Hi all,
I've been following Inkscape's development for some time, and it's always looked like it had quite a lot of promise. I was looking for an open source vector tool to recommend to someone today and thought I'd download it to see how it's coming along. I'm happy to say that it's improved a lot since I last used it. I've very impressed.
The one thing I'm concerned about is the UI. I'm a web designer by trade and while Inkscape is quite full featured, the UI is a bit of a leap to what I'm used to, which makes transition very hard. I read your wiki, and I understand wanting an Inkscape specific UI is important and I agree that just aiming to be an Illustrator clone wouldn't be a worthy goal. However, I think you could win a lot of hearts and minds by conforming to general UI elements that are used in graphics packages.
During Firefox's early development, they made the conscious decision to match some of IE's shortcuts (alt+d, backspace for example) and some of it's conventions. The aim was to reduce the barrier to entry, and to make it feel more familiar, and it was one of the factors in it's success.
I would strongly suggest you make designers feel more at home when they give Inkscape a try. Things like pressing spacebar to pan around a page is a de facto standard amongst image editing tools. I'd say it would be trivial to make Inkscape work in the same manner. Similarly, your path nodes/handles tool are the same as the 'white arrow' tool in other apps. Changing that so it matches would again dramatically increase the accessibility of the software, and I believe seriously increase your usage figures.
These are some small examples of what I'm talking about. As a designer, I'm designing interfaces every day, and creating a low barrier to entry is crucial for my clients. I innovate in certain areas, but know that some things need to stick to conventions or else people will never use the sites I build. Inkscape is a great tool, but it's broken some of those conventions, and that will frustrate and annoy users when they try to apply their current knowledge to this application, and that is a waste. You needn't lose potential users when Inkscape is so very good, just because they're confused.
I would strongly suggest that you make efforts to remove those barriers while staying true to your goals. I'm not a coder so I cannot offer my services in that regard, but if you want to change some things to make the UI more friendly to new users, then I will happily offer my services in identifying issues.
I sincerely hope you'll take me up on my offer,
Kind Regards,
- Kevin Cannon
On 5/17/06, Kevin Cannon wrote:
I would strongly suggest you make designers feel more at home when they give Inkscape a try. Things like pressing spacebar to pan around a page is a de facto standard amongst image editing tools. I'd say it would be trivial to make Inkscape work in the same manner. Similarly, your path nodes/handles tool are the same as the 'white arrow' tool in other apps. Changing that so it matches would again dramatically increase the accessibility of the software, and I believe seriously increase your usage figures.
What's the full list of "incompatibilities"?
Alexandre
On 5/17/06, Kevin Cannon <kevin@...1281...> wrote:
The one thing I'm concerned about is the UI. I'm a web designer by trade and while Inkscape is quite full featured, the UI is a bit of a leap to what I'm used to, which makes transition very hard.
You seem to be assuming that everyone would be transitioning from AI. This seems to be so much taken for granted by you that you don't even mention AI when you speak about "transitioning". But, fortunately, AI is not (yet) the only game in town. Users of, for example, CorelDraw will feel _much_ more at home when using Inkscape.
In general, I have nothing against changing our UI to become compatible with someone else - but only if this improves Inkscape too. That is, if it adds some convenience that we didn't have before, or at least does not break the other conveniences we have and the general consistency of our UI. And even if it breaks some things, I can be convinced if enough people voice their preference. For example, I'm afraid we will eventually bow to the pressure and enable Space to switch to Hand tool, at least as an option (the only problem being that we don't need and therefore don't have a Hand tool, and adding it is not exactly a one-line change).
Kevin, I just wanted you to know my position from the start, because you will likely hear from me if you continue this discussion. Also please keep in mind that I'm just one of the developers, not the top authority on UI, and other developers may have other opinions.
That said, I didn't see any specific proposals in your message except for the Space-for-Hand. If you have more suggestions, we'd definitely like to hear them.
I read your wiki, and I understand wanting an Inkscape specific UI is important and I agree that just aiming to be an Illustrator clone wouldn't be a worthy goal. However, I think you could win a lot of hearts and minds by conforming to general UI elements that are used in graphics packages.
If the plural of "graphics packages" is correct, i.e. you refer to something that indeed more than one vector editor have in common but Inkscape does not, then we're even more interested to hear. If, however, your "graphics packages" is just an emphatic reference to AI alone, then our interest, understandably, is lower (but not zero, of course :)
I would strongly suggest you make designers feel more at home when they give Inkscape a try. Things like pressing spacebar to pan around a page is a de facto standard amongst image editing tools.
CorelDraw and Xara do not comply to this "standard", for example.
trivial to make Inkscape work in the same manner. Similarly, your path nodes/handles tool are the same as the 'white arrow' tool in other apps.
Oh come on. Again, "apps" in plural :) The whole concept of the "white arrow" is so entirely AI-specific. We have a Node tool that edits nodes, and we don't care about the color of the arrow :)
Changing that so it matches would again dramatically increase the accessibility of the software, and I believe seriously increase your usage figures.
I'm not sure what you mean by "match". But I just want to say that our Node tool is, by now, one of the most powerful things in Inkscape, whereas AI's node "tool" (actually a collection of small tools) is one of the worst things in it, UI-wise. Our two approaches in this area, I'm afraid, are hardly compatible.
Hi Bulia,
Thanks very much for the reply. I appreciate you taking the time to followup to my points well.
You mention some good points regarding Corel Draw, and also Xara, regarding shortcuts which don't match up. Although I've worked with many apps, I haven't used those ones so I'll definitely admit my lack of knowledge of them.
