I want to thank Kevin for providing his perspective on these issues. His comments do a good job of addressing some of the issues I was expecting (from reading reviews in graphic design magazines, which tend to be big fans of the big names like Adobe and Macromedia and to a lesser extent Corel). It is better that users provide us with regular reminders of this issues and then no one should be surprised to read similar sentiments in mainstream computer magazines.
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.
I'll assume you are exaggerating to make a point. It is not any one thing but each annoyance adds up to a death of a thousand cuts. Cumulatively there are enough issues to dissuade many users. Any one of the issue in the tracker could be someones must have feature, and the 80/20 rule works against us.
Most users do not care about the availability of source code. Many do not care about price, there is not only piracy but also legitimate users can push that cost to their employers, and paid professionals seem to rationalise the cost as a tradeoff against the cost of investing their time to learn another tool.
Having said that we dont want Inkscape to suffer from horrible mediocrity either and no one expect the developers to pander to compeltely reluctant users.
All of our shortcuts are extensively documented and listed in the menu (for menu commands), many of them are even shown in the statusbar. It's not difficult to figure them out.
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.)
If you're curious enough to try a new program, your curioosity should suffice for looking up its basic shortcuts as well.
Optimistic statement and some users will be dilligent enough to do this. Many more will find Inkscape already packaged in their distribution labelled as the drawing application and try to doodle a few drawings. There is a whole range of users and hopefully we can make improvements that benefit everyone without necessarily pandering to the lowest common denominator.
I don't know how to make our shortcuts more discoverable than they are now, short of adding a Clippy :)
Part of what I have been trying to say is that making it possible to do more things without _requiring_ users learn certain keybindings (they are only "short cuts" if there is a long way to do it ;).
kind of person you're targetting (at least in part) doesn't know much about programming or sourceforge works. They probably wouldn't even
Inkscape is at least in part trying not to exclude the casual users who might only want to do a quick drawing every once in a while and not remember very much of the functionality.
The work bulia has done will make Inkscape extremely attractive to hard core and highly frequent Inkscape users but I think all we are really asking is to keep considering little adjustments which keeps the barrier for entry low for beginners too. Creating good artwork has an inherent complexity and will always require a lot of skill and we probably cannot fix that but there is lots we can do.
think to mail developers. Just because you're not hearing a lot of complaints, doesn't necessarily mean there's not a problem.
I would class discovering things via status bar as a means of tertiary means of leaning about a program. e.g. Little extras like keyboard shortcuts.
The status bar can be turned off. We must assume some users will never see information displayed there and others simply won't notice even if they do have it turned on.
It shouldn't be a means of finding out a primary feature like rotation.
1) Problem identified: some users will have trouble with the Zoom tool
I would suggest putting a rotate tool in the toolbar. It will have minimal effect on current users but will seriously help beginners.
2) Proposed solution.
I'm afraid this is out of the question. It's not like changing a shortcut or an icon. We do not have a rotate tool, and we cannot really add it, this would disrupt the UI and codebase too much.
Perhaps their are other ways this issue can be addressed.
Why can't we expect a comparable level of commitment? Because we are "new and untested"? But Inkscape is already perfectly usable and used for lots of things.
Bulia is always improving Inkscape, in that context I think we can safely take "perfectly usable" to mean good enough to get work done right now without disagreeing that there will always be ways Inkscape could do better.
variety of tasks. If we succeed in "making a name" for Inkscape, I'm sure new users will NOT give up after 10 minutes.
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.
We just need an installation-time option, "Do you want Inkscape to
... install time options ... no comment at this time ...
problem identified but other solutions might be preferable...
By the way, if you know AI really well, you could help Inkscape by creating an AI-like keyboard map. This does not require any coding, just editing a self-explanatory text file. Let me know if you are interested and I'll give you all the details.
Been meaning to take a stab at that task but if someone grabs it first I can always work on a Macromedia style set of keybindings.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/