On Sun, Feb 15, 2015 at 9:59 PM, Martin Owens wrote:
why don't we have a single UI for all tools,
Because it would cost about $50 million and more programmers than are possibly available. The amount of energy required to sync up and do design properly across such a large and diverse set of programs is over 9000!
Martin, I would start with "no team is ready to even approach the subject beyond a few common user interaction solutions" :)
E.g. years ago I did a study, how many hotkeys can be shared between different applications. Turned out, not too many. Driving apps further in that direction would imply dramatically changing user interaction in each of them, and not necessarily for the better (for instance, it would limit the way that developers can enhance the tools), and some of the developers would rather die than go for that (the sK1 team, for instance, is deliberately cloning Corel DRAW's user interaction).
Even Adobe's suite has known user interaction incompatibilities between apps. They do try to hunt them down, but the suite is controlled by a single commercial entity, wheareas Inkscape, GIMP, MyPaint, Krita, Blender etc. are apps developed by different teams with different ideas.
The libre design suite is a dream, but, in my all-but-humble opinion, having mature design apps that don't share some design decisions, but are compatible via open standards, is good enough to build production pipelines.
All of the problems you have could be helped with better funding. A hard problem, we're working on solving. Would you contribute that $100 to making inkscape better?
If you can take just one more comment from me :), I would suggest thinking of a more detailed agenda for the hackfest.
"Being together in one room also allows us to work on things that are harder to do on-line: designing a new plugin/extension system, teaming up to squash particularly nasty bugs, authoring better user documentation, and planning where to take Inkscape development in the future." is a bit specific, but only that much.
Fundraising works best when people see stuff like this:
1) We want to bring X developers together who have shown interest to work on A, B, C, and D features or fixing this and that infamous bugs.
2) Implementing those features/Fixing those bugs will benefit you in E, F, and G ways.
3) We have G,H, I, J, and K developers who epxressed their interest in participating. They are known for doing L, M, N, and O work, so they are skillful and already made stuff you most likely benefitted from.
If you think that at this stage you would be able to do something like that, it would likely get you more funds.
Alex