On Mon, 24 Nov 2003, Nathan Hurst wrote:
Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 11:22:06 +1100 From: Nathan Hurst <Nathan.Hurst@...38...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Cc: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: Keybindings in general [was Re: [Inkscape-devel] (no subject)]
Alan Horkan wrote:
All I am trying to say is that Inkscape cannot please everyone and that it makes most sense to look first at Illustrator (and Freehand and maybe CorelDraw in that order of precedence).
Ah yes, because free software can only chase the tail lights of commercial software. Here was me thinking we'd evaluate ideas based on merit...
I think that it is most important to match the behaviour of other gnome apps.
I mentioned the Gnome and KDE guidelines too, I guess I should have mentioned them first but they are only guidelines and they dont contain all the answers, in fact they dont even contain that much explanation of why they choose to do things certain ways, what compromises and tradeoffs where made.
Think of the users, think what is likely to be the best possible answer for the most possible people.
Those applications are by no means perfect but consistancy is very helpful for most users, there are known benifits to keeping things similar, that is the merit of this idea.
Show me something that is clearly better - not just different - then of course it is worth making things a little bit more difficult to learn at first if it it is significantly better.
I'm only pointing out that it makes sense not to do things differently unless there is a very good reasons to do otherwise.
Inkscape will still be a very different application, have full source code available, an unbeatable price, (faster, smaller?) and lots of other distinguishing features I'm sure.
Inkscape will likely do things that commercial software will never do! With the right infrastructure Inkscape can encourage and make it easy for others to help out with plugins and extensions. It would be fantastic if Inkscape suppoted even half of the XML vector graphics formats such OpenOffice Draw (libgsf might help make this easier), Kivio, Karbon14, Killustrator/Kontour, Dia amongst others. The very openness of Inkscape will make it easier to eventually support lots of different scripting langauges. I'm sure it wont take long before people the world over to translate Inkscape into their local langauage something that commercial software rarely manages. (Not sure best how to make a quick comment about spellchecking but that too is something Inkscape could get cheaply from the underlying desktop, a feature i dont believe Illustrator has).
I'm sure there will be many other way for Inkscape to differentiate itself. I just want to help as best I can to improve Inkscape.
I am glad you have a healthy amount of skepticism. Thanks.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/