Hi, I apologize if I sounded too critical; the criticism intended to be constructive. All the more because I do see lots of potential in
Inkscape
and would like to see it to emerge as a strong competitor to
commercial
products. And thank you for pointing me out a few of the things I overlooked when testing the program. But despite all the above I still stick to
what
I said in my previous remarks.
It did come across as pretty critical, but we know you meant well. =) In terms of Inkscape becoming a competitor with the big guys... honestly, it already is a strong competitor, as 90% of my print work is done in Inkscape now (as well as a few other people I know). The only reason anything is taken into Illustrator at this point is to get the color (proper CMYK) and other minor print related prep issues taken care of. Other than that, it's fulfilling my needs very well.
What hard to understand is why open source developers don't seem to recognize the importance of user-friendly interfaces. (There are a few notable exceptions to this like Firefox or Thunderbird, which are
world
class).
I think that they do understand the importance of user-friendly interfaces, but what is friendly to one person may not be to another. Also, I think that the interface for Inkscape suits it very well, and given my own transition from Illustrator (10 years of getting used to doing it Adobe's way), it took quite a bit of getting used to. And I have actually grown quite fond of it over time... yeah it could use a little work (as could most apps, commercial or OSS), but there's only so much man/brain power that can be devoted to each area... unless _you'd_ like to help with the UI that is. =)
The comparison to Firefox/Thunderbird is a little unfair though, as web browsers and email clients have fairly standardized interfaces (for web browsers it's usually Back, Forward, Stop, Reload, address bar, etc)... if you check out Xara, which is a commercial vector app, our interface is much more like theirs than Adobe's. So I think user-friendliness is partially a matter of opinion & experience. And no, I'm not saying Inkscape's interface is anywhere near perfect (I have my own list of issues too, as we all do), but it does it's job quite well as is.
From the point of view of the designer the dialog boxes, panels,
popup
windows are always nuisances. They interrupt the workflow and disrupt concentration. Therefore, it makes sense to design then as
inconspicuous
as possible. Consider this, each time adobe or macromedia releases a product they always accuse each other of stealing ideas. Recently, if I remember well it
was
adobe who claimed that the idea of grouping panels was its invention
and
accused macromedia of stealing it. This shows the importance they attribute to properly developed interface.
I agree that the dialog boxes can be a pain... no question. Especially if you use it on Windows instead of Linux (haven't tried Mac). Because in the dialog department, Linux is waaay more useable (the dialogs stay on top all the time). Hopefully at some point the interface will take advantage of the "tear away"/dockable dialogs, like GIMP. In my opinion the usability will go through the roof when that happens... but it's only a minor inconvenience at this point because it just takes a little more time to get to the dialogs you need to. Either way, there are a number of things that you use dialogs for now, that will hopefully be shifted to "on canvas" types of options in the future to reduce that dialog clutter.
The interface _is_ still under development, and probably will be for a long time (almost all UIs push to evolve over time). I can tell you that it is leagues ahead of Sodi Podi in this dept though (as popular consensus would say... although we may be a little biased here =)
If you have any suggestions or features you'd like to see, please don't hesitate to let us all know. If you do plan on suggesting, you may want to check the feature requests of the project at sourceforge though (search for what you like to see, if it's there add your .02, if not, submit a request). At the very least, you can just add a "me too" comment to let the devs know what people find to be important.
Thanks for taking the time to comment and give some feedback!
-Josh