On 6/22/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Bernhard Reiter</b> <<a href="mailto:bernhard@intevation.de">bernhard@intevation.de</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
> My suggestion is using "sK1" name for latest branch, because:<br>> 1. This code is highly differ from 0.6/0.7 versions<br><br>I believe this is tightly coupled with the question of how many<br>branched we keep alive. See below.
<br><br>> 2. This code name is already announced as in Russian community and in west<br>> open source world.<br>> 3. This name is derived from Sketch<br><br>Skencil is quite introduced as well, though I agree that sK1 is a stylish
<br>name that is derived from it and its file format.</blockquote><div><br><br>Just an outsider's opinion here, but Skencil is a much nicer name if you ask me. It immediately suggests a program that has something to do with drawing. sK1 by itself suggests absolutely nothing. I could see using sK1 as a subtitle maybe. Something like "Skencil : sK1" to differentiate it from "Skencil : Classic", but just branding the thing "sK1" seems like a bad idea.
<br> </div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">The goals of a "mature vector graphics editor" seems to be compatible
<br>with Skencil's goal, unless somebody comes and want to use it as component,<br>I do not think we should make provisions for it.<br>That the separation of model-view-controler would enable<br>something like skconvert to be run in scripts is quite cool, so I would like
<br>to keep or extend this as another goal.</blockquote><div><br>Being available to use as a component would fill a niche that isn't currently served. I'm currently writing my own vector drawing program from scratch because I couldn't find a decent component to build on. Still, it is quite a small niche, so it may not be worth the effort to create a good clean component design just to serve that niche. Of course creating a design with clean separation is a good idea anyway, it just takes more time.
<br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">> Only Scribus has similar features, but this application is not illustration
<br>> program. </blockquote><div><br>Right, I think Scribus aims to be more a of a Quark wannabe. <br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
So, my personal view of sK1 future is a competitor of CorelDRAW<br>> but on Linux platform. And future users pool should grow from former<br>> CorelDRAW users.<br><br>Well it would be cool if we could target windows as well as GNU/Linux
<br>and X11 running plattform and even MacOS-X. Tcl/tk is pretty portable<br>and pyGTK was as well in the past, so this should be doable.<br>But this is more a personal goal. Having a great application for GNU/Linux<br>is a huge plus as well.
</blockquote><div><br>I agree. But I'm a big advocate for doing everything cross-platform, always. There's no good reason to arbitrarily cut off 80% of the potential users in the world by being Linux-only. Or even cutting off 20% by being Windows only. Unless your app is so OS-specific that a port wouldn't make sense. Say, something like a Gnome desktop configurator, or an app where 80% of the code is platform-specific and would have to be rewritten per-platform anyway. But for everything else, it might as well be written cross-platform, or at least factored from the beginning with cross-platform in mind. (That's why wxWidgets is my GUI of choice.)
<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">> Inkscape Team also declared that it's application is something like<br>
> CorelDRAW or Illustrator, but on my opinion Inkscape is more similar to<br>> specialized editor like Macromedia Flash (at least on current development<br>> stage).<br><br>I cannot really judge, because I did not really use Inkscape a lot.
<br>My next implementation target with Skencil (or sK1) or whatever would<br>be to add the map extension for the Thuban-Map-SVG. (Check out my svg export<br>extension for <a href="http://thuban.intevation.org">thuban.intevation.org
</a> ).</blockquote><div><br>Hmm. I'm a beginner at both, but to me Inkscape is much more usable than Skencil right now. And I strongly disagree with the assessment that Inkscape is a Flash competitor. It doesn't even support animation right now, so claiming it competes with Flash is just silly. It is most definitely a CorelDRAW/Illustrator competitor. It may gain animation features in the future, but right now it is a vector drawing program, plain and simple. And it works cross-platform via GTK ports.
<br><br>The main thing that limits Inkscape's potential in my opinion is that it is actually an SVG editor, as opposed to a general-purpose vector drawing program. If the feature doesn't exist in the SVG spec, it won't be added to Inkscape. Of course if your goal is to export SVG this is not a limitation at all -- it's a huge feature. And SVG at some level aims to be a general purpose vector drawing description language. So if it makes sense for an application to want to do it, chances are that it will be added to the SVG spec eventually, even if it isn't there currently. Some of the Inkscape devs are actually involved in the W3C SVG group.
<br><br>Anyway, these are just my two cents. I tried both Skencil and Inskcape at the same time. I had trouble figuring out how to do much of anything with Skencil (after getting past the troubles I had just installing it), but I found it very easy to use (and install) Inkscape. When I look at Skencil and Inkscape side-by-side, I seriously have to ask myself "what is the point of skencil?" Inkscape is cross plaform, well-thought-out UI, lots of features, pluggable script extensions in multiple languages (but mainly Python), written in C/C++ (==pretty fast and also easy installation), pretty many decent tutorials available. Uses GTK just like Skencil (so unfortunately both look equally ugly and alien on Windows and Mac). So the main thing that seems to differentiate Skencil is that it's in Python (except the low-level stuff, which seems to be X-Windows-specific C extension modules). And maybe also the fact that Skencil doesn't care about SVG compatibility, so it is less constrained in how it can evolve.
<br><br>I could definitely see Skencil catching up to Inkscape in a year or so, thanks to the speed and ease of pure Python development. But on the other hand, being Linux-only restricts the pool of potential developers who might take an interest in the project and decide to contribute. Quite a few of the Inkscape contributors come from the Windows world (including me -- I've already made a couple of contributions to Inkscape now, developed on Windows).
<br><br>Anyway, just my outsider's opinion. Inkscape is most definitely head-to-head with Skencil, so I don't think you should ignore it. You should study it. See what you can learn from it. First you must clearly decide for yourselves what it is that Skencil does, or will do, better than Inkscape, and then clearly explain to the world on the basis of that why we should rush to use and support Skencil rather than Inkscape.
<br><br>I'll just conclude by noting that if all other things were equal about Skencil and Inkscape (features and cross-platform issues), then I would *definitely* prefer to work on Skencil because GTK+ is terribly painful to work with. Inkscape is slowly converting over to GTKmm/C++ which is a little better. But neither can hold a candle to Python for ease of development.
<br><br>This post isn't meant to be discouraging. Quite the opposite. I think you're a little behind Inskcape right now, but if you focus on making Skencil easily available to the widest audience possible (I.e. port it to Win and Mac, and make sure installation is smooth and simple everywhere), I think the ease of working with Python will help lure in more developers and accelerate the pace of Skencil development to the point where it can rocket past Inkscape.
<br><br>Regards,<br></div>--bb<br><br></div>