I mention Illustrator specifically because it's the most obvious. However many of the conventions I was talking about are in other apps too. Fireworks, Flash, Photoshop, InDesign, (some in Quark), Microsoft Expression off the top of my head. Many of them share the same conventions.
I agree it's important to make sure the changes improve the Inkscape UI overall, and don't just add compatibility for the sake of it. However I think there's some shortcuts & features that are defacto standards and would make adoption far easier. Even if someone does use Corel or Xara, for example, they probably still use some of the other tools above so will be familiar with most of the shortcuts.
I mentioned spacebar because it is the biggest one. I'm surprised it's not implemented. I would strongly suggest that it would be as it's by far one of the most used devices in graphics programs. It's akin to having a web browser without a back button.
You asked for more examples. Another one which I immediately noticed was the operation of the zoom tool. In most tools the shortcut is Z, and it zooms in by default. When holding alt the tools changes to zoom out and the cursor has the minus sign on it. Inkscape uses the shift key for the same function though and adjusting is almost impossible. Most people coming to Inkscape will be used to that behaviour, and I think changing it will make the experience much more comfortable for them.
Another example is the palettes. When trying to adjust the stoke if you click back on the canvas, the palette disappears. It's generally bad practice to have UI elements appear/disappear without obvious user interaction, I think keeping it visible until the user closes it would improve it dramatically. At the moment it feels slightly erratic.
Another thing I've just noticed is there's no obvious way to rotate an object. When selected you can't do it, and there doesn't seem to be a rotate tool either. While there may be some way in Inkscape to do this, it's not immediately obvious, and does not seem to be discoverable either.
Regarding the hand tool. You mention that it is not a one line fix, unlike the zoom tool thing I mentioned which would be easy to fix if people wanted. However, as a user I would probably say that the addition of the hand tool is more important that pretty much any other bug you have listed.
Also, one of the things I mentioned was the node tool. I do agree that Inkscape's seems really great, and an improvement on other apps. However I disagree that it's AI specific. It's also used in Photoshop, Firework & Flash off the top of my head. I'm not suggesting that you change the way that works be any means. Indeed, I really like the way many of Inkscapes tools work, the bezier tool particularly, is a pleasure to use. However, if you changed the graphic, so it was a white arrow with a black outline it would make Inkscape immediately more discoverable.
I mostly agree with the sentiments expressed in your reply. I think Inkscape is really great, I would not feel happy to recommend it to people, which is impressive given it's still relatively new. What I'm suggesting is making Inkscape's UI more discoverable. There are small tweaks (a few mentioned above) and would make it feel more familiar to users coming from other common professional applications. If there's a particular reason to keep something different then that makes sense, but if there's not a good reason, then I would suggest matching some of the conventions to make the features in Inkscape discoverable.
I hope I've explained my position more clearly,
If you have any questions fire away,
- Kevin
Kevin Cannon wrote:
I mentioned spacebar because it is the biggest one. I'm surprised it's not implemented. I would strongly suggest that it would be as it's by far one of the most used devices in graphics programs. It's akin to having a web browser without a back button.
Do you have a mouse with a scroll button? If so, all you need to do is hold down the scroll wheel and you can pan around... no extra keys/buttons necessary. I also come from Illustrator, and now when I go back to it I find it frustrating that I have to hold an extra key to pan around. Just my .02
-Josh
On 5/17/06, Kevin Cannon <kevin@...1281...> wrote:
I mentioned spacebar because it is the biggest one. I'm surprised it's not implemented. I would strongly suggest that it would be as it's by far one of the most used devices in graphics programs. It's akin to having a web browser without a back button.
I hope you realize that we are not exactly "a browser without a back button". Rather, we are browser that has different - and more - and better! - ways to go back a page. Middle-button drag and Ctrl+arrows are both more convenient than a Hand tool, and of course they are the most used shortcuts in Inkscape.
You asked for more examples. Another one which I immediately noticed was the operation of the zoom tool. In most tools the shortcut is Z, and it zooms in by default. When holding alt the tools changes to zoom out and the cursor has the minus sign on it. Inkscape uses the shift key for the same function though and adjusting is almost impossible. Most people coming to Inkscape will be used to that behaviour, and I think changing it will make the experience much more comfortable for them.
Another good example. First, as is with Hand, heavy users of Inkscape do not ever switch to the Zoom tool at all. It's just not needed. Middle-click and Shift+middle click are way more convenient and don't require switching tools. Ctrl+mousewheel and +/- (no need to press Ctrl with +/-, by the way, saves a lot of time!) are nice too. Second, what you propose would break the consistency of the UI. In Inkscape, the general meaning of Shift is "Do the same as without Shift, only backwards", whereas the meaning of Alt is "Do some fancy variant of the main action". What you're proposing would be exactly vice versa. Third, Alt+mouse may need some setup to work on Linux (by default it drags a window), which is not good for such a basic action. And fourth, finally, despite all this, I may be convinced to sacrifice this little point if enough people voice their concern over it. So far, however, you're the first person to raise this issue (unlike the space-to-hand issue which was voiced by a lot of people).
Another example is the palettes. When trying to adjust the stoke if you click back on the canvas, the palette disappears. It's generally bad practice to have UI elements appear/disappear without obvious user interaction, I think keeping it visible until the user closes it would improve it dramatically. At the moment it feels slightly erratic.
Absolutely, this is the worst bug of Inkscape at the moment. But the problem is, it's not a bug of Inkscape. It's a bug of the toolkit library we use, and it's only on Windows. On Linux, palettes do not disappear like that. There's already a patch for that bug, and hopefully it will be fixed one day.
