Interview with Ted Gould of Inkscape
Ted Gould is an open source developer working on desktop and usability on Ubuntu for Canonical. He’s also an active developer on the Inkscape project and enjoys photography. He lives in LA with his wife and son.
SCALE: Ted, tell us a bit about yourself. We know you work on Ubuntu, for Canonical, and you’re a developer on the Inkscape project.
Ted: And I use vi. I’m not sure if such a divisive question should start the interview 
I’ve been an Open Source developer for a while, working on Sodipodi and GNOME before Inkscape started. Recently I got a job at Canonical which allows me to spend time doing more mainstream GNOME development.
Inkscape is a GTK+ program, thus using several GNOME technologies, but isn’t in GNOME proper. I’ve never lost my GNOME roots, remaining a member of the foundation and on e-mail lists but now I have more time to act.
I’m really enjoying working in Open Source. There are so many less secrets and things that “we don’t tell customers.” Sure, they know, but we couldn’t tell them, right? It’s frustrating for developers not being able to have an honest conversation and solve problems for people. I feel like I help more people when working in the open.
SCALE: Describe your typical day - how much is Ubuntu work and how much is Inkscape work? Do they overlap at all?
Ted: They do a little, but Canonical is not paying me to work on Inkscape. But the base technologies are the same. We’re using GTK+ and SVG all across both of the projects so in many ways there is no separation. Learning things like Debian packaging at Canonical has also helped out in solving Inkscape problems that would have been difficult before. So, they do overlap, but not “officially.”
SCALE: Inkscape is almost at version 0.46; what’s been added since the previous release?
Ted: Wow, it’s almost too much. The story behind 0.46 is that we kept delaying it to add more stuff, and now it’s simply huge. Some of the big user visible things are:
- the tweak tool, which allows you to naturally edit vectored paths similar to blend tools on bitmap editors;
- 3-d boxes, a way to create vectored pseudo-3d objects quickly;
- live path effects, making objects which are controlled and manipulated by single paths.
There are also things like upgrades to our font handling, printing, OCAL import/export, rendering speed, bitmap exporting, bitmap effects, grids, snapping… and that’s all the ones I can remember off the top of my head! It has been said that working with 0.45 is the dark ages by users who keep up with the development versions. It’s a very exciting release.
SCALE: What’s planned for future releases?
Ted: We’re still focused on 0.46, so we haven’t thought too much about what’s next. I think there is a general idea that we need to focus a little on bug fixing and code clean up for a next release, we also want to tighten the release cycle some - a year was too long!
We want to get more scripting and pluggability going, perhaps by including a VM, so that other languages can be easily placed on top of it. We’re also hoping to finish off all the SVG filters and get the color management hammered out so that users can start using Inkscape for more print-ready type activities. But that isn’t a comprehensive list; I’m sure some developer will come along and impress us!
SCALE: What’s the typical Inkscape user like? Do you have any feel for how widely it’s used?
Ted: It’s really hard to say. I’m always surprised at what people use Inkscape for. As far as GUI users go I think there are three main camps of users: free desktop artist (icons, backgrounds, etc.), web developers (prototyping, graphics) and fine artists. But I found out at SCALE that Open StreetMaps is using Inkscape for all their tile rendering. That probably makes them the biggest Inkscape user of all!
SCALE: You recently spoke at the So Cal Linux Expo on “The Ubuntu Desktop: Bling for Usability”. How was your talk received? What kind of feedback did you get?
Ted: I think it was received well overall. It was a little bit short, which is funny because last year I was very long (people started leaving) and I was trying so hard to be in my time limit this year. I guess I over compensated. I think that some people thought that I was going to do a review, or a how to on the Ubuntu Desktop which wasn’t really my goal. The goal of the talk was to explain how the recent increases in graphics performance on the desktop have allowed us to explore usability in new ways. So, in that regard, some people probably didn’t get what they expected out of the talk. But, I heard some laughs and no crying, so that’s always a good sign