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Usability Eye for The GIMP Guy
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Sat Aug 27, 2005 10:41 AM
from the ease-of-abuse dept.
from the ease-of-abuse dept.
TuringTest writes "The GIMP has recently signed up for
evaluation by OpenUsability.org. 'Many user interface decisions are being made by developers who often have little experience in user interface design. In order to improve this, we need the help of experts. To find them, GIMP has joined
the OpenUsability project. Here's a platform where Open Source developers and usability experts get together.' They also report their first experiences with the paper prototyping of a new Import PDF dialog."
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Great. (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree (Score:3, Interesting)
You're right. The interface for The GIMP is very different from any other application I've used. It's not really bad, it's just different and it takes a lot of getting used to.
I just started using The GIMP not too long ago. I don't want to spend the money to upgrade my old copy of Paint Shop Pro if there's software that's just as good for free. If it takes me a little longer to learn how to use it, that's fine. (Unlike most people, my time is worthless...) But if they could improve the interface, I
Re:I agree (Score:5, Insightful)
If the openusability thing actually makes changes which are demonstrably an improvement then I have no problem with it.
However, if all that happens is that they turn the interface into a clone of PhotoShop's then the developers will be doing the Gimp (and us) a disservice. Personally, I find the "classic" Gimp UI perfectly approachable (and I actually use it on a daily basis).
Incidentally, IIRC I heard (probably on /.) that there is some sort of extension or whatever that is supposed to emulate PS's UI already in existence, but a quick google just now failed to find it...
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Re:I agree (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I agree (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I agree (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I agree (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of the griping probably comes from people who just are expecting Photoshop. OTOH, there are some things you can do in Photoshop that you just can't do in the GIMP, and some of the interface decisions are a result of needing to accomodate additional features.
Re:I agree -- SO WRONG! (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously there were differences enough respective to each program -- the tools for Illustrator are quite different from the tools for GoLive, for example. But the palettes and use of each program was exceedingly similar, after years of being just different enough to be annoying.
Still, Paint Shop Pro uses an interf
Question (Score:3, Insightful)
When the report comes back saying that it should have a proper window instead of floating toolbars, will they say "they weren't using it right, they are just used to Photoshop!" like they usually do?
Seriously, people have been complaining about the interface since day one, and the GIMP developers don't pay any attention. That's their prerogative of course, but if they aren't willing to listen, why are they signed up for this?
Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Back when they started designing GIMP, assuming it was designed and didn't just congeal, that would have been how the majority of Mac applications worked.
Part of the reason the palette system works in MacOS Classic is that when you bring an application to the front in Classic, you bring *all* its windows to the front, not just the one you clicked on. Applications were in "layers." This means you'd never have a situation where you could see your image, but not see your toolbar. That's changed in OS X, and it never existed in Linux or Windows.
So, at best, GIMP is trying to be like a MacOS Classic application and failing because none of the newest window managers treat application windows as "layers." (You can get this effect in OS X by clicking the icon on the Dock instead of the window to bring things forward, though.)
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I saw that show! (Score:4, Funny)
Let's talk about the elephant in the room. (Score:5, Insightful)
PROVIDE AN OPTION FOR AN MDI GUI ALL IN ONE WINDOW.
With dockable tool palettes.
Every time I bring this up to anyone who knows gimp, they tell me to run it in its own virtual desktop. I don't use virtual desktops, and I don't want an app to have a ton of toolbars floating around anyway.
Re:Let's talk about the elephant in the room. (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing about MDI schemes is that they make it impossible to efficiently use multi-monitor setups. Even if the tool palettes can be undocked, it makes it so you can't have different "document" windows on different heads.
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Re:Let's talk about the elephant in the room. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Let's talk about the elephant in the room. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Let's talk about the elephant in the room. (Score:3, Interesting)
Then a mear ten years after the limitation in Windows was lifted, even Microsoft ab
Usability (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Usability (Score:3, Insightful)
It's brilliant with virtual desktops. It's great with multiple monitors. The interface works really well with KDE's window manager; it works really well with X11.app on my iBook.
