On 8/25/05, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...> wrote:
If I _don't_ mention gtkmm on the front page, I don't think I'll discourage anyone from anything. But if I _do_, I will likely scare away some users.
I would assume the opposite to be honest. Besides, with the mention of XML, SVG, CSS, W3C, PNG, etc. whether gtkmm or C++ is listed there seems like it wouldn't make much difference.
There IS much difference. The acronyms of formats and standards are one thing. Everyone has at least heard them. The (much longer and scarier, with weird capitalization and punctuation) "C++/GTKmm" is quite another. Besides it talks about "conversion" which adds to the confusion, as I explained.
Honestly, though, I think from a marketing perspective this qualifies as microoptimization. ;-) If there desire is to maximize users, then there are things that can be done that would have a much bigger effect on userbase size. (In fact, there is a possible opportunity I've learned of which may increase our userbase quite dramatically.)
I'd be interested to hear.
Pretend that you *did* actually care about what widgetset, language, etc. the code was implemented in.
Why pretend? I do care about them.
For example, imagine you are a company considering contributing code to the project but need to find out if your code is going to be compatible with Inkscape. Now start from the current http://www.inkscape.org page and see how far you'd need to navigate to find this information.
That's a completely different question - how easy it is to find information on our site. We're not discussing that at the moment. If that interested company quits after reading the first two paragraphs on the front page, I'd say it wasn't really interested to start with.
Also, for the purposes of gaining developers, I think it is more important for an open source project to appear developer-friendly than for it to have a huge userbase. Yes, large userbases can attract developers, but only to an extent; consider how many large projects there are out there that lack sufficient developer attention. If we focus on gaining developers and making them feel welcome, as we have, then gaining a large userbase will occur automatically, which is exactly what has happened. :-)
OK, let's make a deal. I will try to never scare away developers (not that I ever did, really) and you try to never scare away users :)
In any case, if our goal is to gain users, there are other approaches which would be much more effective. If this is the only reason for removing "gtkmm" and "C++" from the top of the main page, I don't think it is a strong enough reason. Unless and until someone puts together a dedicated developer.inkscape.org as Alan suggested, I think these things should be restored to our main page, or at least be added near the top of the FAQ.
Sure, a FAQ along the lines of "What programming languages and toolkits are used by Inkscape" would be entirely appropriate. Feel free to add it. Just so long as it's not on top of the front page, for the reasons I explained.