-----Forwarded Message----- From: Marek Peteraj <marpet@...83...> To: mental@...58... Subject: inkscape Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2003 17:40:51 +0100

Hi Mental,

i just learned about inkscape, seems to be a very cool project, and as i'm not subscribed to the mailing list yet, i'd like to make a few suggestions:

It seems that inkscape could become the gimp of vector graphics, that's why i think it would be really cool to design the UI to be as close to gimp as possible, since the gimp is pretty mature to date and it can already be considered as a porfessional tool for raster image manipulation.

I took a look at the HiG and it's suggesting the same type of toolbox as sodipodi/inkscape offers. Honestly i must say that i *hate* that kind of organizing. :) The gimp toolbox is pretty slick and offers only drawing tools or tools closely related to drawing such as selections. The idea to organize them in collapsible "trees" seems completely broken to me since actually hiding the tools which you want to see in a toolbox, if expanded it makes the toolbox bigger, and a user that doesn't understand what each button/tool means has to learn it whether it's organized or not, the stock icons are rather self-explanatory and describe the tools in an understandable manner. So things i would suggest to avoid:

1. remove all items that aren't drawing tools or tools related to drawing, such as save as, open etc 2. avoid organizing in trees such as stated in HiG(unfortunately) 3. keep all buttons directly in the toolbox, hide them in pop-up colums(such as the dynahand in sodipodi)

This is basically what gimp does.

Next thing i'd like to suggest is to organize features in dialogs that are either dockable or organized in tabs.

I've collected a few screenshots when i wanted to look at how all apps manage their features and functions. If you take a look at all of them, you'll find that they all look pretty much the same, dialogs on the right, toolbox on the left. Except that *only* gimp doesn't do WiW(window in window). And *only* gimp does provide a reasonable way to manage a lot of dialogs, namely 1) docking them and 2) organizing them in tabs. Gimp does manage tool/functions very carefully, it provides a UI model that is perfectly customizable, and groups features and functions in a clever way.

http://www.pleasewipeyourfeet.com/webtest/pr/gimp.jpg http://www.pleasewipeyourfeet.com/webtest/pr/scribus.jpg http://www.qmedia.co.za/image/screen32791.jpg http://www.activewin.com/reviews/software/graphics/adobe/illustrator10/image... http://www.suse.de/en/private/products/suse_linux/winerack/images/photoshop.... http://www.activewin.com/reviews/software/graphics/adobe/pagemaker7/images/p...

A very important thing to consider here is whether to design the UI of those apps to be as close as possible to each other. This is perfectly possible since only gimp is a mature app to date and it's an app which provides an even more clever ui than it's proprietary counterparts. If we had 2-3 powerful apps that would create a professional linux graphics studio they would probably be:

* gimp for raster image editing, photo retouching * inkscape for vector image editing * passepartout for DTP (it's in early devel stage currently so i can't tell right now)

Keeping their UIs as close as possible is the key to build a pro linux graphics studio since the user isn't forced to get use to another type of ui. :)

Marek