Ted Gould wrote:
On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 13:03 -0800, Jon Phillips wrote:
How did SCALE go? Can someone write up a synopsis? Are there any pictures?
No, no pictures. John and Jon wouldn't let me out of the booth enough to take any ;)
Ha! You couldn't get Ted away with a crowbar :) Kudos to Ted for his great effort putting together flyers, etc (and his excellent LA dining suggestions). Kudos to Jon Cruz for some great onscreen artwork, oh and a cool little XSLT demo. Kudos to Josh Adler for making a big effort to get there and his help explaining to many visitors the comparisons between Illustrator and Inkscape.
I too was surprised how many Linux users didn't know about Inkscape - many asked questions on how it compared to GIMP (not realizing Inkscape was vector based). Besides the usual comparisons to Illustrator, quite a few visitors I spoke with made the comparison to Corel Draw.
A good follow up we discussed will be to create a flyer showing how Inkscape, GIMP, and Scribus relate to each other and can be used together.
It was lots of fun and I encourage others to do a Inkscape demo when an expo is near you.
I think that it went very well. We got awesome booth placement right between Google and LTSP, both high draw projects. Plus the LTSP guy even had Inkscape on his systems. Google of course had overflow, which allowed us to chat them up.
They had almost 1000 people check in at the conference. I printed 250 copies of each of the fliers I posted here earlier, and judging by how many we had left I'd say 150-200 people came through the booth. I had originally planned on turning each into a little tutorial, but there really wasn't room in the booth.
We had two computer set up running Ubuntu and Inkscape. They were both 500 Mhz machines, which I think was a plus because whenever people asked about performance we could just point to them. Wacom let us borrow two Intuos Tablets (which was awesome of them) so that became a draw to the booth, though I think some people thought that you couldn't use Inkscape without a tablet. John Tabor brought a projector, so we used that as one of the monitors so that we had something more visible for large groups of people, and also people walking by. I think that was a huge plus.
I was surprised by how many people hadn't heard of Inkscape. There was also a large contingent of people who had heard of it, but weren't familiar with what it is. At the same time, we also had people coming through the booth who were very familiar with Inkscape and wanted to thank us all for the project existing, though they had a few gripes (like printing). Chris DiBona even came to the booth to check on the Google Summer of Code projects -- he seemed happy with the progress.
Probably the funniest story was from the gal across the hall from us at Bitrock. It is a small startup doing installers. She came over to talk to us as she had been assigned to do the fliers for their booth, and given Photoshop to do them in. The fliers were okay, but when I knew that they were done in Photoshop, I found them very impressive. Also, the copy of Photoshop she was given was a Spanish version, and she didn't speak Spanish. So, she was thrilled about Inkscape, and the fact that we have an English translation :)
I think the most inspiring stories are the educational ones. There seems to be several groups of people refurbishing older computers and giving them out to families who can't afford them. They're usually given without software licenses, or if they get any, it's only for Windows. So they're looking for applications that are useful for these machines. I think that they were all impressed by the abilities of Inkscape, and excited to integrate them into their projects.
Overall, a good conference. I think Inkscape was represented well by John Tabor, Jon Cruz, Josh Andler and myself. We also had a good time hanging out together.
--Ted