Of course, I then recently installed in on Windows, having until the
Re:Let's talk about the elephant in the room. (Score:2)
it's much easier just to point my mouse at the window i want to use, and start working.
by the way... last time i checked, the tool palettes were dockable. and they still are, unless they've removed that since 2.2...
Re:Let's talk about the elephant in the room. (Score:2)
export DISPLAY=:0
metacity &
gimp
There you go.
Re:Let's talk about the elephant in the room. (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously, you're not a professional software developer otherwise you would see the utter stupidity of making such a statement.
To be able to make even minor modifications to a major software project could possibly takes MONTHS of prep work. Its not like opening up a book and fixing a spelling mistake, you need to understand the ins and outs of the module you're working on and the modules that depend on it. And thats assuming that the code is well documented and there is other supporting documentation
What he is talking about is most likely a major undertaking, not something some guy off the street can fix over the weekend off the latest CVS trunk.
In short, please stop repeating that tired old argument, its not feasible for 99% of the user community for any particular application and it makes you sound like an arrogant prick.
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Re:Let's talk about the elephant in the room. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have been hacking the Gimp for weeks and it's finally ready.
What made this project especially difficult is that there isn't one file that holds all of Gimp's tool names and menu structure. I've modified hundreds of files and combed thousands of lines of code to make this version of Gimp a reality. This work pales in comparison to real coding, but for a hack like me, it required a lot of learning and work.
And thats just for moving the menu widgets around.
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Re:Let's talk about the elephant in the room. (Score:3, Insightful)
So he can spend six months fixing it himself, pay some software develper 6 months salary to fix it, or spend a few hundred dollars and get Photoshop.
This is why OSS isn't going to kill commercial software for a loooooooooong time.
Re:Let's talk about the elephant in the room. (Score:2)
Since the Gimp developers have asked for evaluation by OpenUsability, that would seem to me to be a solicitation for comments by the app's users about its interface.
Re:Let's talk about the elephant in the room. (Score:2)
There are many times to be annoyed when people bitch about free software. This is not one of them.
i like how the gimp works. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nowadays, if i go back to a windows system with photoshop or paintshop pro, it feels really cluttered and i get 'clausterphobic'.
Of course, i'm speaking as a casual user who does pretty basic operations. Maybe it's different if you work with it professionally?
Re:i like how the gimp works. (Score:2)
Re:i like how the gimp works. (Score:2)
If GIMP and other mass user Linux products (read, X) want to get users to convert they need to make the transition much easier than it is now otherwise the less savvy professionals in less technica
Deweirdifyer (Score:3, Informative)
having to click to expose just the root menu is excessive. The root menu should always be visible, IMO.
By "root menu" do you mean the menu bar at the top of the tool window, or the context menu in the document window? If the latter, then GIMP 2.0 and later have added that menu to the top of the document window. If the former, then try the Deweirdifyer extension [gimp.org] on Windows or virtual desktops on *n?x.
Will they be able to take... (Score:5, Interesting)
Phew. (Score:2)
As good as the gimp is, it can be nightmare finding tools when you start using it.
Oops. (Score:2, Funny)
Custom Palettes (Score:2)
reminder : GimpShop already exists! (Score:5, Interesting)
Getting used to it (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't just to something, stand there! (Score:5, Insightful)
Gimp is the epitome of wrong UI in OSS, I can barely use it without online howtos, and I'm experienced. Now, imagine Av. Joe
First non-cowchip post. (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, it's probably a lot better than any of the other comments, the dead openusability website, or whatever that site may or may not have posted about this. Simply put, it looks like the gimp is merely a project that has been registered by one of the developers to see what or if any good can from from those guys. That's all. No massive throw-in from the collective force of Gimp users and developers.
I've got a ton or respect for the dude (I've fixed far fewer bugs in GNOME bugzilla
Feel free to call me the stop-motion energy guy... I'm just skeptical.
Seashore for OS X Users (Score:5, Interesting)
-1 Flamebait (Score:5, Funny)
Text manipulation? (Score:5, Informative)
It's really difficult to resize text to fit the shape you want while maintaining good quality, while I believe Photoshop does this by maintaining the font's vector information until you rasterize the layer.