Another thing I've just noticed is there's no obvious way to rotate an object. When selected you can't do it, and there doesn't seem to be a rotate tool either. While there may be some way in Inkscape to do this, it's not immediately obvious, and does not seem to be discoverable either.
A perfect example! You never really worked in CorelDraw, did you? CorelDraw was the first one to invent the "second click" UI in Selector for getting rotation/skew handles. Just click it again and see the arrows change. It's been around in Corel for many years and was copied by other programs as well, Xara being one example. It's an extremely fluid and convenient UI, much better than the clumsy "rotate tools" in AI or FH.
As for discoverability, maybe you have a point here. But look at the statusbar. It says plain and direct, "Click selection to toggle scale/rotation handles". Sounds discoverable enough to me. I know that AI has no statusbar worth speaking about, so you probably are not used to look for it, but Inkscape is different. A LOT of useful information and context-sensitive hints are in the statusbar, so don't miss them.
Oh, and of course let's not forget that unlike any other vector editor, Inkscape also has keys for rotating selection: [ and ] (or with Ctrl for rotating by 90 degrees, or with Alt for pixel-sized rotation). I use them 99% of the time I need to rotate anything, and I honestly don't understand how the poor users of other apps can live without this basic convenience.
Regarding the hand tool. You mention that it is not a one line fix, unlike the zoom tool thing I mentioned which would be easy to fix if people wanted. However, as a user I would probably say that the addition of the hand tool is more important that pretty much any other bug you have listed.
You know what, we've seen people before coming with exact same attitude... and after they learn the basics of the Inkscape way of doing things, many of their complaints disappear. It's just an observation :)
And, like I said, I will not object to someone implementing the Hand tool if they need it. It's not a one-liner, but not too difficult either. Ask me for directions if you want to work on that.
use. However, if you changed the graphic, so it was a white arrow with a black outline it would make Inkscape immediately more discoverable.
No problem with this one, all our icons are dynamically generated from a single SVG file. Someone just needs to draw an "AI clone" icon set and we'll include it with the release.
bulia byak wrote:
On 5/17/06, Kevin Cannon <kevin@...1281...> wrote:
I mentioned spacebar because it is the biggest one. I'm surprised it's not implemented. I would strongly suggest that it would be as it's by far one of the most used devices in graphics programs. It's akin to having a web browser without a back button.
I hope you realize that we are not exactly "a browser without a back button". Rather, we are browser that has different - and more - and better! - ways to go back a page. Middle-button drag and Ctrl+arrows are both more convenient than a Hand tool, and of course they are the most used shortcuts in Inkscape.
I agree. That's the same with most open source tools. There's really powerful features. Though I would add, if you ever stick around long enough to find them. Since you've already got the panning functionality, it seems that adding a hand tool would allow users familiar with that technique to use it, without interfering with existing users. I do like your middle mouse shortcuts, they're pretty cool! :)
You asked for more examples. Another one which I immediately noticed was the operation of the zoom tool. In most tools the shortcut is Z, and it zooms in by default. When holding alt the tools changes to zoom out and the cursor has the minus sign on it. Inkscape uses the shift key for the same function though and adjusting is almost impossible. Most people coming to Inkscape will be used to that behaviour, and I think changing it will make the experience much more comfortable for them.
Another good example. First, as is with Hand, heavy users of Inkscape do not ever switch to the Zoom tool at all. It's just not needed. Middle-click and Shift+middle click are way more convenient and don't require switching tools. Ctrl+mousewheel and +/- (no need to press Ctrl with +/-, by the way, saves a lot of time!) are nice too. Second, what you propose would break the consistency of the UI. In Inkscape, the general meaning of Shift is "Do the same as without Shift, only backwards", whereas the meaning of Alt is "Do some fancy variant of the main action". What you're proposing would be exactly vice versa. Third, Alt+mouse may need some setup to work on Linux (by default it drags a window), which is not good for such a basic action.
I can certainly understand why you wouldn't want to do the shift thing if it breaks your current shortcuts, but I would consider it. Zooming (in that way) is one of those actions you don't even think about. Again, I think your shortcuts with the middle button are cool, but I never would have figure them out if you hadn't just said it. They're not discoverable.
And fourth, finally, despite all this, I may be convinced to sacrifice this little point if enough people voice their concern over it. So far, however, you're the first person to raise this issue (unlike the space-to-hand issue which was voiced by a lot of people).
This is a fair point. I'd like to point out though that the people who have the problem with it just never bother using Inkscape again. The kind of person you're targetting (at least in part) doesn't know much about programming or sourceforge works. They probably wouldn't even think to mail developers. Just because you're not hearing a lot of complaints, doesn't necessarily mean there's not a problem.
Another example is the palettes. When trying to adjust the stoke if you click back on the canvas, the palette disappears. It's generally bad practice to have UI elements appear/disappear without obvious user interaction, I think keeping it visible until the user closes it would improve it dramatically. At the moment it feels slightly erratic.
Absolutely, this is the worst bug of Inkscape at the moment. But the problem is, it's not a bug of Inkscape. It's a bug of the toolkit library we use, and it's only on Windows. On Linux, palettes do not disappear like that. There's already a patch for that bug, and hopefully it will be fixed one day.
Well, if it's a problem when using Inkscape, it's a bug in Inkscape. The problem may not be with your code, but there is still a problem in the program. It's important to see, the end user doesn't care who's fault it is, they'll just uninstall it.
It's great that there's a fix available, and I would suggest doing whatever is in your power to push it through as fast as possible. It would be a dealbreaker for quite a lot of people.
