On Sun, 31 Jul 2005, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2005 21:21:14 -0700 From: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Cc: Inkscape is a vector graphics editor inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: Help -> License
On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 01:37:44PM +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
Help, Modifying and Redistributing Inkscape. :( must resist urge to kill
Not my area - Peter, can you comment?
It is cruft, an unnecessary distraction. I would really like to see this bit of marketing propoganda removed entirely from the user interface. It will probably need to be mentioned in the documentation anyway but the license is important to Free Software Evangelists not to users who want to draw stuff. Distributors should read the Licensing information, users shouldn't need to worry about it and windows users have already been required to agree to the License in the installer. (And users do not need to agree to the GPL just to use the software, only if they wish to redistribute modified versions.)
And to have a menu label steal the promiment position at the end of the list and then to have a five word label is not at all aesthetically pleasing to put it politely. (Sorry the more I do this the more hypersensative I get to these anomolies.)
I was also a bit curious when I saw this added to the help menu. It might be better to simply call it "License"?
That would be a good start, I expect some of the translators have effectively done so already (although translators could provide valuable insight into usability issues if they pointed out problems rather than glossing over them).
I'd hope there could be room to move it to the about dialog at some point, a more standardised About dialog could accomodate a row of buttons underneath the main graphic. (I want to see the stanadard GtkAbout dialog used so I am reluctant to even suggest this but it might be more intereting to use a normal fully decorated Inkscape window to show the about information like Mozilla does it.)
I know that at least one user has asked for licensing terms for usage,
I saw that mail too. Magazine editors often ask too despite the GNU General Public License being clear on their entitlements.
It would be good to have the license with some explanation on the website if it is not there already, and prominantly linked from the download page which I think is the best place for it.
so it's not ONLY good for evangelism purposes. Also, given that nearly every application out there bugs the user with the licensing terms on
Commercial applications certainly do feature licensing information prominently but Open Source applications are a lot more sublte about it.
installation or at start up, I think having it just be a link somewhere in one of the menus is not too obtrusive.
Yeah. When I get started poking at little issues it is hard to accurately convey the relative (un)importance of my various suggestions.
On the other hand, I do see a point that from a user perspective it's probably not a very important link. Perhaps if the end of the list is a prominent position, it could move to mid-list.
Top and bottom positions of a menu are hotspots, and you will almost always find the Help Contents as the first item and the About Program as the last.
P.S., Alan, if you ever do get interested in hacking code,
The old Sodipodi code scared me off, it was quite unlike the other Gtk applications I had seen before and could usually manage to provide patches for the details that concerned me. It is still a horribly time consuming job to get it all up and running and get a properly tested patch but I will really have to make more of an effort to provide patches in future. Thankfully the new XML for menus should make it easier to propose a new layout soon.
My brother is getting married this month so I will have to propose things by the end of the week because after that I probably will not have any more time for Inkscape until well after the next release.
I'd encourage you to check out the menu code first; it's pretty simple code as far as code goes, and it sounds like you put as much thought into menu positioning, etc. as Bulia does into keyboard shortcuts. :-)
You tend to learn the rationale for shortcuts, mnemonics and menu positioning all at the same time and they tend to fit together.
On the one hand you dont want to have a menu structure too deep (helps to ahve at least 3 items before bothering with a submenu) but you dont want menus too long. There is the oft quoted research which says most people can remember 7 things plus or minus 2 but the complexity of an application like Inkscape will necessitate longer menus and it is probably better to keep it practical and look to the average graphics application for reference. I hope to get a trial version of Freehand and possibly Illustrator running and have suggestions soon. I'm increasingly confident a seperate Select menu might be a good idea (Adobe Illustrator has it, Macromedia Fireworks MX has it but strangely Freehand does not). I have a couple of other ideas I have to try out and make sure they do not look too lopsided with Inkscape current feature set but I really hope to have a useful plan soon.
- Alan