On Sat, 7 Aug 2004, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2004 10:50:33 -0700 (PDT) From: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Cc: Ted Gould <ted@...11...>, Inkscape Devel List inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Linux Format Article
On Sat, 7 Aug 2004, Alan Horkan wrote:
You might not like me much for telling you this right after you bought issue 56 but issue 57 has a comparison of various Vector Graphics software incuding Inkscape and another Inkscape tutorial. At ~12 Euro I am again Inkscape got 8/10, as did OpenOffice.org Draw.
OpenOffice.org Draw was described as the best drawing tool but the reviewer was baffled by the lack of any SVG import whatsoever.
It annoys me no end that these reviewers do not contact the development team and provide direct feedback, but I guess if you want to cater to the market you have to hunt down the reviews and address their complaints to get better reviews in future. I'm going to write to the editors and ask them to provide direct feedback.
There is a tactic amongst proprietary software to work on features specifically to win good reviews and cheap publicity. On its own this stategy is crass and rather foolish but it is useful to keep in mind as a secondary objective. Inkscape is already far more responsive to user feedback than many projects in my heavily biased opinion but it is important to make users feel like they are being listened to even when there ideas are not going to be accepted.
I got a chance to see the article too, and was quite pleased with what it said. Some quotes:
Dammit I wish I'd seen this post before I went scribbling my quick notes. My notes will not be direct quotes and are not likely to even be proper sentences
The article was writtten by Andy Chanelle, in case anyone wants to try and contact him. I assume no one has yet tried to contact the author of the other article mentioned. If reviewers are reading this for the love of god talk to us directly please!
The review was of Inkscape 0.38.
There are some interesting things to be learned from the comments against the other vector graphis software.
"Last month we took our first look at Inkscape, the latest open source graphics tool to sweep the Linux desktop marketplace. IS fills a long-standing void in this area: vector illustration."
"Inkscape gains prominence over its progenitor by dint of its superior interface and the pace of development that the coding team has established. This is especially remarkable when you consider the group has only been active on the project for seven months."
better inteface ... not having so many dialogs ... allows more working space.
"It installed without issue on everything we tried."
"Crucially, Inkscape has the most comprehensive set of 'path' tools for cutting, combining and generally mangling shapes, and this does lift it above the rest of these apps quite significantly."
the reviewer really likes the word crucially (yes I realise I have some questionable writing habits too)
I think the adjustment widgets (such for rounding a rectangle) being shown more often, not just when using the node editor has been a significant improvement and part of the reason he foudn the path tools so pleasant (I am inferring this from the rest of what he wrote).
Verdict: "A young, but very promising application that has the potential to outclass the other apps reviewed here. Definitely one to watch for future improvements."
"This is really a two-horse race." [While OODraw has numerically more features...] "For more design-intensive tasks, Inkscape is the surprising winner... They have a lot to do, and they need the support (both moral and financial) to keep on keeping on."
They really liked the usability, node editing, interactive editing of primitive shapes, toolbar layout "in the traditional fashion", boolean operations, and the calligraphic pen.
The caligraphic pen. It was suggested that Nibs would be a nice feature. and still in that context he mentioned the Corel Image Hose, which I think is similar to the Inkscape Clones but he is describing it from a different direction.
There were several things they suggested needed work: EPS/PDF support,
The reviewer thought EPS and PDF were a crucial omission, but the situation has improved in Inkscape 0.39 and 0.40 (at least on Linux which is what is important in this case).
text-on-path,
text fit to a curve.
the workaround mentioned in the tutorials was useful but reviewer disliked that the text had to be converted to paths and could no longer be edited. (it would be interesting if the underlying text could be preserved in the underlying XML markup to allow for it to be converted back to text later, which is something I think i was able to do in Macromedia Flash).
a better way for naming and managing gradients,
he made a bad pun about making it more transparent.
the way I see it the gradient management needs to be largely seperated out into a seperate full window gradient manager allowing searching sorting renaming and preview of many gradients (and previewing them as Linear, Radial and possible other ways). All that would be kept to the front would be a preview of the current gradient.
I am hoping that by providing over a hundered gradients to OpenClipArt.org than I've forced any future redesign of this functionality to be very scalable because in time it will need to be able to manage hundreds of gradients.
expanded functionality with the calligraphic tool (i.e., more nibs). The scorechart showed:
Features: 7/10 Ease of Use: 9/10 Documentation: 6/10 Performance: 8/10
Rating 8/10
The review had been on 0.38, so I think they're going to be pleased to see 0.39, and it looks like 0.40 is going to satisfy at least half the things on their wishlist. I think we can do better on performance, and it looks like there's a lot of gain to be had from better docs (Sodipodi rated a 0/10 in documentation in the article, so we've already come a _long_ way.)
*** Points worth noting from the other reviews and the roundup ***
He also said the future was bright if intergration with Scribus and the Gimp goes well.
In the roundup section he foolishly suggested that applications might support Gimp XCF export. The Gimp has a good SVG importer already and the gimp developers do not recommend other applications using the XCF format.
Exporting to a standardised file format like MNG (Multiple Network Graphic, related to PNG) or even a de facto standard like Adobe Photoshop Document (.psd) format would make far more sense to me.
Skencil has a colour palette as a toolbar just above the status bar and he mentioned that this was like Corel and very convenient. (I think Xara X did this too). It would seem like a logical extension of how inkscape currently handles its toolbars (but I still wish toolbars could be properly be docked and undocked and used as palettes as well but thats a GTK problem). I've been thinking about colour tools in inkscape recently and how handy it would have been to be albe to do things like "Invert Colours" or Swap Red -> Green (G->B, etc).
The reviwer was paritcularly taken by the Blend tool in Sketch/Skencil which he also described as a Tween tool, as it would combines two shapes into the a shape that is halfway between the two shapes. (I think this is very differnt from what Adobe Illustrator does with its Blend tool but I'd appreciate if someone more knowledgeable could clarify).
He also liked Karbon 14 but was dissappointed by bugs and instability.
I think this was an extremely good article for Inkscape. I was surprised to see us rank so high compared with OODraw; OODraw has a lot more features than Inkscape, so since Inkscape and OODraw were tied score-wise, that means we're winning because of better intrinsics and usability, rather than simply on feature lists, and that's a very good sign.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/ http://advogato.org/proj/OpenClipArt.org/ http://advogato.org/proj/Inkscape/