On Sun, 8 Aug 2004, Alan Horkan wrote:
On Sat, 7 Aug 2004, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Sat, 7 Aug 2004, Alan Horkan wrote:
You might not like me much for telling you this right after you bought issue 56 but issue 57 has a comparison of various Vector Graphics software incuding Inkscape and another Inkscape tutorial. At ~12 Euro I am again Inkscape got 8/10, as did OpenOffice.org Draw.
OpenOffice.org Draw was described as the best drawing tool but the reviewer was baffled by the lack of any SVG import whatsoever.
Yeah, he's not alone. ;-)
Getting OpenOffice to support SVG is actually one of the ulterior goals of Open Clip Art. ;-)
There is a tactic amongst proprietary software to work on features specifically to win good reviews and cheap publicity. On its own this stategy is crass and rather foolish but it is useful to keep in mind as a secondary objective.
To me the best things to win are the comments from really advanced users, when they say things like, "Wow, it's so easy to use", and when they show off the amazing things they've created with the software.
Open Source is a bit unusual in that the _size_ of the userbase doesn't produce a direct benefit, as it does with proprietary software (where large userbase == large customer base == more $$$). Rather, for Open Source projects it seems like what is more valuable is the _quality_ of the userbase. It's more useful and fun to have a good user community that helps one another and participate in the process. We may not have a ton of users, but the ones we've got are very cool. :-)
Nathan made a very good point early on in Inkscape regarding our PR strategy - by growing the userbase slowly but steadily, the community quality will grow; if we grew too quickly, too suddenly, there could be a disconnect and we could lose that.
The article was writtten by Andy Chanelle, in case anyone wants to try and contact him. I assume no one has yet tried to contact the author of the other article mentioned. If reviewers are reading this for the love of god talk to us directly please!
Simarilius wrote a letter to the editor, updating them on our recent progress and encouraging further reviews.
I think the adjustment widgets (such for rounding a rectangle) being shown more often, not just when using the node editor has been a significant improvement and part of the reason he foudn the path tools so pleasant (I am inferring this from the rest of what he wrote).
I think you're right. Those handles have turned out to be quite a significant enhancement, despite how subtle they are.
There were several things they suggested needed work: EPS/PDF support,
The reviewer thought EPS and PDF were a crucial omission, but the situation has improved in Inkscape 0.39 and 0.40 (at least on Linux which is what is important in this case).
*Nod* Yeah, I've noticed for each release (including back during Sodipodi days), there has *always* been a "crucial omission". At one point that was boolean operations, at another it was layers, one day it will be cut-and-paste or scripting or something. It's like peeling an onion, each new feature makes some other missing feature more visible as necessary. "Gee, if only it had..."
I think it's to our credit that we've been able to predict these trends pretty accurately. Half the time the requested feature is already implemented in CVS by the time we hear of the need. :-)
the way I see it the gradient management needs to be largely seperated out into a seperate full window gradient manager allowing searching sorting renaming and preview of many gradients (and previewing them as Linear, Radial and possible other ways). All that would be kept to the front would be a preview of the current gradient.
Anyone interested in improving the gradient editing interface should take a look at the Gimp's gradient editor. Seems a lot more usable.
Skencil has a colour palette as a toolbar just above the status bar and he mentioned that this was like Corel and very convenient. (I think Xara X did this too). It would seem like a logical extension of how inkscape currently handles its toolbars (but I still wish toolbars could be properly be docked and undocked and used as palettes as well but thats a GTK problem). I've been thinking about colour tools in inkscape recently and how handy it would have been to be albe to do things like "Invert Colours" or Swap Red -> Green (G->B, etc).
Yeah there's a lot of work to be done with the colors. It seems that this is an onion layer we've not quite reached, but it's close. Feels like it's somewhere under the "redo the text editing interface".
The reviwer was paritcularly taken by the Blend tool in Sketch/Skencil which he also described as a Tween tool, as it would combines two shapes into the a shape that is halfway between the two shapes. (I think this is very differnt from what Adobe Illustrator does with its Blend tool but I'd appreciate if someone more knowledgeable could clarify).
Wow, interesting idea... Sorta sounds like an extension type of thing.
He also liked Karbon 14 but was dissappointed by bugs and instability.
I didn't read that review - what were the particularities he liked about it?
Bryce