On Sun, 23 Nov 2003, bulia byak wrote:
Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2003 10:56:22 -0500 From: bulia byak <bulia@...23...> To: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Inkscape-devel] (no subject)
I'm torn between wanting to shamelessly pander to Illustrator users or decide if doing it differently would be better enought to mitigate the inconsistancey!
Illustrator is far from being the standard.
It is hard to say any application is the standard but I'd venture to say it is the market leader and as such is a de facto standard.
What I want to know is how the hell they get away with charging ~ $500 when CorelDraw 11 is a mere ~ $150 (prices based on quickly looking at adobe.com and corel.com)!?
I do believe that Adobe Illustrator is much less dominant in the Vector drawing space than Adobe Photoshop is in Raster Graphics and I look forward to Inkscape forcing them even harder to justify their prices.
Xara,
when you said Xara last time i could only think of Xara 3D but i did a bit of research and it seems they have a bit more than just 3D http://www.xara.com/
Xara X does not even support SVG, I'm not impressed at all.
CorelDraw,
I should think CorelDraw when I think vector graphics but I dont. I just not familiar with it at all. Lauris Kaplinski said older versions of CorelDraw helped inspired him with Sodipodi.
(I read a recent review of CorelPainter and they have made its interface much more like Adobe photoshop in a bid to sway Adobe users. I've no idea what the latest version of CorelDraw is like though).
Freehand,
I'd have claimed Freehand was the second biggest commercial vector graphics progam largely due to the strength of Flash and Macromedia's other products.
Canvas all have sizeable user communities,
I can only guess you mean this Canvas http://www.deneba.com/products/canvas8/ and it is a technical graphics program more than an artistic vector graphics program.
While we are enumerating Vector Graphics programs I may as well mention that Jasc Web Draw 1.0 has a reasonably nice and clean interface and the SVG source editing looks useful. By the time it gets to version 2 or 3 I expect it will be more substantial and a really good program. I'm quite impressed by the progress they have made with Jasc Paint shop Pro 8, so I expect they will also turn WebDraw into something good enough at a reasonable enough price.
and as a rule they don't imitate Illustrator keybindings but do most things their own way.
Besides, there's GIMP and other linux graphic soft that we must take into account. So I think in each case, we should review the existing approaches and either select one of them (not necessarily Illustrator) as the best, or devise our own.
And by the way, at least global keybindings should ultimately be user configurable (it's difficult to do that for all keybindings, but at least those in shortcuts.c must be taken from the config file).
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).
I am not saying the Inkscape developers should disregard other software and other programs certainly should provide inspiration just to follow the leader unless there is a significant benefit to doing it differently. By following Adobe Illustrator we make it much easier for people to leverage existing knowledge (training, documentation, and other support) and we make migration away from Illustrator much easier.
I think it makes more sense to look at vector graphics programs rather than raster graphics programs. Some projects make a point of being different and good luck with that but if you want to maximize your audience then the default shortcuts should take the path of least resistance. I really hope that Inkscape look first to the leading vector graphics programs and also carefully consider the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines (push for changes if you strongly disagree) and KDE Usability Guidelines.
It would be nice if Inkscape allowed users to rebind menu items to other keys the way the GIMP does (off by default in GIMP 1.3/2.0 to prevent accidental rebinding). It would also be quite nice to be able to easily switch between keybinding profiles, the GIMP has a photoshop-menurc just for this purpose but unfortunately has no user visable way of changing it (by which I mean you can only change it by removing the standard menurc and replacing it with the photoshop-menurc) but even then the default keybindings should try to appeal to the largest possible audience.
Sorry to go on so long, I do take this a little too seriously sometimes.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
PS Opinions, disclaimer, etc
PPS Another factor is the behaviour of Adobe (think Sklyarov) and their ridiculous prices which metaphorically makes me want to slap them.