Just a few months ago, the people behind Inkscape released the new v1.0 beta of their popular vector drawing software. It's time for Spicy Yoghurt to put it to the test and do a quick review. We took it for a spin and created some vector art with it.
All of the vector art on the Spicy Yoghurt website is made with Inkscape, a vector drawing program. Unlike software such as Illustrator, it's open source and completely free. The interface takes some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, it's one of the best free editors available.
The people behind Inkscape have been working on v1.0 for months now, and the first beta was released in September 2019. The beta is available for Windows, Mac and Linux users and brings a lot of major and minor improvements. The list of new features is impressive, ranging from performance improvements to being able to rotate the canvas.
One of the biggest changes, however, is for Mac users only. To run on macOS, the old Inkscape relied on XQuartz, an extra program you had to install. The new version runs completely on its own, without any extra software. And unlike its predecessor, the new Inkscape is now compatible with the latest macOS, Catalina.
As a frequent user, Spicy Yoghurt had to put this new version to the test. We installed the Mac version and went to work. The result is this new piece of vector art: a little spaceship flying over a cloudy planet. It's a bit like the last one, which you can see in this Spicy Yoghurt Instagram post, and it has the same space theme.
Working with the beta for a few hours gave us a good feel for the new software. Unfortunately, it's still a bit buggy. You notice it right away when you start the application and try to open the Layers panel. The panel doesn't appear until you resize the window. There are some other visual bugs, and despite the performance improvements, the program can still feel a bit sluggish.
But it's definitely not all bad. Apart from the small bugs, Inkscape didn't crash once, and creating new artwork is perfectly doable. And let's not forget the big plus here: Inkscape runs as a native application on macOS Catalina. The compatibility issues are gone, and the application starts a lot faster.
In short, you can safely try the new v1.0 beta of Inkscape. It has some bugs that need to get squashed, but it's definitely usable. You can start right away and create some nice vector art. If you need something more stable, you can use the previous version, v0.92, unless you're on macOS Catalina. Of course, you can also wait for the official v1.0 release. There's no release date yet, though.
Happy drawing!
No comments yet. Be the first to leave one!