Inkscape Developer Reacts to Affinity being Aquired

This spare of the moment video is brought to you by "things I needed to say"

It's not great news to know there are millions of users out there who don't get to own their work tools. But I hope through developing Inkscape and your help funding my work, we are making a difference and allowing users to free themselves from this sort of depressing news.

Now what can we do to make things better?

[Inkscape-tutorial-pl]

There are a few things Inkscape needs to become more competitive:
1. CMYK (which is in progress),
2. A decent, stable text edit tool that is comfortable to use. Soft spaces, text that is easy to work with when there is a large amount of it.
3. Filters that are nice, stable, predictable and easy to adjust. Current filters are useless. The filter gallery helps, but does not solve the problem.
4. Better font management - preview and style, easy size setting
5. a more convenient clone layout tool that would allow you to make nice, dotted gradients.
6. Generally improve the ease of work for example like adding noise to gradients.

[HaraldEngels]

Inkscape has some quirks but I am not willing to use something different than open source software (OSS). I am very grateful for all these people who make OSS possible.

[gregdarroch]

I purchased the entire Affinity suite, despite almost exclusively using Photo. I moved to Affinity from Adobe because of the subscription model, and was happy to support Affinity because it wasn’t subscription. I feel quite a sense of betrayal at the moment. The language used in the announcement from Affinity didn’t give me confidence at all. The old “no current plan” for change really means “we will wait a short time before we introduce the new model”.

[kameikojirou]

I moved from Adobe to Affinity to Inkscape about two years ago. CMYK is the only reason I still use Affinity software from a Virtual Machine. Inkscape is an absolute Joy to use otherwise.
1) CYMK support
2) The Text tool could use a little love too.

[Melissa_h]

Only been using (learning) Affinity Designer for a short period for SVG files for my laser. I just downloaded Inkscape and will learn that now. So Thank You for being here for us all!

[nzlemming]

Martin, you never blather. I'm very pleased to have found your channel. Inkscape user for nearly 20 years and very happy with it.

[CTRL_SMarcos]

Since this is not the first time Adobe buys a product and immediately kills it, here is a "conspiracy theory" Canva buys Affinity, Adobe buys Canva and kills two competitors to make way for Adobe Express and Illustrator. Sorry, I'm just bored...but on the other hand, who knows? 🤔😆

[toxiccan]

Instead of paying a subscription for temporary access to Adobe under the guise of funding continued development, it would be better to have a recurring donation to Inkscape to actually fund development. With the latter, you still have access after you stop paying.

[chrisnash]

Affinity designer user here. I don't know how helpful this is, but it was always my impression that not having an image trace tool in the Affinity suite was a huge miss on their part. I know inkscape and illustrator both have one (and to be honest i haven't used inkscape in a couple of years) but just making sure that some tools that already exist within the inkscape environment continue to get tweaked and updated to keep up with the industry standard would go a long way. Thanks for all the great work you do :)

[toolsman]

Just finished my latest work with both Affinity Designer and Inkscape. Mainly use Affinity Photo but after the acquisition and watching your video I found that I need to pay more attention to FOSS creation softwares like Inkscape and Krita. Thanks for your contributions and contents Martin!

[reikooters]

I'm not a designer, I'm a developer, but I use inkscape for editing or cropping svgs like icons or adjusting a company logo sent to me by a customer. Just wanted to say it's a great tool for what little I use it so thank you to you and the team.

[TimJones]

I would love to see some sort of “Pixel Persona”, introduced into Inkscape. Being able to “paint” with actual raster brushes, would open huge opportunities for open source artists, allowing them to stay within Inkscape for vector and raster mixed media work flows. 👍

[IronEchoDesign]

I tried Affinity and had a feeling this would happen. Inkscape is the way.

[davescustommakes]

Hi Martin, I use Inkscape for most of my vector drawings with the exception of when it comes to putting text on a path, especially when it comes to placing text on a circle. In Affinity Designer placing text on a circle is so much easier and more intuitive than it is in Inkscape that I often stop and switch over to Affinity Designer for the text on a path work and then switch back to Inkscape. Doing this creates its own issues, but I can often work within those constraints with a little bit of planning.

[Jantcu]

Thank you for all your work on Inkscape Martin! It helps us sleep at night knowing that we truly have ownership and control over the software we use thanks for selfless people like you :). Open source for us is simply about accountability, it's giving the user the keys in case the project ever becomes misaligned with their values.

[Cubasenet]

I like Inkscape so much! My suggestion would be for you to prepare an Affinity Photo software equivalent, because Canva-Serif will fall sooner than later in a subscription plan, and then we, Affinity Photo (or the suit) owners, will be on the RUN as we were with Adobe.

I use Affinity just because of the CMYK support. It's very easy to work or convert exiting work into CMYK with Affinity Designer.

[jobbel]

I haven’t used Inkscape so far, so I am not really aware of its current feature-set, but I generally appreciate it if a tool has support for 1) the file format „openEXR“ and 2) the OSS framework „OpenColorIO“ (OCIO) as I often need to have „control“ over 1) Arbitrary Output Variables (AOVs) or 2) be able to en-, or decode different color management specifics, through OCIO for instance. - not sure if this is something Inkscape already has, is planning to, or does not make any sense to implement with regards to its current user base.

[johannes-vollmer]

as an affinity user, what I'm missing in Inkscape is mainly the non-destructive workflow. for example, non-destructive booleans. masks. that stuff.

[OnyxStudiosInteractive]

I really like your image to svg tracing feature. As far as what you could do to appeal to Affinity users, I think you could add some visual hierarchy to the UX/UI to make it more like Affinity. Their icons are slightly larger and more differentiated. Also depending on the area, some tool icons and controls are visually larger such as the persona and color tools at the top.

The panel designs could be updated as well to model Affinity's and Photoshop's layouts. That's just what designers and artists are used to these days. Inkscape is just as powerful as Affinity software however the UX/UI design could be updated to match Affinity's more modern visual style.

I know as a developer you're much more focused on the features rather than icons and panel layouts, sliders and color boxes but looking at them visually side by side, it does make a difference.

Thanks for all the awesome work you've been doing! I really appreciate it.