Another thing I've just noticed is there's no obvious way to rotate an object. When selected you can't do it, and there doesn't seem to be a rotate tool either. While there may be some way in Inkscape to do this, it's not immediately obvious, and does not seem to be discoverable either.
A perfect example! You never really worked in CorelDraw, did you?
As I said earlier, I haven't at all. I've never even known anyone to use it outside of specific niche areas, or people who've been using it for years and years.
CorelDraw was the first one to invent the "second click" UI in Selector for getting rotation/skew handles. Just click it again and see the arrows change. It's been around in Corel for many years and was copied by other programs as well, Xara being one example. It's an extremely fluid and convenient UI, much better than the clumsy "rotate tools" in AI or FH.
Yea, that's neat all right, but I never would have found that, and I looked.
As for discoverability, maybe you have a point here. But look at the statusbar. It says plain and direct, "Click selection to toggle scale/rotation handles". Sounds discoverable enough to me. I know that AI has no statusbar worth speaking about, so you probably are not used to look for it, but Inkscape is different. A LOT of useful information and context-sensitive hints are in the statusbar, so don't miss them.
I would class discovering things via status bar as a means of tertiary means of leaning about a program. e.g. Little extras like keyboard shortcuts. It shouldn't be a means of finding out a primary feature like rotation. I would suggest putting a rotate tool in the toolbar. It will have minimal effect on current users but will seriously help beginners.
Oh, and of course let's not forget that unlike any other vector editor, Inkscape also has keys for rotating selection: [ and ] (or with Ctrl for rotating by 90 degrees, or with Alt for pixel-sized rotation). I use them 99% of the time I need to rotate anything, and I honestly don't understand how the poor users of other apps can live without this basic convenience.
Well, it's really rare that I'd ever want to rotate something in increments like that, but I could see how it would be useful to some.
Regarding the hand tool. You mention that it is not a one line fix, unlike the zoom tool thing I mentioned which would be easy to fix if people wanted. However, as a user I would probably say that the addition of the hand tool is more important that pretty much any other bug you have listed.
You know what, we've seen people before coming with exact same attitude... and after they learn the basics of the Inkscape way of doing things, many of their complaints disappear. It's just an observation :)
I agree with you 100%, but that kind of thinking is the problem.
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.
I guess it all depends on if you're trying to great a power tool that few people will use, or a very good tool, that a lot of people can use.
And, like I said, I will not object to someone implementing the Hand tool if they need it. It's not a one-liner, but not too difficult either. Ask me for directions if you want to work on that.
If I could code I would. My expertise is not in coding, which is why I'm mailing you, in the hope that at least I can offer some kind of perspective that will help you guys look at Inkscape from other people's POV.
use. However, if you changed the graphic, so it was a white arrow with a black outline it would make Inkscape immediately more discoverable.
No problem with this one, all our icons are dynamically generated from a single SVG file. Someone just needs to draw an "AI clone" icon set and we'll include it with the release.
Well, I wasn't suggesting you have an AI icon set, since that doesn't help the general user who downloads Inkscape. I'll happily edit that icon if you tell me how I can access the files though. But I think the change would be useless unless it was made to the default toolbar.
I would just like to add that you've explained some great features in Inkscape for me in this mail. I think power shortcuts are great for users when they get to know a tool. But not everyone will be a power user, and finding things when you start using Inkscape could be improved.
All the best,
- Kevin
On 5/18/06, Kevin Cannon wrote:
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.
I don't get it.
Rotating:
1. Select rectangle tool 2. Draw rectangle 3. Hover the Selector icon, see the "Select and transform objects". 4. Choose selector 5. Look at the bottom of the window (at least Xara users WILL look). See "Rectangle in Layer 1. Click to toggle between scaling and rotating" 6. Click. Rotate.
Zooming:
Most apps use Ctrl+Mousewheel. So does Inkscape
Panning:
Many apps use middle mouse button for that (IE, Visio etc.). So does Inkscape/
Do you really think they won't figure it out within 5-10 minutes? I think you are underestimating "most people".
We have much more chances to lose users because of not supporting AI, CDR, WMF or EPS in a way they would like. How come you don't tell that we need supporting them Right Now (tm) ? :)))
Alexandre
On 5/17/06, Kevin Cannon <kevin@...1281...> wrote:
This is a fair point. I'd like to point out though that the people who have the problem with it just never bother using Inkscape again.
Sorry, I just don't believe that a person who has been using program X and is now trying program Y will give up when the first shortcut he tries turns out to be different. All of our shortcuts are extensively documented and listed in the menu (for menu commands), many of them are even shown in the statusbar. It's not difficult to figure them out. If you're curious enough to try a new program, your curioosity should suffice for looking up its basic shortcuts as well. I don't know how to make our shortcuts more discoverable than they are now, short of adding a Clippy :)
kind of person you're targetting (at least in part) doesn't know much about programming or sourceforge works. They probably wouldn't even think to mail developers. Just because you're not hearing a lot of complaints, doesn't necessarily mean there's not a problem.
Yet we do hear a lot about space-for-drag.
I would class discovering things via status bar as a means of tertiary means of leaning about a program. e.g. Little extras like keyboard shortcuts. It shouldn't be a means of finding out a primary feature like rotation. I would suggest putting a rotate tool in the toolbar. It will have minimal effect on current users but will seriously help beginners.