Also it was very difficult adding simple effects to it, such as a outline, glow or shadow. And at the same time, having it adjust dynamically when I alter the parent layer.
I found it very frustrating, and I've been using Gimp for many months now. >.< Maybe I'm missing something and still have more to learn, but I don't think many people would disagree that some of the interface on Gimp is unintuitive.
I'm happy to hear that they're trying to improve.
- shazow
My wife's experience (Score:4, Informative)
-- Dialogs were inconsistent and many times didn't properly explain their function (filters)
-- Layers are handled 'quaintly'. No layer grouping, which takes it totally out of the running for her day-to-day stuff. She will often have documents with 100+ layers, grouped and folder-ized.
Those were two of her biggest compaints, most of the others were "this feels different from Photoshop", which you can't do anything about. But the large compaints were all layer and user interface related.
She didn't care about CMYK because she wasn't doing anything destined for print, but that would have killed her too.
Most of my personal beefs have to do with palettes that get behind other objects (like my workspace) and I have to track them down. But I'm not an artist.
Most of her compaints exist in previous versions of Photoshop too, to be fair, but if I even joked about "hey, why don't I install Photoshop 6 for you on that new machine", well, I wouldn't eat for a month.
The experience of trying to get her to use Gimp for a day scared me off of ever trying to get her using Inkscape or any of the other vector stuff, even for 5 minutes, instead of Illustrator.
Usability lab testing can only mean good things for this project, I hope a lot of good comes of it!
Artist feedback (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyways, I've been trying to give feedback to GIMP(shop) for quite a while, but I can't find any feedback emails or forums.
I failed to register at "open usability". I couldn't activate my account, because of an error or I just got my password wrong (which I wrote down clearly). I also tried to register another account, but that didn't work since my email was taken by my previous inactive account.
So my feedback will have to go here. It concerns mostly my painting technique. Maybe someone could drop this in a relevant inbox?
1: Colorpicking has to be easy. I prefer temporarely shifting to the colorpicker while holding down a key. The colorpicker should be able to handle average colors too, in case you colorpick from an area with a lot of noise.
In GIMPshop it seems I have to switch to the colorpicker tool manually, then when I colorpick a dialog comes up that I have to click down. This takes several seconds and kills workflow. Basically thing single 'feature' alone makes it practically impossible for me to paint in GIMP. I need to be able to colorpick once or twice per second. Yes I paint fast and I blend by using a 50% transparent brush and dabbing several times if I want opaque color, or I dab and colorpick if I want it more transparent. I use a wacom but have pressure sensitivity set to size so I can reach narrow places or fill large areas without having to change brush. Workflow and accesability is VERY important.
2: Brushes. It would be useful to be able to make several brushes that are just a click of a button away. When painting I generally use a few hard brushes and a few soft airbrushes, and some for multiplying on base colors onto line art. I do not want to manually set these up everytime I'm changing brush.
3: Photoshops 'Fade' is very useful. It brings up a slider which allow you to fade the last change, which can be a brushstroke, a curve/level, a hue/saturation change, or almost anything. This is very handy since it's realtime and you can fade your change until it looks balanced.
4: Photoshop's history can be useful. Some artists also make a new layer to experiment, paint a little and if they're happy they merge, otherwise they delete it. I use the history brush occasionally to erase changes I made with a soft or hard brush. This is useful if I for example painted a lot of cool armour details, but ruined the head, then I can just history erase the bad changes to the head. Theoretically this can be done with layers though, if the old layer without the changes is perserved somewhere.
5: Brushstroke quality is important. There might be an option for it but my version of GIMPshop made irregular little blotches on my lines. Giving any changes to pressure some sort of weight might prevent this, so transitions to thinner lines goes smoother somehow. Flimsy and chaotic does not look good unless you're Pollock.
Re:Oh, wonderful (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Oh, wonderful (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole point of a GUI is to have a graphical interface. If I want to slip into 'point-n-drool' mode for a while, why should I have to wade through some arcane XML or registry syntax just to set some simple option that the developers don't think a "normal" user would need. How would they know? Ma
Re:Oh, wonderful (Score:2)
At least we have KDE, which is improving at an impressive rate, while we wait for the GNOME guys to realize their mistakes.
