Native MacOSX Support!!
"Inkscape is now a first-rate native macOS application, and no longer requires XQuartz to operate. The minimum required operating system version is OS X El Capitan 10.11.
It has a standard Mac-style menu bar (rather than a menu bar within the window). Keyboard shortcuts now use the command (⌘) key rather than the control key. Retina display screen resolution is now supported. The build is now cleanly 64-bit, a prerequisite for macOS Catalina 10.15 and beyond. It comes bundled with Python 3 to power Inkscape extensions. "
Oh I'm so glad to see progress is being made in this area. Inkscape was just unusable for me on macOS. Now it's a bit more bearable. Keep up the good work!
First grats to the devs and hurray for high quality open source.
My impression though for OS X, that with Affinity Designer a lot of need for a cheaper Illustrator has vanished (if you need it to be free/open source/on principle then Inkscape is great)
Inkscape is a lot more versatile than Affinity Designer. So it all depends what you need to do. But also how you like to or are used to work.
Inkscape is more of a CorelDRAW than an Illustrator clone. People who come from CorelDRAW, like me, usually disrelish the way curves are edited in Adobe products.
As much as I like Affinity products (I own both Photo & Publisher), I prefer Inkscape any day over Designer (or Illustrator) for this reason.
The other reason I simply couldn't use Designer at all until approx. six months ago was that is lacked snapping of curve handles to grid intersections. It took Affinity years to implement this essential feature for people who do typography or logotypes[1].
As others mentioned: the Carbon native Inkscape (beta and now release) are even slower than the XQuartz version. Which was already slow, compared to running Inkscape on Linux on the same MBP.
For this reason I now use Vectornator[2] (free) as much as I can. For the missing bits I go back and forth with Inkscape.
Not ideal but it's only recent that the macOS version of Inkscape has seen more love from the developers. I hope that soon performance will improve and I can do everything in one app.
A tangent, but Vectornator is completely mystifying to me. Not the application itself, which is a very accessible vector illustration tool, but the company. It’s a Berlin-based startup with $5 million in venture funding, and they don’t have any kind of externally-visible business model for their free, no-IAP apps for MacOS and iOS.
(Further muddying the waters is a recent update to the iOS app that adds achievement badges. I don’t know what kind of product roadmap for a creative tool ends up prioritizing that, but that’s where they are.)
Yeah, they're showing 31 people and a bit over 5MM EUR as their funding. But their job ads are ~60 EUR/year, so that's what, maybe 1-2 years of funding? Not exactly long-term as they're claiming.
There's something else going on. Perhaps training an AI?
As a researcher who composes a figure or two every now and then, I find Inkscape to be far more intuitive than Affinity Designer. Affinity makes simple things hard. Creating arrows was not a feature until recently, resizing multiple selections would mess text objects, and changing the size of the canvas requires copying all content to clipboard and creating a second, separate canvas. Not to mention that exports, which should be simple, are also hard to understand for beginners / non-designers, and the gazillion of menus makes it impossible to ever find what you need.
After many years of waiting, I'm happy to see Inkscape jumping to MacOS too. Kudos to all devs and contributors that made this possible.
As a researcher who draw figures quite often... I use PowerPoint. That sounds like a joke, but the ratio features/learning curse is perfect. On the contrary I was never able to draw anything with Inkscape, and I give it a try every few years or so.
> Not to mention that exports, which should be simple, are also hard to understand for beginners / non-designers
That’s strange, I’m not a designer and I found it very easy to understand, and very powerful too — that is unless you don’t know there’s a separate Export Persona. Guess a tiny amount of prior experience with Sketch helped a bit in my case.
Unfortunately, this native version is quite laggy compared to the previous XQuartz releases. I wonder how it compares with a Linux version in a VM; my previous experience suggests it may work better.
Hopefully removing a whole extra layer will make it easier to profile and improve, both for Mac tools and for Mac developers. One of my main complaints about Firefox is that everything is so completely custom (even the parts that look 'native') that all my years of Mac development knowledge are useless.