I'm afraid this is out of the question. It's not like changing a shortcut or an icon. We do not have a rotate tool, and we cannot really add it, this would disrupt the UI and codebase too much. Everything in Inkscape is built around the simple and intuitive assumption that all kinds of transformation are done by the Selector tool. We cannot break the tool in two, it will be a too painful operation for too little gain.
As a silly but possible comrpomise, does AI has a keyboard shortcut for its rotate tool? Is it "r"? If it is, I can easily add that shortcut so that in Selector, it does the same as the "second click", i.e. switches the handles to rotate mode.
Oh, and of course let's not forget that unlike any other vector editor, Inkscape also has keys for rotating selection: [ and ] (or with Ctrl for rotating by 90 degrees, or with Alt for pixel-sized rotation). I use them 99% of the time I need to rotate anything, and I honestly don't understand how the poor users of other apps can live without this basic convenience.
Well, it's really rare that I'd ever want to rotate something in increments like that, but I could see how it would be useful to some.
What increments are you talking about? Alt+[] rotates by one screen pixel, so the closer you zoom the more precision you get. With this I actually get better rotation precision than with mouse.
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.
That really depends on which program is this. If the user is starting to learn AI which he never tried before, I doubt he will give it up after 10 minutes. He will likely spend weeks trying to wrap his mind around this usability disaster of a vector editor, and whenever he can't figure out something, he will likely blame himself, not Adobe.
Why can't we expect a comparable level of commitment? Because we are "new and untested"? But Inkscape is already perfectly usable and used for lots of things.
I'm not saying we should not try to make migration easier for AI users. Of course we must do all we reasonably can for that. But we ALSO must do all we can to promote it as a powerful program in its own right, to assert that its being different is actually being better (for the most part), and to demonstrate its applicability to a wide variety of tasks. If we succeed in "making a name" for Inkscape, I'm sure new users will NOT give up after 10 minutes.
For a program like Inkscape, most of the distribution is done by word of mouth, in person-to-person mode. For example, you mentioned you were going to recommend it to someone. So, instead of just sending them a URL, why not show them interactively the cool shortcuts you've learned, or at least why not mention that they exist and that it is indeed possible to do in Inkscape all that they did before in AI, so that the person would be more motivated to discover those ways on his own. That's how new and better programs take over the world: someone gets excited and shares his excitement with others. There's no other way. I think Inkscape is well worth the extra time you would spend on this.
Well, I wasn't suggesting you have an AI icon set, since that doesn't help the general user who downloads Inkscape. I'll happily edit that icon if you tell me how I can access the files though. But I think the change would be useless unless it was made to the default toolbar.
We just need an installation-time option, "Do you want Inkscape to mimic Adobe Illustrator as much as possible", and if the user chooses yes, it would use AI keyboard shortcuts, AI icons, and possibly some AI behavior tweaks.
By the way, if you know AI really well, you could help Inkscape by creating an AI-like keyboard map. This does not require any coding, just editing a self-explanatory text file. Let me know if you are interested and I'll give you all the details.
On 5/18/06, bulia byak wrote:
As a silly but possible comrpomise, does AI has a keyboard shortcut for its rotate tool? Is it "r"? If it is, I can easily add that shortcut so that in Selector, it does the same as the "second click", i.e. switches the handles to rotate mode.
You don't want rectangle tool be available by "r" any more? :)
Alexandre
On 5/17/06, Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@...400...> wrote:
On 5/18/06, bulia byak wrote:
As a silly but possible comrpomise, does AI has a keyboard shortcut for its rotate tool? Is it "r"? If it is, I can easily add that shortcut so that in Selector, it does the same as the "second click", i.e. switches the handles to rotate mode.
You don't want rectangle tool be available by "r" any more? :)
Oh, sorry, forgot about that (I always use F4). And it looks like AI's keys for its rotate tool is indeed "r". So there's really nothing we can do about it without wreaking havoc on our UI.
There are loads of great points in this thread I'd like to address but I'll try and restrain myself (or at least stick to one significant point in this email).
On Wed, 17 May 2006, bulia byak wrote:
[...]
kind of person you're targetting (at least in part) doesn't know much about programming or sourceforge works. They probably wouldn't even think to mail developers. Just because you're not hearing a lot of complaints, doesn't necessarily mean there's not a problem.
Yet we do hear a lot about space-for-drag.
The GNU Image Manipulation program hears it a lot too. Currently space switches to the move tool temporarily and releasing switches back. Sven did have some reservations about changing since a lot of people like the current behaviour but my impression was that there is a good chance they will add it given a bit more encouragement.
Having trouble finding a suitable reference on the mailing list, but maybe this discussion was just older than I thought: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.gimp.devel/7599/focus=7631
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
I want to thank Kevin for providing his perspective on these issues. His comments do a good job of addressing some of the issues I was expecting (from reading reviews in graphic design magazines, which tend to be big fans of the big names like Adobe and Macromedia and to a lesser extent Corel). It is better that users provide us with regular reminders of this issues and then no one should be surprised to read similar sentiments in mainstream computer magazines.
On Wed, 17 May 2006, bulia byak wrote:
On 5/17/06, Kevin Cannon <kevin@...1281...> wrote:
This is a fair point. I'd like to point out though that the people who have the problem with it just never bother using Inkscape again.
Sorry, I just don't believe that a person who has been using program X and is now trying program Y will give up when the first shortcut he tries turns out to be different.
I'll assume you are exaggerating to make a point. It is not any one thing but each annoyance adds up to a death of a thousand cuts. Cumulatively there are enough issues to dissuade many users. Any one of the issue in the tracker could be someones must have feature, and the 80/20 rule works against us.
