Just in case you are looking for a commercial alternative to Inkscape with a more modern UI and Chromium-based rendering engine, check out my project Boxy SVG: https://boxy-svg.com
The next version (to be released in 2-3 weeks) is going to introduce full support for filters and color swatches. In the upcoming 12 months I expect to reach full feature parity with Inkscape.
I'm sad to say that I judged it purely on the fact that it wasn't open source.
Then I went ahead and tried it out... mind blown. It's that good. Feels like a native app in it's UI quality and speed. And $9/month is a very good price point, especially for those that regularly create vector art.
I'm amazed at the quality of your app. It'll be especially incredible once you're at Inkscape parity. How large is the team you got working full time?
I'm working on it alone, which is possible thanks to Electron and Chromium projects which are abstracting away the difficult tasks.
BTW, the widget toolkit used by Boxy SVG is open sourced and can be used by other projects. You can try it out on https://xel-toolkit.org. In near future I'm planning to improve it by adding Windows 10 theme and full support for color schemes and dark mode.
Only $1080 over the next decade compared to zero for inkscape! You would probably be better off writing a check for $100 to fund improvements to same and put the other grand in your pocket.
Everyone on earth wants to turn a sale into a recurring revenue stream for a reason. Trivial individual costs add up substantially over time.
Boxy SVG desktop app does not and will not require recurring payments. You pay for it once and after that you will be receiving updates for free as long as I'm in charge of the project (i.e. I won't get hit by a bus or something along those lines).
hey, you might wanna change your website a little bit then. it's not obvious right now.
i clicked on the link of your site, and the first box i saw said "9$/month". that's enough to click away (for me).
only after i did some more clicking and followed an external(!) link to the store it was obvious you can do a one-time purchase.
in a normal situation i would never have gotten to that point and would have clicked away immediately after seeing 9/month for a new product that still has to prove itself and doesn't have a big name behind it.
Yes, it's not at all clear. If you switch away from "Web app" by clicking on an OS, you don't get that (or any) pricing info. Going to the stores themselves, Windows and Mac seem to have a one-time payment, and Chrome and Snap don't seem to have a price.
Originally I was assuming that the vast majority of potential desktop app users would discover it throw the app
stores, therefore the website should focus on marketing the web app. I guess this assumption was wrong, I will update the marketing materials per your suggestions.
Full feature parity with Inkscape in a year is a bold claim, and I’m rather sceptical of it. You have built an impressive app (and I’m sure that being just one person helped with that), but there is a lot of advanced functionality in Inkscape that you don’t have at present. A few examples that spring to mind: full pressure-sensitive tablet support (and sure, this is the beauty of using the web as your platform—it’s all there in the PointerEvent; well, until you need more fine control, then you’re completely stranded), live path effects, extensions, tracing. I’d also like a much stronger keyboard interface. I’d be interested to see your take on some of Inkscape’s extensions particularly, like JessyInk and font editing.
I did test the app for compatibility with Wacom Intuos. "Blob" tool already supports pressure sensitivity [1], as you said it was relatively easy to implement with the Pointer Events API. I'm not sure how pressure and tilt information could be used by other tools (other than "Spray") as SVG does not support stroke with variable width.
Tracing could be easily implemented using third party libraries [2]. Custom extensions would be initially limited to the "Generators" panel. I haven't thought about the live path effects yet.
The hardest part remaining is full support for filters, but I have this feature mostly sorted out in the dev branch and the UI is going to be much nicer than in Inkscape [3][4].
Inkscape 1.0 adds what’s basically a more powerful version of that, a pressure-sensitive pencil, implemented with the powerstroke live path effect—more powerful, I say, because it’s editable, because it’s not immediately flattening it to what SVG can represent, but is also keeping its own editor information in namespaced attributes. That’s how you can add things like that and mesh gradients before SVG supports the concept.
I’m still intensely sceptical of your claim of full feature parity with Inkscape in a year, but I’ll believe parity for >95% of users and use cases.
My biggest problem with your app at the moment looks to be that path editing is painful compared with Inkscape. I like to show the outline of the path, and its keyboard and mouse operation also feels just all-round superior at present, and I don’t think that that’s just my greater familiarity with Inkscape showing through.
I’d also like more text labels and fewer icons. Iconless labels have no place on something like your filters panel; text labels are objectively superior. I’d say similar for the Defs panel and other such panels.
