I think with everything we put out, we should consider the reputation and image of Inkscape. MS Paint has always been a joke, and I don't want people to think the same of Inkscape.
I can't imagine even budding artists starting out using MS Paint. It was/is horrible third-rate joke software that even Microsoft never advertised as being any damn good because it never was.
The only reason MS Paint was around for so long is precisely because it was packaged with Windows. Re - using the decommissioning of MS Paint's rotting corpse as a way to say FLOSS is better... I think round about no one is going to swallow that. :) Adobe's subscription model is far more compelling thing to attack. No one uses MS paint as a serious utility. It was and is bad software (even before the proprietary bit is taken into consideration)- that's why it's going away - it will cause no ripples at all in the graphic editing/illustration world, and I believe it will not generate new users for Inkscape.
I fear it will look as if we have no new news, nothing more compelling to broadcast than a cheap dig at an unpopular software package. To new users it will look as if we think MS Paint is a competitor of ours, that has been vanquished by its own evil propritary-ness. I dunno... I just think we're better than that. :)
-C
On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 9:43 PM, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...961...> wrote:
On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 09:25:32PM +0100, C R wrote:
Do we want to be comparing Inkscape to MS Paint? I think this will probably get us laughed at at best. MS Paint was never meant to be professional graphics software like Inkscape is. People who use it do so for creative irony and nostalgia.
My thought- There are plenty of FLOSS graphics editors that can replace MS Paint, for what it does. We don't need to lower our software to the level of a basic (long obsolete) bitmap editor to get new users.
I completely agree it's a bit orthogonal to our mission, but I don't see much harm if someone's motivated to use it as a good opportunity to do some Inkscape marketing. And I think Alex's intuition is probably right that there's likely to be an increase in attention on art software in the tech media space, that suggests it'd be a good time to put a foot forward offering Inkscape as an option for people to consider.
Offhand, my guess is that people who rely on MS Paint are perhaps a bit distant from our usual target audiences, but on the other hand every budding artist has gotta start someplace. So I'd probably de-emphasize references to MS Paint, in favor of putting more focus on explaining what makes Inkscape great.
I liked how Martin compared and contrasted the situation with proprietary vs. foss software; that thinking could resonate well with potential future community member types. Another good compare/contrast here could be the classic raster-vs-bitmap discussion, since MS Paint is the rather prototypical raster app.
Bryce