As a long time Macromedia Freehand user I was curious about the latest release of Inkscape, which I have been testing for about a week. These are my observations. Inkscape's interface is so unintuitive that it almost hurts. The layout and the look and feel of the various panels and dialog boxes are awful. They lack coherence, functionality and are badly implemented. Examples: the Object properties palette is a puzzle; I expected that this would be one of the most important panels where the essential parameters of the selected object can be found and edited. I've found nothing to edit there. The font palette looks like it was borrowed from an office suite. The implementation of gradients are so weird that hard to describe. The Export Bitmap dialog box is poorly designed, the window wouldn't even close after saving files. The program lacks the tool to group panels into different panel groups. In addition, most of the features are incomplete. The new text on path is nice but, if you design a circular logo, most of the time, you would want to put text on the top and on the bottom of the circle. Can you do this in Inkscape? I couldn't figure out. Also when export text on path, it exports the path as well, which is unacceptable. Another example: the implementation of patterns. It is nice to have it but it is basic to have the tool to edit it after applied to a shape (moving, scaling and so on). Without this the feature has limited use. I also couldn't rename pattens but stuck with the generic names. I missed the preset zoom settings at the left bottom corner, as well. A word on priorities. In my view adding features should proceed from the most essential toward the less important. At the hart of a vector drawing program one expect to find tools, such as swatches, gradients, tints and pattern palettes and the capacity to to export and import them from one document to the other. Symbols are also essential to work efficiently. Until they are implemented pointless adding less commonly used ones like bitmap tracing, for instance. Any graphic artist can tell that this is a relatively seldom used tool in the actual work environment. By the way, I liked the Tracing Bitmap tool. What impressed me in Inkscape is the ingenious and interactive ways it allows to edit shapes. Also the fact that I could stroke path with gradient without first expanding it. I found great that I could export a selection rather than the entire ardboard; this feature dearly missed even in adobe illustrator. I also liked the options on the upper menu bar. This helps setting parameters effortlessly and it eliminates the need of dealing with additional dialog boxes which are always nuisances. I liked the layers and the fact that they are collapsible�-one more thing less cluttering the work environment. Would be nice if I could move object from one layer to the other with a click of a mouse. My conclusion: before adding additional features polish up and complete the existing ones. Also before go on adding more tools implement the fundamentals (swatches, tints, gradients, patterns, symbols and so on) and redo the interface from scratch.
jozsefmak