Most users do not care about the availability of source code. Many do not care about price, there is not only piracy but also legitimate users can push that cost to their employers, and paid professionals seem to rationalise the cost as a tradeoff against the cost of investing their time to learn another tool.
Having said that we dont want Inkscape to suffer from horrible mediocrity either and no one expect the developers to pander to compeltely reluctant users.
All of our shortcuts are extensively documented and listed in the menu (for menu commands), many of them are even shown in the statusbar. It's not difficult to figure them out.
This is great but there will always be a few more users we can try to reach and as has been said before if we can do that without alienating existing users it is a good thing. (Again there are exceptions and these points are not to be taken to extremes. I think it was Bryce who wrote that we are most interested in attracting active contributors, as opposed to more users. A healthy community to help develop and support all aspects of Inkscape is what is really needed.)
If you're curious enough to try a new program, your curioosity should suffice for looking up its basic shortcuts as well.
Optimistic statement and some users will be dilligent enough to do this. Many more will find Inkscape already packaged in their distribution labelled as the drawing application and try to doodle a few drawings. There is a whole range of users and hopefully we can make improvements that benefit everyone without necessarily pandering to the lowest common denominator.
I don't know how to make our shortcuts more discoverable than they are now, short of adding a Clippy :)
Part of what I have been trying to say is that making it possible to do more things without _requiring_ users learn certain keybindings (they are only "short cuts" if there is a long way to do it ;).
kind of person you're targetting (at least in part) doesn't know much about programming or sourceforge works. They probably wouldn't even
Inkscape is at least in part trying not to exclude the casual users who might only want to do a quick drawing every once in a while and not remember very much of the functionality.
The work bulia has done will make Inkscape extremely attractive to hard core and highly frequent Inkscape users but I think all we are really asking is to keep considering little adjustments which keeps the barrier for entry low for beginners too. Creating good artwork has an inherent complexity and will always require a lot of skill and we probably cannot fix that but there is lots we can do.
think to mail developers. Just because you're not hearing a lot of complaints, doesn't necessarily mean there's not a problem.
I would class discovering things via status bar as a means of tertiary means of leaning about a program. e.g. Little extras like keyboard shortcuts.
The status bar can be turned off. We must assume some users will never see information displayed there and others simply won't notice even if they do have it turned on.
It shouldn't be a means of finding out a primary feature like rotation.
1) Problem identified: some users will have trouble with the Zoom tool
I would suggest putting a rotate tool in the toolbar. It will have minimal effect on current users but will seriously help beginners.
2) Proposed solution.
I'm afraid this is out of the question. It's not like changing a shortcut or an icon. We do not have a rotate tool, and we cannot really add it, this would disrupt the UI and codebase too much.
Perhaps their are other ways this issue can be addressed.
Why can't we expect a comparable level of commitment? Because we are "new and untested"? But Inkscape is already perfectly usable and used for lots of things.
Bulia is always improving Inkscape, in that context I think we can safely take "perfectly usable" to mean good enough to get work done right now without disagreeing that there will always be ways Inkscape could do better.
variety of tasks. If we succeed in "making a name" for Inkscape, I'm sure new users will NOT give up after 10 minutes.
The better Inkscape suceeds the more likely there will be a big healthy community to help out. If after 10 minutes a users is having many problems hopefully other Inkscape users will give them a helping hand.
We just need an installation-time option, "Do you want Inkscape to
... install time options ... no comment at this time ...
problem identified but other solutions might be preferable...
By the way, if you know AI really well, you could help Inkscape by creating an AI-like keyboard map. This does not require any coding, just editing a self-explanatory text file. Let me know if you are interested and I'll give you all the details.
Been meaning to take a stab at that task but if someone grabs it first I can always work on a Macromedia style set of keybindings.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 03:25:35AM +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
I want to thank Kevin for providing his perspective on these issues. His
Agreed, this has been a fascinating thread. Bulia's replies even helped teach me about shortcuts I hadn't heard of before. My middle mouse button is going to be getting a lot more wear and tear now! ;-)
On Wed, 17 May 2006, bulia byak wrote:
On 5/17/06, Kevin Cannon <kevin@...1281...> wrote:
This is a fair point. I'd like to point out though that the people who have the problem with it just never bother using Inkscape again.
Sorry, I just don't believe that a person who has been using program X and is now trying program Y will give up when the first shortcut he tries turns out to be different.
My guess is that neither of these statements have any data to back them up. We know that Inkscape is attracting new users and being used in increasingly more distinctive and different ways. I don't know its relative popularity in the computer graphics world in general, but I know that within the Open Source community, we're certainly the most popular vector graphics tool.
Most users do not care about the availability of source code.
When talking to non-technical potential Inkscape users, the point I work to emphasize is not so much the code as the community. I describe how in Inkscape, a motivated artist with great ideas does not run into the brick walls and barriers they do with other programs; there is very little to stop a user's good idea from reaching the eyes and ears of a developer. Also, with a little work, it is possible to get a definitive answer to a question from the exact person that coded the feature you're having trouble with, who will appreciate your feedback and perhaps even change the code to eliminate that problem in the future. Some day try tracking down help for an Illustrator feature! I bet you'll never make it out of the tech support call tree!
I also don't really put much time into talking about the cost-less nature of the software. It's true that the alternatives have high price tags, but I suspect most artists have someone else buy the software for them or something. Instead, I think it is important to emphasize that Inkscape benefits from having a lot of people who contribute to it - even including ordinary users, that donate a bit of their freetime to help with tutorials, testing, and so forth. In doing so, these users not only help make their software better, but also become part of a community that will help them in turn when they need it.
