On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, bulia byak wrote:
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 14:56:18 -0300 From: bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Cc: Inkscape Development Mailing List inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] NEW: more stuff in Help menu
On 10/11/06, Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> wrote:
Yes definately. In ten years time that link might break, especially since it links to index.php instead of the relevant directory. Odds are it will break far sooner than that - and who knows what it could get changed to - but once there are Inkscape binaries out there in the wild there will be nothing we can do about it.
Sure, linking to inkscape.org should be preferred, but ten years?
Exagerrating to make a point, I know it was excessive but I hoped it wouldn't require further explanation.
I can't imagine anyone will use Inkscape 0.45 in 2016.
People are still using Windows NT 4 and Windows 98. It may not be a good idea but isn't too hard to imagine.
Keep in mind the time it takes things to get adopted by distributions (months for Red Hat, even longer for Debian stable) and then institutions such as schools which might only upgrade their software once a year or less.
That isn't really important though, we all see the merit in centralising links at inkscape.org
For something like command line arguements it might be better to programatically show exactly what arguements are available in the version the user actually has.
You can do that by running inkscape --help. But that information is brief and not detailed.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be a page in the user manual explaining it but that it might not be important enough to have a menu item, rather than having one menu item pointing to the manual or website.
I would be concerend that Command line arguments should not be needed by most users
They are needed by some, that's enough. We get questions on how to use Inkscape in scripts regularly.
Might just mean the command line arguments are not very user friendly. Usability applies to command line applications as much as GUI applications (applies to quality APIs too, a case where the targer users are developers too, but again I digress).
- if many people are using them then batch features of the GUI
would need to be improved.
No, the GUI use and the command line use are quite orthogonal. Both are being improved but they will never converge or replace one another.
Perhaps I should have phrased that differently, there will always be a place for command line features because it allows inkscape to be pipelined together with many other command line utilities. However I dont think anyone would disagree that it might be useful if the user interface provided a way to achieve a batch task like exporting each layer of a document as a seperate image.
The man page or running inkscape --help are the standard places to find command line help, a menu item would be relatively unusual.
It is relatively unusual for a GUI drawing app to have command line operations at all. None of the commercial ones have them AFAIK.
I'm thinking more of other Open Source software which very often does include command line arguments, particulary for things like file format conversion but even then we might just have different ideas of 'unusual'.
Therefore it is justified to mention them in the GUI because otherwise many people (that might benefit from them) will never even think to look for them.
You cannot mention every useful feature directly in the user inteface certainly not in the level of detail I think this functionality would deserve which is why I think a page in the manual would be best. A page in the manual would provide room for the kind of detail people seem to want like including a short example and enough shell scripting to iterate through and process a large set of images.
- FAQ on wiki
Again I'd very strongly prefer to see a nice clean link pointing at inkscape.org/faq/
Yep, by making that a redirect.
- Release notes for the current version
Personally I wouldn't consider this as something users would read frequently (more than once even?) and therefore not worth having a menu item.
On the contrary, for many users who are already familiar with the program, it's the most important information in the entire menu.
I would think people (adminstrators?) would read the release notes before or while downloading the new version. The Changelog and News files provide even more information.
given the amount of new features in our versions, and their detailed descriptions in the release notes, this menu item will certainly be consulted more than once.
It is great that the release notes are of such high quality and provide good descriptions but shouldn't this information really be in the manual and tutorials?
Good idea in principle, problematic in practice = bug or feature request? (Mostly a menu item will give you feature requests.)
Real bugs need detailed feedback like stack traces and integration with bug-buddy or similar tools is more likely to result in the kind of high quality feedback you really want.
Sure, so it links to inkscape.org/report_bugs.php which explains all that.
Okay, make sense. Attempting to raise the quality of user feedback is another seperate question.
- SVG 1.1 specification at w3.org
Artists are the target users of Inkscape.
Who says that?
Who are the target users of Inkscape? Nailing that down would avoid confusion and help people focus on serving those users and make decision making easier when tradeoffs must be made.
Artists are one target group right?
Bryce has said before "contributors" are possibly the most important group. The tendency then is to think of contributors in the narrow sense of developers contributing code and Inkscape becomes increasing about techincal drawing. It is much harder to make things easier than to just make them possible.
Other projects tend to talks of their archetypal users or strive for software so easy Aunt Tillie could use it. I tend to think an appropriate archetype for Inkscape non-technical artist, intelligent people with the obvious skill and talent to create beautiful imagery but not necessarily adept at computers or particularly interested in techincal details.
Maybe the artist is not the primary user but with a better impression of who the targer users are then I will be able to make more appropraite suggestions, and perhaps not place so much importance on that type of user.
I know all this frequent criticism is not ideal but it is about as close as I can get to providing iterative usability analysis. Much as I might love to have experts and testing on large samplings of live users I'm doing to the best I can to keep Inkscape on track but the problem is the track isn't particularly clear.
Is this really useful to artists?
[XML editor, useful to understand the SVG source ... link to file format specs]
Surely it's uncommon for a commercial app to link a complete documentation of its file format right in Help, but I don't think we should neglect this opportunity to be better than them.
so this menu item is quite relevant.
Okay, I've stated my opinion but you do still think it is worth showing it prominantly in the menus. A link to the specification is still probably too technical and less use for the purpose you stated than a short entry in the manual explaining the basics of XML and SVG tags, and has the added advantage of not requiring net access - for those travelling and playing with inkscape on the train or on a plane for example.
Make it a link to inkscape.org that points to the specification and can be easily updated to something better should it exist then I guess I would have no excuse but to create something better. Then again linking to a page in the documentation avoid relying on an internet connection.
It makes a huge difference is you stated the underlying purpose behind the link which makes it possible to come up with better solutions.
I would urge restraint since I've seen so many crappy programs with links that no longer point to anywhere useful but it is certainly tempting to include a link to OpenClipart.org at least until OpenClipart.org is integrated with inkscape in some other way.
I'll attempt to summarize (okay more like rephrase) my points, menu items are prominant highly visible indicators to users of useful functionality but the more things you give menu items the more you reduce the clarity and usability of the other menu items. (Inkscape has what, ten types of Paste?) Links are great if you have an internet connection, but if you dont the time wasted by firing up a web browser to nowhere can be very slow and annoying.
Anyway it will be excellent to have links in the menus, and a clever use of python. Great idea bulia.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/