-----Original Message----- From: bulia byak [mailto:buliabyak@...400...] Sent: 14 October 2005 21:32

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Working on shared libs is a good thing. However, for me personally the most important thing is the UI. I added a lot of small and not-so-small UI tweaks to Inkscape, and even though a few years ago I was a diehard Xara fan, now I perceive Xara as somewhat clumsy compared to Inkscape. It feels a bit awkward when I use it, I miss lots of small conveniences of Inkscape.

I would love to have an offline conversation with you about what you dislike or find awkward - I feel the same when using Inkscape, in certain areas more than others. But UI is an area I take a great deal of interest in. Of course a huge amount is that you like what you know and know what you like. I know diehard Illustrator users who defend what, to most others, appears a tortuously convoluted way of doing things. They've been through the pain learning it all once and 'sure as hell aint going to learn something else'.

Also Xara misses a few critical features of Inkscape, most importantly clones.

Yep, I agree. Been on the wish list for about 10 years. Always had higher priorities. A great example of a feature that I'd imagine little if any Inkscape code would be relevant or help us. So if we want the feature we'd have to do it from scratch.

It's up to you, but I'm not sure resisting to improvements, even temporarily, is the best tactic. Everyone can try the complete Xara on Windows right now, and everyone can get a good idea of what's in most urgent need for improvement, based on that.

Well you're possibly right, and we're never going to turn down improvements if they're dead safe and can be done with delaying things. But the dangers are that a) we de-stabilize the product b) we get distracted implementing new features and thus delay a 1.0 release. I think having a very clear target that is easy to describe and understand is worth a great deal. We've been burned so many times by making a 'relative small change' that turns into a huge job. For example Live Effects, was originally estimated at about 3 months works, no great architectural changes required. 14 months later we had it done to our satisfaction.

Charles