Hi all,
I wanted to follow up with a few comments on the reception of the article. I was mortified when I saw that the Slashdot blurb said Inkscape was my "brainchild" and that I was _the_ founder of Inkscape rather than _a_ founder. I hope no-one took offense at that. I suppose its unusual for open source projects to be true team efforts, but that is really one of Inkscape's strengths and one of the things that makes it so fun.
I also want to apologize to Bob for cratering his server! Hope that didn't cause problems beyond just the loss of the machine. Hopefully with Artemio's help, that problem will be stimulating us to gain a better solution in general for the future.
Despite the problems, I think it went quite well. The main goal had been to raise awareness of Inkscape and what we got exceeded what I'd been hoping for. Also, I noticed that a number of the points I wanted to make were conveyed and received by the audience. A couple of the points sparked some interesting discussions; I think our "patch first, ask questions later" policy got people thinking. Big thank-you to mental or whomever suggested emphasizing we don't _blindly_ accept patches, but do check licenses, etc.
I again want to thank everyone that helped with editing the article and rejon for giving me a deadline to get it done by; as much as I grumble about deadlines, it was useful motivation. Nathan - it turned out we missed one of the erroneous "it's", as several readers pointed out to me. :-)
I'd also like to return the favor. I think with this general "What's Inkscape" piece out of the way, there is an audience for more focused articles, and if anyone is interested in writing one I would be more than happy to lend a hand. For example, I'd bet an article giving advice about usability would be well received. An article about Inkscape internals as they relate to SVG rendering would as well. I also think a usage-oriented "secrets of Inkscape" article would be appropriate. So if anyone is interested in authoring an article on any of those subjects, I would be happy to help in any capacity.
Bryce
Oh, one other thing I should follow-up on: In the osnews comments there were a few reports of sluggish performance on certain systems (see the second and third page of the comments). I was hoping they'd submit a bug report but I haven't seen one yet, so those interested in Inkscape performance optimization might want to look at/comment on that thread.
Bryce
On Thu, 3 Jun 2004, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Hi all,
I wanted to follow up with a few comments on the reception of the article. I was mortified when I saw that the Slashdot blurb said Inkscape was my "brainchild" and that I was _the_ founder of Inkscape rather than _a_ founder. I hope no-one took offense at that. I suppose its unusual for open source projects to be true team efforts, but that is really one of Inkscape's strengths and one of the things that makes it so fun.
I also want to apologize to Bob for cratering his server! Hope that didn't cause problems beyond just the loss of the machine. Hopefully with Artemio's help, that problem will be stimulating us to gain a better solution in general for the future.
Despite the problems, I think it went quite well. The main goal had been to raise awareness of Inkscape and what we got exceeded what I'd been hoping for. Also, I noticed that a number of the points I wanted to make were conveyed and received by the audience. A couple of the points sparked some interesting discussions; I think our "patch first, ask questions later" policy got people thinking. Big thank-you to mental or whomever suggested emphasizing we don't _blindly_ accept patches, but do check licenses, etc.
I again want to thank everyone that helped with editing the article and rejon for giving me a deadline to get it done by; as much as I grumble about deadlines, it was useful motivation. Nathan - it turned out we missed one of the erroneous "it's", as several readers pointed out to me. :-)
I'd also like to return the favor. I think with this general "What's Inkscape" piece out of the way, there is an audience for more focused articles, and if anyone is interested in writing one I would be more than happy to lend a hand. For example, I'd bet an article giving advice about usability would be well received. An article about Inkscape internals as they relate to SVG rendering would as well. I also think a usage-oriented "secrets of Inkscape" article would be appropriate. So if anyone is interested in authoring an article on any of those subjects, I would be happy to help in any capacity.
Bryce
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On Thu, 03 Jun 2004 21:03:24 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Oh, one other thing I should follow-up on: In the osnews comments there were a few reports of sluggish performance on certain systems (see the second and third page of the comments).
