I am a long-time user of Inkscape (since 2007 at least), and it is sad how poor it looks now next to Sketch/Figma. Their vector tools are better, their layer tools are better. It's a million little things that make drawing a similar shape in Sketch 50x faster than in Inkscape.
The way Blender does it is near optimum in my eyes: not shying away from a major overhaul once in 5 years and aleays making sure it is really making things better.
Blender is one of the most successful projects out there, and assuming other projects could just 'do what Blender does' is ignoring some of the fundamental differences between Blender and smaller projects.
The closest other projects have to this are vague forum/bugtracker posts that more often than not give little (or misleading) idea to the programmers what is needed.
Having an artist sit next to you and giving them the mouse and keyboard to show you directly in the software what they are doing, how they are doing it and what they want to do is much faster and gives you way more information and you can bounce forth and back alternative ideas, perhaps make minor quick modifications on the spot as a prototype or lead to an idea, etc.
(the next best thing is you being both the artist and the programmer - which is how many of FLOSS art oriented programs are made really - but there is a great danger of you getting used to your software's drawbacks and being unwilling to address them)
Programs like GIMP (or even entire OS UIs like Gnome and KDE) often shy away from 'aping' respectively Photoshop or Apple. But those proprietary vendors have spent millions of dollars on focus groups and man hours to optimize their UI and UX. Benefiting from that seems like a no-brainer, but alas.. NIH and proprietary hate reigns supreme.
And really personally i find Photoshop UI atrocious and if i had to chose between that and GIMP's i'd pick GIMP any time (though overall i actually prefer PSP7's UI which IMO is the best of any of those).
Last time I checked ps still defaulted to require control-shift-something-non-standard for redo, unless you customize the key mappings. there are much more standard bindings and they even admit the only reason for this default is legacy users .
Having said that i think Photoshop's non-standard Undo/Redo use is that it uses Ctrl+Z as a "last step undo" in that Ctrl+Z flips between undo/redo so that if you do some operation, press Ctrl+Z, it undoes that operation and if you press Ctrl+Z again it redoes it (and Ctrl+Z again undoes it, etc). This is because Photoshop at the past, like many other programs, had only a single step undo where Ctrl+Z would undo the last operation - including undo itself (so if you painted, undo would undo the paint and the next undo would undo the undo itself thus restoring the paint). Many artists used to this as a way to quickly compare the result of operations like crops, filters, etc so it became part of their workflow and was mentioned in articles, books, etc so Adobe most likely decided to use a different key when they introduced an undo stack. That was at a time that many other programs still had a single undo step so using a different key wouldn't really be non-standard. But again that became part of workflow, documented, etc so both remained as they were to avoid alienating users.
Though TBH that is based on my very brief use of Photoshop many many years ago, things may have changed since then.
Note that some simple programs still work like that, e.g. Notepad only has a single level of undo and pressing undo again undoes the undo itself.
To be more precise, after looking again the issue was, there was no way to use control-z for multiple undo without remapping the keyboard. Looks like they finally fixed it:
In older versions of Photoshop, you could only press Ctrl + Z once to undo your most recent change. If you wanted to undo more changes, you had to change the shortcut keys to Ctrl + Alt + Z.
from version 20.0.0 (CC 2019) onwards, we can just press Ctrl + Z which makes things a little easier
There was a blog post by a product engineering at adobe that lamented they had to stick with it for so long for legacy reasons. This supports your point that many parts of the UX would likely be much different given a modern clean sheet design.
They seem to keep pushing it as a professional alternative to Adobe Illustrator, but no matter how many individual features they add, it just doesn't seem designed for that kind of user.
Not enhancing UX because some users might have already gotten used to the current setup is rather shortsighted (relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/ ). What about all the people you don't get on board because the UX is terrible compared to all the other tools?
My experience is that when software reaches a certain level of maturity, major 'improvements' to the UI are driven very much not by the users.
> Not enhancing UX because some users might have already gotten used to the current setup is rather shortsighted
Perhaps. It depends proportion of 'some'. 1%..99%, it depends doesn't it. You're pushing for change with no quantification of the value of it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, so first find out if it's broke.
Inkscape is pretty extensible as well. It's not too hard to write plugins for it (in Python). I've did it myself, and love how a handful of people seem to find it of use¹.
1: https://inkscape.org/~jdhoek/%E2%98%85isometric-projection-c...
Adobe's video editing suite of latest versions is actually well known to be buggy in terms of regular crashes and hangings. It took me many months to realize that the problem was not inferior CPU or drivers or other software or virtual machines or little memory, but that their software is straight up buggy. That's a company that charges hundreds of dollars for their suite and also a company that had a perfectly good software before and have also basically owned the market before. Now it is buggy and crashes. What other software even crashes these days? I have to think back several years when I remember office suites crashing or other complicated software. It is really a disgrace on Adobe's part. This is not a single user experience either, there is a general consensus now among video editors that this is the case with Premiere and After Effects.
The crashes I had were due to 3rd party plugins. I am slowly replacing AE with Blender now, but for certain stuff I still like it.
Also as an additional thought, is it really that good that they make such a big software that can be crashed because of a plugin? They know there will be a plugin Zoo out there, they know the plugins sometimes have to use GPU on their own, which brings many troubles with drivers etc, - they still can't manage to just isolate in in their own processes? Plugins are used all the time, it's an industry of itself. Company of the size of Adobe can't foresee that some plugins will be unstable and they need to take care of it? The dreaded chrome can isolate websites in their own processes, Adobe can't do the same with a mere plugin??
Sometimes this kind of thing turns out to be memory with a problem at some address. :/
Now, it's possible that this was technically the other programs' fault, but on the other hand you can't blame them for not testing their video playback with all different filters installed. Why does Adobe add these filters globally with a high ranking if they're not drop-in-replacements for the 'normal' ones?
Being able rapidly and precisely build an item in 2D CAD, then do the graphic design component on Inkscape is amazing.
More recently I’m moving to do the graphic design part in Affinity Designer due to a couple of irritating bugs in Inkscape... but it doesn’t have export to DXF... But Inkscape is what taught me vector graphics, and I’m still using it as my default vector graphics app in my day job as a laser cutter operator-extraordinaire.
Learning to use updates to a UI is relatively cheap. Having a bunch of tools that are outdated is expensive.
Inkscape is great for what it is, but it could definitely use a well thought out interface refresh.
Yeah, right. Like Xara XL
Every time I'm pleased at how easy Inkscape makes it. And it's completely smooth on both Linux and Windows.
* Learn how to use it once
* Keeps getting better (some commercial software seems to bloat beyond repair)* Available on many platforms
* All of the above for FREE
Now I dont need to do vector graphics every week, not even every month. But for those couple of times a year it's good to have a tool in your box. Inkscape is there for me, no need to buy a (subscription) license. No need to boot into another OS. No need to relearn it. More than complete feature set for my needs.
Congrats to the team!