Jozsef Mak wrote:
I agree one hundred percent that user-friendliness is a matter of experience. When I went to graphic design school and I had my first experience with Illustrator it was neither user friendly nor “non user friendly”. When I finished the school I developed a feel for the adobe way of doing things. We can easily agree that this feature or that feature would be better implemented here or there but the fact remains that we keep finding easy what we got used to. And 99% of graphic design schools teach adobe programs. So the overwhelming majority of designers already developed a feel for doing things the Adobe way.
Actually, some of that depends on when those designers went to school. Though Adobe dominates the scene now, they did not always do so. Also, the "Adobe" way has also changed over the years. Some graphic/art academies were even heavily into Corel Draw, and not even Freehand. (Oh, and for reference, I'm down in Southern California, and took art at the same college as Rob Liefeld)
Yes, I have formal art training, and even did graphics work for game companies before settling into software and multimedia development instead. One thing I have seen, however, is that true professionals get to use whatever tools will make their work easier, and thus learn more than one. Much like any decent 3d artist will end up being able to shift from Maya to Max or vice versa. Again, much of the current Inkscape UI does not resemble Illustrator, however it does resemble Xara, which is not open source, but is another commercial product. However, it is by a UK developer, so is not as known here.
But to keep on track... I belive the main focus is to make Inkscape a premier SVG editor. This is slightly different than making it a general vector graphics program that happens to use SVG. So again, much of the focus is on creating a workflow that enables users (note that there are several classes) to be able to create SVG graphics in the most efficient way while still enabling the full power of SVG when desired. The focus is not on creating a product to lure graphic artists off of Illustrator.
But... again, we are not out to just reject existing programs or approaches. If users of Inkscape find certain things help their workflow and certain things hinder it, we are very interested in hearing from them. Some of what you have pointed out is already on the roadmap to be addressed, but then some other parts are more convention or work habits learned through different paths. I believe that Bulia and I are two of the developers more focused on UI. Some things we agree on, while other things we hold opposite opinions of. I belive that some of your issues end up in our disputed areas.
The good news, though, is that I'm of the general belief that in UI design if there are different ways to do something, then we should support them. While I'm not saying we should implement everything under the sun in as many complex ways as possible, I do know that different approaches work differently for different users at different times. Menu items versus hotkeys is one example. Full-screen landscape web browser windows versus partial screen portrait layout is another. I think we've even bounced around the idea of making some preference sets to switch UI 'style' the same way word processors could be set to emulate others (Wordstar, emacs, etc. in Word for example). Though we're a bit off from that point, the more input we can get on what workflows different people like, the better we can support them.
So what can help the most is precise details on why certain things are liked or disliked. Jumping in the inkscape jabber room is also a good way to get ideas bounced off of others and get things stirred up. Skimming the RFE's is another. Entering new RFE's is again another way to get some kind of action on requests. Try to get things narrowed down, and think also of the distinction between 'how' you think we need to do something, and 'what' that something to be achieved is. For example 'you should add alt-shift-ctrl-5' is a low-level 'how' to do something while 'I'd like a simple hot-key combination to invoke a regular expression replace' is a bit higher level 'what'.
Hmmm... now that I think about it, I also think there's been mention now and then of getting some "Inkscape for Illustrator users" document done. Perhaps you might have suggestions for some things that should go in there, and some things that should be added or changed in Inkscape itself.