Wednesday 22 September 2010

Inkscape ARGH!

Damn, it's that time of the project again - and in need of some sort of diagram editor.

Inkscape - looks the part, has lots of features, but maddingly as hell to use and buggy as all shit. When I try to grab stuff it keeps grabbing the wrong thing. The modal editing of objects is sort of nice but hard to get used to. Snapping snaps to different things all the time. The text tool is very unreliable - e.g. setting fonts. Every time i leave it on another desktop for a while I come back to half a dozen python error boxes (@#$@# python bullshit no wonder), and then it just crashes with a windoze-like error box.

I've had it crash 5 times in 2 hours, things vanish while I try to move them and generally a pretty abysmal user experience. Why can't the developers focus on stability rather than features and pretty toolbars? I might have to persevere regardless however as the openoffice draw thing is awful and dia is a bit too bare after all these years.

I think i'm just unlucky with the version in Fedora 13. It has a few other issues such as a version of Octave which simply crashes whenever you try to do any image processing.

Hmm, had an ear-ache most of the day, and it's getting worse. Trying to get drunk enough to make it go away. I think I scratched my ear trying to get some wax out the other day, or maybe i'm just worried I did and made it hurt for nothing, but half my head hurts to touch too. Had a horrid nightmare this morning which kept me awake for hours and then I spent the otherwise quite pleasant and occasionally sunny day writing documentation.

Altogether a day to forget.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

lol... Well, I happen to comparatively like it's GUI; to say the GIMP, at least. And yes; Inkscape seems to keep getting more resource hungry every time. Not everything can be the filters' quality fault, or be easily tweaked. In my case even the menus seem to drag; even with only a few objects present! Mem's sparse and so CPU power; so what gives? I mean; what's the point of using a program if we have to manually optimized points, paths and shit... If I wanted a res hog, I'd be using Vista!

(PS: Although it may be too late; get well...)