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THis is so cool guys! You should blog this whole big overview on the Inkscape site. I'm bummed I couldn't go...so great...your slides are really great as well...I wanna give the Ted extensions lecture sometime :)

Hopefully you can give some form of at LGM2007 :)

Jon

On Mon, 2007-02-12 at 23:00 -0800, Ted Gould wrote:

Hey all,

I thought I'd write up a quick summary of SCaLE, hopefully everyone else who was there can add to (and correct) what I've put here.

-- The Booth --

I was a bit concerned that this year we'd just run into the same people as last year. That was definitely not the case. On the most basic level, I'd say that 50% of the people we talked to hadn't heard of Inkscape. We definitely got the word out there. But, I think there were some other notable conversations.

• Both of the companies doing network monitoring are interested in doing

network maps using SVG. I thought that was pretty cool. They were talking about SVG even before we talked to them.

• We got visits from two people from studios in LA. I don't really

believe that either will turn into anything, but it was interesting, and probably good to get buzz into that community. Interestingly, one asked if Inkscape was in RHEL 4, and I didn't know. I talked to the Redhat guys, and they built the package right there. There is now Inkscape for RHEL 4 :)

• We met the editor of Linux Gazette, and his wife. Apparently she was

needing vector illustration to make the move off of Windows. She was trilled to find a way to move to Linux.

• We talked with a guy who works at RPI and wants to remove the Adobe CS

from their curriculum and replacing it with Open Source tools. Apparently they don't really teach the tools, as much as they use them to teach about work flow. So each student has to buy the full suite for a minor amount of functionality overall. He's working to change that.

• Linux.com stopped by. Their overview was pretty flattering, and now

is on the Inkscape site. He asked if I'd do an interview, and I didn't realize it was going to be video. You can now watch me stumble over my words trying to say something insightful.

• I did an interview with the booth next to us (everyone else was

scared). They hired a 'booth babe' to make a video asking stupid questions of conference attendees. It was cute. But I have to harass John Tabor for giving me misinformation about the whole thing :)

-- The BOF --

We had the bird of a feather which went very well. We were a bit shocked that they didn't leave the projector in the room, so Josh wasn't able to show all the artwork he collected from folks to show off Inkscape. John showed a little bit of mapping stuff as we had a good group of people huddling around his laptop. There were several people who just wanted to know more about Inkscape, but there were some experienced users also. In particular, there was a guy from Ticketmaster that uses Inkscape to prototype websites. Overall, it was a good crowd and discussion, and we could have definitely gone longer than the hour we were allotted.

-- The Talk --

I gave a talk about Inkscape Extensions, with the goal of inspiring new developers to jump on board. I was really worried that it was going to go long, but I was actually about 10 minutes short. They said that it was going to be recorded, but it was not. Josh has some video, but the audio isn't good. Hopefully some post processing will help. For those who want to flip through the slides, they are here:

http://gould.cx/ted/presentations/scale5x/

Overall, I think we did pretty good. It's always fun to get together with Inkscapers and hang out. Even promoting Inkscape some. Thanks go to everyone who helped out: Jon, John, Josh, Erin and Hillery.

--Ted

---

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Quoting Ted Gould <ted@...11...>:

Hey all,

I thought I'd write up a quick summary of SCaLE, hopefully everyone else who was there can add to (and correct) what I've put here.

Here's my $0.02 worth:

In general the attendance struck me as improved over last year. I'd charactarize it less as a change of people but more of an addition. The hobbiests and such were still there, but there was a supplementing of those who struck me more as small business owners or managers. Overall the people seemed a lot more aware of Linux and open source. A bit less of "gee, what is this thing" and a bit more of "which things can I use to get my tasks done".

The number of people coming around was also good. There were slight slowdowns near the end of lunch times, but it was overall quite active. Even at the end when Ted and I had thought to start tearing down we still ended up with more people coming by and having some good discussions.

Ted's talk, I think, went over very well. There was a good sized crowd, and they seemed to be following farily well considering some of the talks I've seen. There were not as many questions asked at the end as he may have liked, but it struck me more as due to Ted having covered the bases well. The talk was technical, but not too technical, and did a good job addressing the "but how might *I* use things" aspects. And from where I was sitting (about a third of the way back) I didn't really notice anyone just wondering off as often happens at conference talks.

Here are a few scattered points I remember from talking with various people:

* Big thanks to all working on Inkscape. We definitely got a lot of this, so I wanted to be sure to pass on all the thanks to everyone involved.

* Cooperation between projects. More than one person commented on how nice it was that when a problem might not be best solved with Inkscape, we had no problem recommending other tools that might work better. (Scribus and GIMP were two of the more common guys to point out and that were pointed out to us)

* Need for color management including CMYK and spot color. Different people phrased things different ways, but overall this is one thing that would be *very* helpful. Some people probably just need it for buzzword compliance, but then again for many professional artists and designers it's the carrot that can draw them in.

* UI. Most people really liked the UI. We had many people thank us for creating such an easy to use tool. People who were unfamiliar but took a peek or a try also were impressed. There were a few requests for things here and there, but most are already underway. And a few could be answered with "no, you really don't want that. you want to do this instead" and the people seemed happy.

* Native mac support. Some people were asking about it, but most were happy with it being worked on for some point in the future. And the few who asked who seemed the most serious were quite comfortable with launching X11.

* Illustrator mode. This was mainly from a few people who were or knew long time users of commercial apps, but hadn't checked out Inkscape. Making it easy for users to transition from Illustrator is probably the main goal. However, we can't share the fun if they won't walk in the door. This will probably take a bit of careful ballancing, but is something we might be set for starting on.

* Animation support. As usual, an often asked question.

* Tablet support. One person was looking for which tablet to buy, and wanted to be sure to get one that supported Inkscape. Several people asked about tablet support in general, and were impressed by what we have (we couldn't show them there, but just explaining it and showing the key-drag node sculpting impressed several artist types).

* Whiteboarding. Got a few people asking about it. A few who learned of it were impressed and decided to go check it out.

* Simple macro recording. I'll try to get a proper RFE checked and entered... but this was one thing that first struck me as way out there, but might be closer to possible due to some things other people are working on now. Basically the request boiled down to create a simple effect by doing operations in the UI. Then being able to use those saved actions as an effect or from the command line. Being able to invoke them from the command line is one aspect that makes it trickier... wanting it to be smart and not just "click at x,y, drag to x',y'" is the bigger trick.

* Good headless SVG processing. This was a side issue from the simple way to record macros. We're already in the ballpark, but getting Inkscape to play really nice in the absence of X11 could be the same as cleaning up and enhancing the extensions. (One example was having hundreds of images that needed similar operations done on them, and things getting farmed out to remote boxes for the actual processing).

* Killer App. At least one artist there discovered that Inkscape (complimented with Scribus) would be the thing to finally free them from running on Windows, turned to their S.O. and exclaimed that Inkscape was "[their] killer app."

* Stability. One person talked a bit to find out if there was a difference in stability between Inkscape on Windows and Inkscape on Linux. He's going to switch over from Windows for that.

* Xara. A few people asked various questions, and we gave the info that's often on the mailing list.