On second thought, 100% parity might be a bit overoptimistic as some features such as auto-wrapped text and mesh gradients rely on APIs that must be implemented upstream by Chromium (and those features are not the top priority for Google). But 95% seems sensible to me.
There should be an outline shown when you hover a path with the "Edit" tool [1], though it's a bit sloppy and needs more optimization. Most path-related commands are exposed by the "Shape" panel. To convert a node between a smooth and an edge type you must double-click it. The ability to box-transform selected nodes and to move them with arrow keys is missing but should be added soon.
My main problem with text labels is that they take a lot of horizontal space. Text labels could be shown only when the panel is wide enough to fit them, or when user hovers the icon (like it's done in Autodesk Graphic).
You don’t need upstream support for all features; you can often implement them in older SVG techniques with namespaced extra data to help with editing. That’s how text wrapping has worked in Inkscape historically, though 1.0 is introducing support for the actual defined SVG functionality.
Not everything is possible this way; mesh gradients can’t be emulated in vectors, for example—though you could effectively implement a canvas-backed renderer for it to polyfill it; but a lot of functionality can be implemented without upstream support.
I need a rock solid support for Custom Elements, Shadow DOM and Pointer Events. There is a ton of browser-specific bugs that need special handling and workarounds.
It's a commercial project, I have updated my comment to make it clear. I would open source it if it was a sustainable option. In the past Gravit and Xara did try to use the open source model, but there was very little interest from the community to contribute.
Yes, heaps of interest from people who can't code or provide financial support but who like to complain. Same with Gravit (then known as Stagestack) who failed to raise 20.000 USD from Fireworks community [1]. Or with Akira and its Kickstarter campaign [2].
Monthly subscription is used only by the web app. The desktop app requires a single payment, after that you can continue using it and receive updates for free.
I know and I feel bad about it, but I have to make some compromises due to limited resources. Supporting all major operating systems is already a huge undertaking even if you use Electron.
Besides, everything seems to suggest that Firefox will be out of the market in the next couple of years. At least unless Mozilla adopts Chromium engine like Microsoft and Opera did.
>Besides, everything seems to suggest that Firefox will be out of the market in the next couple of years. At least unless Mozilla adopts Chromium engine like Microsoft and Opera did.
A browser rendering engine monoculture really isn't a good thing that we should wish for. Chrome is very much the new IE at this point.
- Signed HTTP Exchanges and AMP. The controversy around these two has already been well-documented.
- Poorly thought out plans to roll-out default SameSite behaviour whilst a glaring bug was present in Safari which would be exacerbated by the behaviour change (requiring SameSite=None). I'm all for preventing CSRF by default, but these sort of changes should be planned and implemented considerately. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20905396
- Poor implementation of CT reporting which sent spurious reports to sysadmins even after the policy was supposed to have expired. See https://crbug.com/786563
But no, I personally don't think so - provided web developers do their job and stop designing for one browser. I've been impressed with their recent work - Quantum, developer edition, WebRender etc. Don't care so much for the sync/VPN/other external services, though Firefox Send is quite neat.
I understand that you have to focus your resources onto Chromium; but don't count Firefox out yet. The way Google is behaving nowadays coupled with the progress that Firefox keeps making, there will be a sizable group of us Firefox users for the foreseeable future. And, we're a vocal bunch, too!
I’ve also noticed a small uptick in my circle of friends abandoning chrome for firefox lately. I personally also switched back to firefox this year after years of using only chrome.
"Besides, everything seems to suggest that Firefox will be out of the market in the next couple of years"
yeah, that's what they've been saying about Linux for over 15 years now. i wouldn't bet on it. we, the FOSS community, will always need a non-commercial browser that embraces the open source core values.
There are already some Inkscape developers who accept donations, for example Tavmjong Bah [1] who has been a long time contributor and still actively works on it.
I'm not sure why you want new developers to donate to when the existing ones clearly didn't reach their goals yet.
Thanks. Now this is an appropriate link asking for money for this thread. The post I was replying to was completely inappropriate and shameless hijacking of an Inkscape thread.
Probably because not everyone wants to mess with decade old dependency and just start with something fresh?
So it is sad, that it is not open source, but apparently he proved the starting new approach is worth it.
The next version (to be released in 2-3 weeks) is going to introduce full support for filters and color swatches. In the upcoming 12 months I expect to reach full feature parity with Inkscape.