On 2007-December-02 , at 00:00 , Maximilian Albert wrote:

I just finished talking with a friend who discovered Inkscape today (without any effort on my part :)) while working on a webpage for his funk & soul band. He was really enthused by Inkscape's power and usability, so first I'd like to give the kudos to all developers.

However, using a Mac, he felt that the overall integration and "Mac feeling" could still be improved. Following my suggestion he gave one of the development snapshots a try (he was using the 0.45 release) and was pleasantly surprised to discover improvements (e.g., Apple key + click now correctly emulates right click). I think some of this is due to jiho's work? Thanks! (Also to all the others working in this area.)

The Apple+Right click thing is not me ;) However, I think that this has always worked, it just requires the right option to be enabled in Apple's X11. The main Mac-related improvements were some cleanup in the startup script and some visual improvements in the GTK theme (the latest Intel builds have had it for a while). I hope to get python scripting working out of the box soon too. But that's about it. And well there's always the long term goal of X11 independance... which is not so far away now.

But some other things still don't work properly. He mentioned, for instance, that Inkscape windows cannot be opened/maximised by clicking on the task bar (or whatever it's called on the Mac), which I found strange but using Linux I can neither confirm nor refute.

That's true indeed. When windows are minimized they go to the "Dock", which also holds running application icons. For regular mac- applications clicking on the icons maximizes the last closed window. Inkscape's application however is just a wrapper around a shell script. Once it is started, control passes to X11 so one should click the X11 icon to maximize Inkscape. However that does not work either, but this a bug in Apple's X11 not Inkscape. Another consequence of this is that documents can't be dragged and dropped onto the icon once Inkscape is already running (another instance can't be started from the shell script) so one has to use the open menu, which is less than ideal since it is a GTK dialog with different settings from the rest of the environment. However, I think this is more of a feature request for Inkscape itself: on Linux also, when opening two documents without using the open menu, this creates two independent instances of Inkscape and things such as copy paste don't work between the two. It would be much better to have something similar to gimp-remote IMHO, so that all windows are part of the same instance.

So I was trying to find info about the changes since 0.45 in the Release Notes for 0.46, unfortunately without success. Just out of curiosity (since I'm not affected by this), is any info about the changes or about what's still missing available somewhere?

The only big and visible stuff is already in the Release notes and that's the GTK theme change. That may seem superficial but once perfected, I think this will make a large difference for OS X users, in particular if we get Inkscape to run natively.

I have plenty of other ideas about what could be done. There's just too little time so more mac contributors are always welcome.

Cheers and thanks for getting one more mac user ;)

JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/