On Wed, 17 May 2006, Vladimir [utf-8] Savi�^G wrote:
In the spirit of node sculpting debate, I felt free to say something about Inkscape's UI in general. :) Just my observations (from user's perspective).
- Rename Star and polygon tool to Figure tool(?)
Figure tool
- Polygon
- Star
(- Comic book balloon
- will be requested more of these in the future, I'm sure...)
Macromedia Freehand does seem to have rather interesting infrastructure and only the basic shape primitives are hardcoded. Shapes like torus/donut, comic book balloons, arrows, et cetera seem to be extensions. (If you can get a copy of Freehand you should rummage through the configuration files and you should find some shape definitions that look a lot like ASCII Text art.)
Much as I'd like to see Dia benefit from the continued improvement of Inkscape that doesn't seem to be happening and more and more people will want to use Inkscape for diagramming. This will increase the desire for people to use predrawn shapes, which I expect would overlap somewhat with some of the more exotic shape tools.
Certainly it will be interesting to see how this potentially very complex area of functionality evolves.
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/