On 1/30/07, Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@...1631...> wrote:

On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 04:24:00PM +0000, Alan Horkan wrote:

...

If you are only using it for status and not making much use of the

hiding

...

or locking buttons do you think an indication in the title bar would be helpful?

No no no, I do use it for switching, locking and hiding, too. It give status infomation, and sits in the status bar. It offers means to change all it informs about with only taking a tiny bit more space for that.

...

this started because the status bar messages were unclear and

abbreviated.

Hmm. They have tooltips. The only one that made me wonder was the O for Opacity (I'm looking at a not too recent 0.44+devel version).

Fills, Stroke and Zoom could use icons.

The N/A ... I would just write nothing. no word, empty space. Note even F: and S: needs to stay there.

The foo "in layer bar" message is really redundant.

The palette bar could hide the scrollbar if it fits in.

...

You'd think people are only beginners once but unfortunately many people stay there, I for example dont use Blender often enough to retain what little I have learnt and I'm effectively a beginner everytime. If you have worked in technical support you find many more users are like this when it comes to their computer. without really trying inkscape has

been

...

successful in attracting artistic users who want inkscape for their various kidns of crafts work it will help if things can be kept simple with one right way to do things and not too many assumptions made about inkscape users being experts at technical drawing and wanting many different possibilities to achieve the same end results, as it is the results that matter.

Unfortunately, no matter how many people come to a consensus, the "one right thing" will not appeal to everyone, and assuming that there is any one way to go about a task makes the inkscape UI seem a little authoritarian. The effect is an arrogant sort of "This way is better, and you need to adjust the way you do things from however you did it before, because THIS is how it is in inkscape." This does not strike me as typical FLOSS behaviour, and even if the motive behind the above quoted notion isn't arrogance, it comes off as such.

IMHO, idea that "having many ways of doing the same tasks" is for experts is flawed. An expert would have worked out the most efficient way to carry out a task and then stuck to that. The point of having many ways to do something would be to cater to users at every level. Of course the inkscape community would want to push users to develop instead of staying at the beginner level, but it seems to me that it would be better to try to encourage the user away from the inefficient way they have been doing things in AI/Freehand/whatever instead of insisting that they quit cold turkey and "Do it the right way!".

my 2c

I still think most users make it to some intermediate level.

If you look at hours spent with a software, users that only touch it once in a while don't count.

-- Thorsten Wilms

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