On Windows at any rate this seems to be partly a GTK issue. It paints far, far slower than it does on Linux/X, at least in my experience (fairly fast XP machines). GTK isn't exactly a speed demon on X either, so I'm not surprised people feel it's slow. They also have not yet fixed the message pumping/painting problem :(
Mike Hearn wrote:
On Windows at any rate this seems to be partly a GTK issue. It paints far, far slower than it does on Linux/X, at least in my experience (fairly fast XP machines). GTK isn't exactly a speed demon on X either, so I'm not surprised people feel it's slow. They also have not yet fixed the message pumping/painting problem :(
We might look at GTK/fb as an optimization option. Drawing directly to a framebuffer, SGI-style might give a good speed jump.
Bob
Hi,
I'd also like to return the favor. I think with this general "What's Inkscape" piece out of the way, there is an audience for more focused articles, and if anyone is interested in writing one I would be more than happy to lend a hand. For example, I'd bet an article giving advice about usability would be well received. An article about Inkscape internals as they relate to SVG rendering would as well. I also think a usage-oriented "secrets of Inkscape" article would be appropriate. So if anyone is interested in authoring an article on any of those subjects, I would be happy to help in any capacity.
I was thinking of writing a few articles about Inkscape usability; there have been a lot of good improvements since the fork. I've been using Inkscape to develop an online comic and a few sets of icons, and have found very few frustrations. I was also planning to develop some more tutorials, contribute some code, but that's a topic for another day.
Here's a list of usability bits (good and bad) I've found while using Inkscape. As I'm using the latest stable version, these items may be fixed in the bleeding edge. And while I've read most of the wiki, and browsed the changelogs, I may have missed something that is known or planned for the future ...
Good stuff:
* Boolean operations :) * Keybindings/menus. I found Inkscape's organization better than the pre-forked project (even though I liked, in concept, the pre-fork's tool window). * Speed. It renders well on all of my machines (some older ones too). * Output quality. This is the biggest issue for me, and Inkscape has really nice (UI and rendering) export facilities. * It doesn't crash. Some of the non-free vector drawing tools I've been forced to use in the past crashed regularly (*cough*, Visio).
Stuff to improve:
* Resizing objects resizes their line width. For the online comic, I'm aiming to use a constant style, which includes a fixed line-width for all of the shapes. Adjusting line-widths on every resize is very frustrating - if this were modal (modified with a keypress, or via a setting), it would be a great improvement. * Copy/paste between Inkscape instances seems broken. I had planned to use one Inkscape document like a clipboard of comic bits (similar to Visio's stencils), but I couldn't get cut/paste to work. * There is no 'application' toobar. I have a habit of clicking on save from time to time (even though I also use ctrl-s). I haven't found a standard toolbar. * Snap-to is a bit too snappy. Some applications have a snap-to that allows both fine-positioning /and/ snap-to at the same time. One such application uses a modifier key while dragging objects (shift iirc), and another is just nice about its snappyness. * The text properties are not applied in real-time. Nearly every time I modify the text properties of a chunk of text, I forget to click apply. Other similar applications apply these changes in real-time. I'm sure there's a performance (or other) reason why this isn't the case, but it results in many "D'Oh!"s.
Wishes:
* A user-defined palette. The colour wheels and sliders are great for picking colours, but I'm usually working with a very particular set of colours (and I'll work with those colours for many weeks). I've worked around this by drawing my own palette on the diagram, which I use instead. * Persisted document properties. For every document I create, I find I have to make the same set of tweaks to the document settings. It would be really handy if this were persisted by Inkscape, and applied to each document created. * A stencil-mechanism. I'd like to be able to save bits of drawings that I could reuse later (cartoon bubbles/balloons, strip outlines, etc.) * A way to import bitmaps easily. One useful tool for an illustrator is to be able to trace over a sketch loaded in the background (or in a box). I've never really liked auto-trace tools, so just the ability to load a bitmap into a box would be incredibly useful.
Thanks to all of the Inkscape developers -- this is a great tool!
participants (4)
-
Bob Jamison -
Bruce Alderson -
Bryce Harrington -
Mike Hearn