Re:Oh, wonderful (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's something else you're missing - the type of people Gnome is targeting *DO NOT CARE* about 95%+ of the settings that would require opening GConf to change. For these users, it's far better to have a tool layout such that finding basic options does not require digging through 4 layers of option dialogues.
I'm not saying Gnome is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, simply that the majority of people on Slashdot who complain about Gnome being 'ruined' just plain do not understand how difficult seemingly simple tasks are for the average user. I mean, really, I've been using Linux since around '99, and run KDE from time to time just to see how they're progressing, and it almost always ends up with me digging through the control panel searching for things that should be rather simple to change because KDE exposes too many options for the average user.
Sure, if you're a geek and enjoy playing with all your settings, more power to you. But for people who simply want to use their computer, the KDE Control Panel is a confusing mess. So I'd really take issue with the idea that KDE is improving at an "impressive rate." If they spent more time cleaning up the Control Panel and building in HAL tools instead of adding huge oversized tooltips and calling it a usability improvement, I might be able to agree.
The changes that have been made to Gnome (for the most part) were not mistakes. It was a deliberate decision to move toward an interface that's more usable to a computer neophyte. Argue that the KDE interface is 'familiar' all you want, but the idea behind usability is that you don't *need* to be familiar with it to figure out how to do what you want.
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Re:Oh, wonderful (Score:3, Insightful)
Usability means the program performs the tasks the users need it to in an efficient and easy to learn manner, with minimal interference. Ideally, it should perform the tasks in the manner a wide range of users want it to.
Gnome's new UI is a classic example of a bad UI: It is inefficient, does not perform the necessary tasks (look at the horrendous file dialogue - it's quite literally the worst I've ever seen), is difficult to learn since many basic options are hidden an
Re:Oh, wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
Somehow I doubt that's possible - unless they add "Spacial layers" so that you have to edit each one in a separate window
I use Linux on my desktop at work, and have Gimp installed, and I've found it the least usable program I've ever seen. Admittedly it's rare that I need to work with images at work (I use Fireworks and PS at home) but even operations such as resizing and adding a background to an image are ridiculously long-winded. For instance, I had to Google to find out why the option to change the stacking order of layers is greyed out by default - there's no sane reason for it...
Every time I've attempted to use it I've found it so frustrating; it feels as though you're fighting the program rather than using it; that I've ended up giving up in disgust and found a spare Windows machine to do the job. I'm sure it have some great features, but it's viciously protective of them and doesn't want anyone to use them!
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Re:bravo! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I applaud the GIMP initiative. Try using Photos (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look carefully, I think you'll find that most of the comparisons are with Photoshop; in other words, they have tried it, and apparently it is worth $500 (or $1200 here in
Obviously there are these artistic types that went through years of conditioning who claim the contrary.
Again, considering the fact that Adobe have used user feedback to refine their product, is it a question of the "artistic types" being conditioned to Photoshop, or Photoshop being conditioned to the "artistic types"? If I was designing a graphic manipulation program the first people I'd ask about UI layout is graphic artists, and I'd take their comments seriously because they set the (de-facto) standard that everyone else follows.
And bearing in mind that graphic design is a specialized discipline with a technical language of its own, how intuitive do you expect a user interface to be for "hacker types"? Do you also expect to be able to use Blender without understanding coordinate geometry? Neither GIMP or Photoshop promises a novice complete usability from the start, that's the price of a comprehensive feature set. But the fact that anyone is still prepared to pay hundreds of dollars for one, when they can both do (almost) the same job according to the specifications should be a bit of a clue stick: apparently it is possible to make a UI suck so badly you can't give it away, regardless of the underlying features.
Frankly, I recommend GIMP to everyone I know who thinks they need a pirated copy of Photoshop. I've handed out over thirty copies for various platforms on CD; the only person who persisted for any length of time was my 71 year old father, and he gave up using it when he found Graphic Converter had a clone stamp tool. Think about it: "does everything you'd need from Photoshop, its free, has no license issues", yet not a single taker, even from those who have never used Photoshop. Care to explain that?
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