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That’s a common theme with OSS applications, unfortunately. It’s rare to get UX engineers to help, and even more rare for anyone to lead “product direction” fr

That’s a common theme with OSS applications, unfortunately. It’s rare to get UX engineers to help, and even more rare for anyone to lead “product direction” from a UX perspective. So a lot of them make use of rudimentary UI toolkits, with admittedly sub-par interfaces that stink of design-by-committee, since the focus is more on the “substance” of the application than the presentation. But with a lot of these tools, design tools in particular, the presentation is such an integral part of the experience, it’s unfortunate to see it be the part that gets the least care or attention. Not to say that this shortcoming is universal; blender version 2.50 made huge improvements to UX, and Ubuntu showed the importance of good UI in open source. But Inkscape, GIMP, openlibre and others are still notably behind the curve.

ken 7y ago
You don't need a rare "UX engineer". The issues here are much more fundamental. On a Core i7 with 16 GB of RAM, dragging one object on an otherwise empty canvas gives me about 1 fps. You don't need any special "product direction" to know that needs fixing. Half of the issues would be fixed by not using GTK+. Any GTK+ app on a Mac is going to feel like "you got a Linux app to run on a Mac", not "a Mac app". Maybe someday that will no longer be true, but it's been true for the past 20 years. Inkscape doesn't even look like an old Mac app -- these UI toolkits are moving in different directions. I know that's not going to change, which is why I'm not optimistic Inkscape is ever going to be good on the Mac. My only hope is that someone will write a Mac app which uses the Inkscape engine, like Camino or IINA did in their respective categories. But good and inexpensive alternatives exist, so there's not a lot of incentive.
oefrha 7y ago
> stink of design-by-committee Design-by-programmer is a more accurate phrase here.

ken 7y ago

You don't need a rare "UX engineer". The issues here are much more fundamental. On a Core i7 with 16 GB of RAM, dragging one object on an otherwise empty canvas gives me about 1 fps. You don't need any special "product direction" to know that needs fixing. Half of the issues would be fixed by not using GTK+. Any GTK+ app on a Mac is going to feel like "you got a Linux app to run on a Mac", not "a Mac app". Maybe someday that will no longer be true, but it's been true for the past 20 years. Inkscape doesn't even look like an old Mac app -- these UI toolkits are moving in different directions. I know that's not going to change, which is why I'm not optimistic Inkscape is ever going to be good on the Mac. My only hope is that someone will write a Mac app which uses the Inkscape engine, like Camino or IINA did in their respective categories. But good and inexpensive alternatives exist, so there's not a lot of incentive.

oefrha 7y ago

> stink of design-by-committee Design-by-programmer is a more accurate phrase here.