This is great but there will always be a few more users we can try to reach and as has been said before if we can do that without alienating existing users it is a good thing. (Again there are exceptions and these points are not to be taken to extremes. I think it was Bryce who wrote that we are most interested in attracting active contributors, as opposed to more users. A healthy community to help develop and support all aspects of Inkscape is what is really needed.)
Yes, this is one of my major soap box items. :-) I believe very strongly that users that participate in the project are by far much, much more important than passive users, to the degree that I argue that our audience is exclusively the former, and not the latter. I also try to define "participation" pretty broadly - I'd consider anyone who does nothing more than lend some tech support to fellow Inkscapers to be a full fledged participant. Obviously, I'd rather see them join in with creating docs, doing testing, or improving code, but like Bulia said, our project's strength is the huge network of people sharing information through word of mouth.
The better Inkscape suceeds the more likely there will be a big healthy community to help out. If after 10 minutes a users is having many problems hopefully other Inkscape users will give them a helping hand.
Agreed. I would like to see us put the same type of attention into "designing" and "optimizing" this user community as we do the technical aspects of the software itself. Certainly, we ought not make things so hard that a user can't figure things out from the software itself, but I do think an active, helpful, friendly user community can be a godsend for the (hopefully rare) situations where the user is at wits end due to overlooking some otherwise simple thing (like needing to click twice to get rotation arrows, or that a preference setting will turn on a bunch of new functionality, or that there actually *is* useful stuff under the Help menu...
Besides, communities are fun, and being able to show off something you've done in Inkscape to fellow drawers is irresistable. :-)
Bryce
To look up the Rotate tool key in AI, I googled some tutorials, and here's a truly wonderful bit that I found:
The way you make the Free Transform tool do its intended job (distortion) is to click a corner of the bounding box and while holding the click you hit the Command (Control for Windows) key. This will turn the cursor into a single arrowhead (Fig. C).
I then double checked it with my manual for AI 9 and with the real program. Unbelievable but true! You MUST press Ctrl AFTER you start dragging, otherwise distorting won't work - you get plain scaling instead, same as without Ctrl.
Yes, you read it right. Ctrl+drag does not work, only drag+Ctrl does.
All our talk about Inkscape's "discoverability" pales in comparison to this monstrosity. Adobe never ceases to amaze me.
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.)
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.
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!
Thanks to everyone here for making such a good program, - Spyros Blanas
On 5/18/06, Spyros Blanas <sblanas@...400...> wrote:
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.
Thanks for reminding! Would anyone object if I enable JonCruz' docked palette by default in new installs? Even though it's rather larger than I'd want (i'd prefer it to be less tall), it would be a big boost for newbie users.
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.)
This is a different case I think. Where Inkscape simply lacks some required functionality (such as, until recently, a color palette), I'm not trying to defend that. With time, we will get all this and more. Kevin and I were discussing cases where Inkscape is different for a reason.
On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 05:43:41PM -0300, bulia byak wrote:
On 5/18/06, Spyros Blanas <sblanas@...400...> wrote:
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.
Thanks for reminding! Would anyone object if I enable JonCruz' docked palette by default in new installs? Even though it's rather larger than I'd want (i'd prefer it to be less tall), it would be a big boost for newbie users.
As long as it's been found to be stable, I think that'd be a good idea to do. If we find it has stability issues in the next few weeks of testing, we can always flip it back off.
Bryce
On May 18, 2006, at 2:44 PM, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Thanks for reminding! Would anyone object if I enable JonCruz' docked palette by default in new installs? Even though it's rather larger than I'd want (i'd prefer it to be less tall), it would be a big boost for newbie users.
As long as it's been found to be stable, I think that'd be a good idea to do. If we find it has stability issues in the next few weeks of testing, we can always flip it back off.
I had actually been thinking about that, but was holding off to see what other people think.
I have a few things that can be done to attack it... at the moment it requests the minimum size recommended by GTK+. I was thinking of allowing a manual override, but also of doing some other calculation and requesting smaller. Between those we'd probably have a more functional first impression.
On Thursday 18 May 2006 22:43, bulia byak wrote:
On 5/18/06, Spyros Blanas <sblanas@...400...> wrote:
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.
Thanks for reminding! Would anyone object if I enable JonCruz' docked palette by default in new installs? Even though it's rather larger than I'd want (i'd prefer it to be less tall), it would be a big boost for newbie users.
Sorry if I sound negative, but for me it's about four times too high and I think the first thing I would do if I were to discover Inkscape is looking for a way of disabling it. It seems so big to me it's disruptive and makes for a negative first impression. Now, make it *much* smaller and I would always have it on as I do with the swatches dialog for the moment, waiting patiently for the palette to become smaller :-)
Cheers, JFL
On Thu, 18 May 2006, bulia byak wrote:
On 5/18/06, Spyros Blanas <sblanas@...400...> wrote:
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.
Thanks for reminding! Would anyone object if I enable JonCruz' docked palette by default in new installs? Even though it's rather larger than I'd want (i'd prefer it to be less tall), it would be a big boost for newbie users.
Certainly worth a try for the preview release at least and that would give time objections. If it turned out to be a problem it could still be disabled in the release.
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.)
This is a different case I think. Where Inkscape simply lacks some required functionality (such as, until recently, a color palette), I'm
Inkscape does have the functionality needed to draw a box with a green fill if they user keeps looking for a way to do it. Depending on how you look at things they can be missing features or refinements of existing ones.
2006. 05. 18, csütörtök keltezéssel 17.43-kor bulia byak ezt írta:
On 5/18/06, Spyros Blanas <sblanas@...400...> wrote:
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.
