On Fri, 10 Dec 2004, Alan Horkan wrote:
To test Inkscape we started off by creating basic basic shapes using Inkscape's rectangle and ellipse tools and fiddling with color fills, stroke styles, rotation and so forth just to get a feel for Inkscape's tools. It took about fifteen minutes for this writer to get comfortable with the Inkscape interface.
That seems a bit long.
It seems consistent with my experience showing it to one of my graphic artist friends a couple days ago (who is a contributor himself, via a patch and an OS X launcher, but has been away from either project for a long time).
Many of the dialogs and context menus need some heavy usability work.
and intuitive. The "Vacuum Defs" item under the File menu was a bit of a puzzler at first, though it was finally determined that it was for removing unused information from the defs tags in a document. We presume this is a good thing.
*cough* told-you-so *cough*
It is unusual to have a menu item that to the average use has no noticable effect and if this is really necessary I think it would work better as a global preference.
It needs to be invoked manually if at all, otherwise it can have some really painful consequences for certain kinds of users if it's done automatically (particularly on save, which is the time where the consequences are most likely to be unrecoverable).
Now, where it should go is as a button or something in a "defs manager" or "library" dialog, where its function is immediately relevent and apparent (since you could immediately see the unused stuff disappearing).
It's just on the file menu because it's necessary for some users, but we don't have any such dialog to put it yet.
-mental