I see that, for better or worse, Inkscape is still fully GTK+ even on macOS. It uses the slightly improved native features of that toolkit, but all the controls still look like they're ripped from an X11 app. The text labels don't even use Mac naming conventions.
I wonder if GTK+ is architected in a way that's going to be easy to optimize on the Mac graphics architecture.
Yeah same issue here, much worse performance than the XQuartz releases. Dragging objects, especially arrows, is extremely laggy and awful. I've moved to Affinity Designer for now, which is better in almost every way except that unfortunately it is not easy at all to add LaTeX equations. Also the UI looks somehow feels less native macOS-like than the XQuartz versions, they're still not even using NSOpenPanel which is a huge pet peeve for me
> Yes. This is related to GTK and is holding the macOS release back while Win/Linux graduate from beta. If you want to connect with the developers they can be found at: https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team
So if you want to help resolve it, perhaps check there :)
The developers for the Mac build are aware of this issue and trying to determine how we can resolve it. As far as I understand it may be an upstream GTK problem, but if you'd like to know more (or even better, you have the skills to help) you can chat with them at: https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team_devel_mac
This surprises me. I would imagine that most programmers would want to work on a unix-variant instead of Windows. But, that is probably just my bias talking.
Both MacOS and Windows are relatively annoying platform for which the "official" programming tools are not free. Additionally, there is a network effect: GTK applications, specifically, remain on Linux because GTK on Windows doesn't work too well.
The Windows SDK is free to download. Unless you meant free, like in free software, in which case, yes, there may be an ideological barrier to entry regarding Windows development.
To be honest, its much easier to port Linux software to MacOS than to Windows. Why? Because MacOS & Linux are both Unix-like OS.
And not only GTK+ apps easy to port on MacOS, but X11-based Linux apps also easy to port to MacOS. For example, take a look on AzPainter painting app.[0,1]
Native OS support and interface is important to me, and the reason I didn't jump on to Inkscape earlier.
It's also the reason I no longer use or support Audacity. I don't expect every open source project to be up to date with the latest whiz-bang OS release. But Audacity has had ten years to put together a 64-bit version, and haven't been able to pull it off. No Catalina support makes it a non-starter for me.
That’s a common theme with OSS applications, unfortunately. It’s rare to get UX engineers to help, and even more rare for anyone to lead “product direction” from a UX perspective.
So a lot of them make use of rudimentary UI toolkits, with admittedly sub-par interfaces that stink of design-by-committee, since the focus is more on the “substance” of the application than the presentation. But with a lot of these tools, design tools in particular, the presentation is such an integral part of the experience, it’s unfortunate to see it be the part that gets the least care or attention.
Not to say that this shortcoming is universal; blender version 2.50 made huge improvements to UX, and Ubuntu showed the importance of good UI in open source. But Inkscape, GIMP, openlibre and others are still notably behind the curve.
You don't need a rare "UX engineer". The issues here are much more fundamental.
On a Core i7 with 16 GB of RAM, dragging one object on an otherwise empty canvas gives me about 1 fps. You don't need any special "product direction" to know that needs fixing.
Half of the issues would be fixed by not using GTK+. Any GTK+ app on a Mac is going to feel like "you got a Linux app to run on a Mac", not "a Mac app". Maybe someday that will no longer be true, but it's been true for the past 20 years. Inkscape doesn't even look like an old Mac app -- these UI toolkits are moving in different directions.
I know that's not going to change, which is why I'm not optimistic Inkscape is ever going to be good on the Mac. My only hope is that someone will write a Mac app which uses the Inkscape engine, like Camino or IINA did in their respective categories. But good and inexpensive alternatives exist, so there's not a lot of incentive.
It has a standard Mac-style menu bar (rather than a menu bar within the window). Keyboard shortcuts now use the command (⌘) key rather than the control key. Retina display screen resolution is now supported. The build is now cleanly 64-bit, a prerequisite for macOS Catalina 10.15 and beyond. It comes bundled with Python 3 to power Inkscape extensions. "