Thanks for reminding! Would anyone object if I enable JonCruz' docked palette by default in new installs? Even though it's rather larger than I'd want (i'd prefer it to be less tall), it would be a big boost for newbie users.
But not with the default colors, its ugly.The tango color theme is really nice. However inkscape does not save the last used palette. So when I launch inkscape, i must load the tango palette. And It was a bit accidentaly found the little arrow at the top right corner (there is no sign, it is a palette switcher button).
Khiraly
On 5/19/06, bulia byak wrote:
Thanks for reminding! Would anyone object if I enable JonCruz' docked palette by default in new installs? Even though it's rather larger than I'd want (i'd prefer it to be less tall), it would be a big boost for newbie users.
Btw, Inkscape doesn't remember last opened palette. Is it a feature or a subject to a bug report? ;)
Alexandre
2006. 05. 19, péntek keltezéssel 15.40-kor Alexandre Prokoudine ezt írta:
On 5/19/06, bulia byak wrote:
Thanks for reminding! Would anyone object if I enable JonCruz' docked palette by default in new installs? Even though it's rather larger than I'd want (i'd prefer it to be less tall), it would be a big boost for newbie users.
Btw, Inkscape doesn't remember last opened palette. Is it a feature or a subject to a bug report? ;)
Just found this RFE (this is exactly what you/we want): [ 1453152 ] store color palette per document https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1453152&gr...
Is it in RFE, should we move to bugreports?
Khiraly
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!
Spyros Blanas wrote:
Kevin Cannon wrote:
Now if you're goal is to become quite popular, you have to cater for everyday users.
It's maybe -a- goal, but not -the- goal. -The- goal is to be a good editor for SVG, last time I checked.
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.)
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.
Making the features of Inkscape either familiar, intuitive, or quickly guessed by induction, is certainly a good way to design it. Gaining an audience from the pool of Illustrator users is also a good thing. I have been a fan of Illustrator for many years, and have used it at work often. We would do well to measure its good qualities as candidates for Inkscape ideas. Blender is a good example, too. I once thought that Blender's keystroke-only interface was a horrible mess, until I saw a talented person using it productively.
But one thing should be remembered. Inkscape, in the end, will be its own individual project, and will work in the way it needs for users to be able to produce quality -SVG- output. There is no interest in producing an exact clone of Illustrator or Photoshop. There is no innovation involved in merely copying someone else's work. Nor is there any incentive for people writing code in their free time on nights or weekends to provide such a beast. If enough people want those, then they can petition Macromedia to port to Linux, or maybe start their own project. Let someone else do that.
SVG is something new and cool.
Being familiar is wonderful, but INNOVATION IS NOT EVIL. People should never be afraid to learn new things. When you lose your curiosity, you lose part of your soul.
But, yes, for those things that are new and different, there should be a good reason for them to be that way, and not just be mysterious in order to promote our l33tn3ss, as if the GUI were written in Latin. :-)
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!
The guys on this project make up one of the best groups of open source developers I have been fortunate enough to meet, and I have been in open source for quite a while now.
And don't forget, Inkscape developers are Inkscape users, too. Kinda like the Hair Club for Men.
bob
Bob Jamison wrote:
But one thing should be remembered. Inkscape, in the end, will be its own individual project, and will work in the way it needs for users to be able to produce quality -SVG- output. There is no interest in producing an exact clone of Illustrator or Photoshop. There is no innovation involved in merely copying someone else's work. Nor is there any incentive for people writing code in their free time on nights or weekends to provide such a beast.
I personally think that Inkscape already *is* an individual project, and a very successful one. I do not wish to see merely an open-source clone of a popular application and Inkscape has features that other million-budget vector applications lack.
However, being able to customize the UI (like MS Office & OpenOffice do, with the ability to change menus, toolbars and shortcuts) is certainly a powerful feature and greatly increases productivity and user satisfaction (why bother finding this specific option in the menu, when you can add a button on your custom toolbar?).
If such functionality existed, it would be trivial (in programming effort) to allow for different 'profiles' to be selected. And then users could easily create Illustrator-like profiles (or anything else they wanted). This way, users have an active role in UI design and can even contribute their own designs!
This way we leave room for both innovation (in Inkscape-specific features) and familiarity (user-selectable UI).
- Spyros Blanas
On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 09:43:09AM +0300, Spyros Blanas wrote:
However, being able to customize the UI (like MS Office & OpenOffice do, with the ability to change menus, toolbars and shortcuts) is certainly a powerful feature and greatly increases productivity and user satisfaction (why bother finding this specific option in the menu, when you can add a button on your custom toolbar?).
If such functionality existed, it would be trivial (in programming effort) to allow for different 'profiles' to be selected. And then users could easily create Illustrator-like profiles (or anything else they wanted). This way, users have an active role in UI design and can even contribute their own designs!
This way we leave room for both innovation (in Inkscape-specific features) and familiarity (user-selectable UI).
Is this something you are interested working on?
We've long thought that increasing the customizability of the interface is a good idea, but there simply haven't been enough coders to work on restructuring things to enable it. However, the gtkmm refactoring work and the DOM API work brings inkscape much closer to allowing this sort of an approach to be done. All we need is someone with the dedication to create it.
Bryce
participants (11)
-
Alan Horkan -
Alexandre Prokoudine -
Bob Jamison -
Bryce Harrington -
bulia byak -
Jean-François Lemaire -
Jon A. Cruz -
Joshua A. Andler -
Kevin Cannon -
Khiraly -
Spyros Blanas