On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, Alan Horkan wrote:

I'm new here and I'd like to wish you best of luck with InkScape, it really sounds like a good idea.

Firstly congratulations on choosing a name I can immediately pronounce, that is not an acronym, that I'm not embarassed to admit I use or say out loud and that does not feature an over abundance of G, Q, or K that seem to plague so many other projects (I'm sure you all can guess the ones I'm talking about).

Thanks, and welcome to the list!

I found out about Inkscape from a story on Gnomedesktop.org which from the various posts I'm sure you are well aware of but I think it might be worth linking from your news page (and this mail did invite suggestions http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=3434272&forum_id=... ) I'm also having minor difficulty downloading this file, I only get the top chunk http://www.inkscape.org/mockups/export_dialog_02.png

I've added the news item - I folded in around Nov 6 so it's down a bit on the page but historically accurate.

I verified that the png appears to be broken. I've added a task to look into this; it may have gotten corrupted when I downloaded it.

Which leads me to my next point, the Export Dialog. Rather than make specific criticism of each approach I would put it to you that it would be best to use a standard Save Dialog with an additional "Options..." Button. The Options button would prompt uses to change the export settings, these should probably also be available through some sort of Import/Export preferences dialog. Why do it this way? Other programs do it this way but more importantly that that I can promise you that users will not want to change the export settings each and every time, and being able to set them once (or just once for the current session or project) and keep reusing the same settings until you feel the need to change them and keep them out of your way. (This is an approach I have been advocating quite strongly on the Gnome usability list mailto:usability@...45... so that when the GTK File Open Save As dialog gets redesigned that developers will have a clear and standard way to extend it rather than cluttering the dialog with all manner of new features.)

I think you'll find general agreement that the application does not save preferences as thoroughly as would be desired. For example, I frequently have to reset grid settings when I use the program, and I'd love it if it would save them.

Note that advocacy is helpful (especially when posted to the RFE on SF), but contributing patches is what really makes things go. It's much easier to say 'yes' to a patch because the hard work is already done. :-)

Also there's some distinction between 'save' and 'export' - the former implies that you can load the file back into the program and continue editing, whereas the latter is considered a one-way path. So I think this is the reasoning behind keeping the export dialog separate from the Save As dialog.

The website says "We aim for capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, Visio, etc." I hope you will also aim for a user interface similar to those programs, except of course when there is a clearly better alternative. You'd be amazed how lost I feel in Sodipodi as it does(/did) not have a menubar or document toolbars. Keeping the interfaces similar makes it much easier to reuse existing books tutorials and other resources already targeting the dominant software and also helps kill off the distasteful "marketable skills in the workplace" crap that I'm forced to admit happens all too often.

Sodipodi's approach was to not try to clone any particular program's interface but to adopt one which is a reasonable compromise between them, but at the end of the day would be its own interface.

For Inkscape, the near-term direction is going to be driven by the patches that are sent in and the preferences of the developers contributing code. Bulia has been the most active in this respect so is the person to talk to with on it.

Longer term, Mental is developing a prototype of a "verb" based system which promises a greater degree of freedom in how menus, keyboard shortcuts, etc. are mapped. This will be a while in the making but I imagine it will permit allowing the user to customize the interface to taste, so I could envision some day folks being able to make a "CorelDraw Mapping", "Illustrator Mapping", etc.

I'm a fan of portable cross platform software - who know what Operating System we'll be running in 5 years, but I'd like to still be able to use my favourite software - but at the same time I encourage you to not just get involved with Gnome and try to follow the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) where you think it is appropriate but also help push for changes and more flexability where you really dont think the Guidelines are appropriate.

Yup, better HIG compliance is one of our objectives. There's numerous changes needed to achieve that, so it'll be an ongoing effort to achieve.

Another goal is to try to work more closely with other projects to feed back into them - we'd been thinking mainly in terms of libraries but your suggestion to contribute back to HIG fits well with that philosophy.

Thanks, Bryce