On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 08:11:46PM +0300, Spyros Blanas wrote:
Kevin Cannon wrote:
And I am quite confident that if I learn Inkscape I would get around those problems. However, I didn't mail you because of me. I mailed you because of all the other people out there who won't take the time to learn it. Now if you're goal is to become quite popular, you have to cater for everyday users. I'd say that out of every users who downloads Inkscape, you have about 5-10 minutes of them using it before they decide if they'll ever use it again.
A significant portion of people will never use it if they can't find out how to pan, zoom and rotate effectively in that time period. And it's really those people I'm speaking for. If someone is really motivated to learn Inkscape they will of course, but most people will be trying it out for a few minutes to see if they like it.
As a new Inkscape user, I have to admit that Kevin has -IMHO- quite a point. I can recall that in the very first five minutes I almost stopped using Inkscape (yes, forever) because I couldn't find out how to fill my juct-created rectangle with a green color, being used to these nice docking swatch toolbars Corel/Xara programs had. And I am not talking about rocket science, just about painting a box! No one should need to read the manual to do this! (Needless to say, patience paid out well in the end.)
Those are on the todo list, I believe... All good things in time. ;-)
In this regard, I think that creating Macromedia, Illustrator and Corel-like environments (shortcuts, menus, toolbars) would have a great impact on new users. I don't know to what extent this is possible, though.
There is sort of a catch-22 situation here, though...
To create a "clone interface" for one of these other programs requires a person who is quite knowledgeable in how to code Inkscape. However, once a given developer has reached that level of skill, they will have also become comfortable with the existing interface. They will have already solved whatever new-user issues they'd encountered originally, and be more interested in focusing their development time into things that will affect their further use of the software.
In other words, the people best able to create alternate environments, have the least motivation to do that work. The people who have the most motivation for it, have the least technical ability to do it.
However, it's possible these could get created if a few people with a shared passion for making it easier for new users (such as the participants in this thread), were to undertake this work. We have seen that this approach works very well - this is why we have good, easy to install ports for Win32 and Mac OSX today.
Shortcuts would be the easiest place to start, since there is already support implemented for alternate keyboard sets. Other UI customization will be possible once the interface is more further ported to gtkmm.
Personally, the best thing about Inkscape is that it is actually being developed by a community and is open-source. After all, in one month after first using Inkscape, here I am, tracking the inkscape-devel list!