Well, I wasn't suggesting you have an AI icon set, since that doesn't help the general user who downloads Inkscape. I'll happily edit that icon if you tell me how I can access the files though. But I think the change would be useless unless it was made to the default toolbar.
We just need an installation-time option, "Do you want Inkscape to mimic Adobe Illustrator as much as possible", and if the user chooses yes, it would use AI keyboard shortcuts, AI icons, and possibly some AI behavior tweaks.
By the way, if you know AI really well, you could help Inkscape by creating an AI-like keyboard map. This does not require any coding, just editing a self-explanatory text file. Let me know if you are interested and I'll give you all the details.