On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 03:25:35AM +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
I want to thank Kevin for providing his perspective on these issues. His
Agreed, this has been a fascinating thread. Bulia's replies even helped teach me about shortcuts I hadn't heard of before. My middle mouse button is going to be getting a lot more wear and tear now! ;-)
On Wed, 17 May 2006, bulia byak wrote:
On 5/17/06, Kevin Cannon <kevin@...1281...> wrote:
This is a fair point. I'd like to point out though that the people who have the problem with it just never bother using Inkscape again.
Sorry, I just don't believe that a person who has been using program X and is now trying program Y will give up when the first shortcut he tries turns out to be different.
My guess is that neither of these statements have any data to back them up. We know that Inkscape is attracting new users and being used in increasingly more distinctive and different ways. I don't know its relative popularity in the computer graphics world in general, but I know that within the Open Source community, we're certainly the most popular vector graphics tool.
Most users do not care about the availability of source code.
When talking to non-technical potential Inkscape users, the point I work to emphasize is not so much the code as the community. I describe how in Inkscape, a motivated artist with great ideas does not run into the brick walls and barriers they do with other programs; there is very little to stop a user's good idea from reaching the eyes and ears of a developer. Also, with a little work, it is possible to get a definitive answer to a question from the exact person that coded the feature you're having trouble with, who will appreciate your feedback and perhaps even change the code to eliminate that problem in the future. Some day try tracking down help for an Illustrator feature! I bet you'll never make it out of the tech support call tree!
I also don't really put much time into talking about the cost-less nature of the software. It's true that the alternatives have high price tags, but I suspect most artists have someone else buy the software for them or something. Instead, I think it is important to emphasize that Inkscape benefits from having a lot of people who contribute to it - even including ordinary users, that donate a bit of their freetime to help with tutorials, testing, and so forth. In doing so, these users not only help make their software better, but also become part of a community that will help them in turn when they need it.
This is great but there will always be a few more users we can try to reach and as has been said before if we can do that without alienating existing users it is a good thing. (Again there are exceptions and these points are not to be taken to extremes. I think it was Bryce who wrote that we are most interested in attracting active contributors, as opposed to more users. A healthy community to help develop and support all aspects of Inkscape is what is really needed.)
Yes, this is one of my major soap box items. :-) I believe very strongly that users that participate in the project are by far much, much more important than passive users, to the degree that I argue that our audience is exclusively the former, and not the latter. I also try to define "participation" pretty broadly - I'd consider anyone who does nothing more than lend some tech support to fellow Inkscapers to be a full fledged participant. Obviously, I'd rather see them join in with creating docs, doing testing, or improving code, but like Bulia said, our project's strength is the huge network of people sharing information through word of mouth.
The better Inkscape suceeds the more likely there will be a big healthy community to help out. If after 10 minutes a users is having many problems hopefully other Inkscape users will give them a helping hand.
Agreed. I would like to see us put the same type of attention into "designing" and "optimizing" this user community as we do the technical aspects of the software itself. Certainly, we ought not make things so hard that a user can't figure things out from the software itself, but I do think an active, helpful, friendly user community can be a godsend for the (hopefully rare) situations where the user is at wits end due to overlooking some otherwise simple thing (like needing to click twice to get rotation arrows, or that a preference setting will turn on a bunch of new functionality, or that there actually *is* useful stuff under the Help menu...
Besides, communities are fun, and being able to show off something you've done in Inkscape to fellow drawers is irresistable. :-)
Bryce