Le 15/02/2015 21:19, Alexandre Prokoudine a écrit :
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:
- 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.
- Implementing those features/Fixing those bugs will benefit you in
E, F, and G ways.
- 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
Thank you Alexandre for your answer and I'll use it for my answer to all people after my last message :
- I thank you for this message because when I read the annoucement for the hackfest I didn't understand what it's about and why I'd give money for having people around a table and talking about Inskcape. I'm serious. So thanks for selling me the concept (better).
- Someone talked about Deviantart and something like "that's funny that you said that nothing in deviantart is made with svg, because the logo is made with svg, actually, hahaha, gotcha !". *Sigh*. I think there's some difference between a site made for the most part in svg for graphics, and a site with just its logo. And I was talking about artists that may draw with vector software, but never share their work directly in svg or other vector format, for obvious reasons. Oh, well, never mind.
- Also, It's not because svg is the best format for diagrams that it is widely used for them. In my professional work, when people need to make a diagram, they use Powerpoint, or a soft made specifically for diagrams, not a soft like Inskcape that is not designed to draw easily and quickly complex diagrams (I tried, and I had hard time).
- Someone told me about giving 100$ to help for development. Yep, sure, except that now I'm sure that Inkscape will never be what I wish. Unify the UI for tools like Filters, LPE and so on ? Don't count on that, you said, because of "debts" and the fact that it's too much work. OK, so you tell me that you'll never touch of those "debts" ? Do you realize that a day or another, you soft will be stuck because of this, and it will be impossible to improve because "really too much work" ? Is it really not possible to change that now, when it's not too late ? (or maybe it's already too late ?) Now I clearly see what Inkscape will be. A soft that can draw in the svg (2, 5, whatever) standard, but with an user interface that is a pain to use for many tools, and limited by its own structure. Sorry, I won't pay 100$ for this. I'll prefer pay that for a soft that fits my """artist""" needs.
Don't get me wrong. Again, I don't want fo insult anyone. The soft is great, and fairly perfect for 80% of my needs. But I do know now that for more ambitious drawings I'll need another vector soft, more artist-oriented. There are many cheap softs for painters (really good, and without a standard to follow !), no doubt there will be new softs for vector artists sooner or later (Illustrator doesn't count, too expensive).
Cheers, Francois.