The GIMP UI Redesign 549
sekra writes "The GIMP UI Redesign Team has created a blog to collect ideas for a new design of the most popular image manipulation program. Everyone is free to submit suggestions to be published in the blog. Will a new GUI finally get more users to choose The GIMP as their program of choice?"
Hmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
QT please (Score:1, Insightful)
Most Popular?? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly why I hate GUIs (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't want to learn a new gui.
Simple suggestion: multiple skins (Score:5, Insightful)
wxWidgets! (Score:5, Insightful)
How about (Score:5, Insightful)
How about a new name? (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time I see The Gimp, I think about Pulp Fiction. How about a cooler name? I know it sounds like form over substance, but you'd be surprised how something so simple could slow adoption.
stupidest key combo decision ever (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Will a new GUI finally get more users (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it all that broken? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:wxWidgets! (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason I use gimp is because it's free, not because I like it better. I've started putting the bug in my boss's ear about photoshop, because Gimp is just getting on my nerves.
krita (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How about a new name? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Gimp" on the other hand sounds like an insult, something inferior, and It rhymes with pimp -- and not in a good way. I have no desire to ever speak that word to anyone. They will never get word of mouth marketing from me.
This is by no means the only drawback that gimp faces, but it is a pretty major one. A great first step towards increased usage would be to change the name along with the UI redesign.
Krita (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How about a new name? (Score:1, Insightful)
Conversely, "Film GIMP" turned into "Cinepaint," which is a GREAT name, and deserves better than the near-dead development that has befallen the project.
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:3, Insightful)
If GIMP really wants to clone Photoshop, just allow for 3rd party skinnable UI's and allow "the community" to do the dirty work. It'll be one of those whack-a-mole type things for Adobe's lawyers to try to deal with... and once something is out on the internet, it's pretty hard to kill.
GIMP UI improvements (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I second that... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I second that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is exactly why I hate GUIs (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Risking flaming here (Score:2, Insightful)
Why even have static key bindings? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:UI isn't my problem with GIMP (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as I am concerned, leave the UI, fix the quirks, provide alternative key bindings, and, most importantly, concentrate on the parents wishlist, rather than wasting time rewriting the user interface.
Re:Umm...no (Score:5, Insightful)
gtk is no walk in the park to compile, time-wise, but I guarantee you qt is a flipping nightmare to compile, such that I go out of my way to disable the qt* useflags. (Oh, yeah, and this is not a slow system, being a 2.4 GHz single core K8.)
This says qt is full of bloat relative to gtk. Why does gimp need so much cruft just to expose a window and some buttons? What gimp really needs isn't so much a UI redesign so much as native 16-bit component support (or dare we even ask for HDR?) now that everyone and his brother has RAW support on his camera.
Maybe its just full of useful classes? Assuming those classes are broken up into enough separate static and shared libraries, that does not translate into bloat for the qt programs.
Also GTK is only a graphics library. As opposed to QT, which has APIs for networking, database connections, etc. You can write conole programs in QT. Its about as easy as java or .NET, except you have to dofree whatever you new. So yes it will take longer to compile QT than GTK, but the real measure of bloat is would be if you wrote a simple text editor in QT and one in GTK, and made them both static executables, which executable would be bigger. Then you have to say which one was quicker to develop.
Have you tried to *USE* Krita? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wanted people to switch to Krita for the deeper color support and integration with DigiKam and ShowFoto, but the thing is unusable! There (currently) aren't nearly as many editing tools while and the UI may look more like Photoshop, it's sure doesn't behave like it.
After about 2 weeks of trying to use it, I had to go back to Gimp and put Krita off for futher evaluation in a year or two.
Some things Gimp has going for it:
1) It works pretty well (not great, not all the features that Photoshop has, but good enough for many uses)
2) The new 2.4 version is a huge improvement in usability (All color items in their own menu? Yes!, All special effects scripts in one place? , Yes!)
3) The extensive set of plugins http://registry.gimp.org/ [gimp.org] which allow for added (and usually tested) functionality
4) Enough people use it that most major bugs are squashed before a release is made
Re:UI isn't my problem with GIMP (Score:3, Insightful)
CMYK (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I second that... (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, for years I've been listening to people complain that the Free Software and Open Source communities don't ever invent anything on their own. That they simply re-implement other peoples' ideas. I think it's kind of ironic that the number one suggestion for the future of the GIMP is that it be changed such that it simply re-implements other peoples' ideas.
I think you're hearing from two different sorts of people. The people who vaguely insist that free software to do something new and inventive, without having any idea of what that "inventive" thing might be, are probably developers who don't use the software. There seems to be a lot of OSS developers who think that the most important thing for software to do is something "cool" and "inventive", which is usually geeky.
The people who use the software, on the other hand, usually just want the software to work in easy, predictable, and efficient ways. They want the software to have all the features they need, and have it be simple to use those features in their own workflows without needing some kind of specialized knowledge for that software.
When "Free" and "Open" software succeeds in that, you'll usually find that people start using it.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, when I hear the words "GIMP UI Redesign" I have a similar thought.
To put it another way, you have a market that is dominated by a product, and the reason that product is dominant is because people like it, and not because of vendor lock-in. Even if you wanted to innovate, wouldn't it make sense to begin with copying the strengths of the existing dominant product? If you wanted your project to attract users, wouldn't you want to make sure that you were replicating the positive features of the competing product that people like?
I mean, I can certainly understand that someone might have their own ideas. If I'm a developer, I might look at Photoshop and say, "Photoshop is doing these things badly, and I don't want to fall into those pitfalls, so I won't replicate those problems." If you think you can do a better job at something, then by all means try. But if you hit the point where you don't have your own vision of how things should work, and you're soliciting suggestions, might you want to also look into copying the success of others?
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:3, Insightful)
As many people here are already saying, the UI is not what's holding GIMP back. The UI is the thing that stops PShop users even taking the time to find out what's missing. And why would they?
A few graphics pros have asked me "What's this GIMP thing like?" My answer "Photoshop 3"
Re:Simple suggestion: multiple skins (Score:2, Insightful)
which is why it's a Good Thing(tm) that TheGIMP isn't a clone of Photoshop, and since they don't have any pressure to sell people expensive upgrades they're free to follow UNIX's "do one thing and one thing well" philosophy, which allows them to concentrate on making a good raster image editor while leaving the vector stuff to Inkscape and Xara, 3D objects to Blender, and video to who-the-fsck-knows. Which is how things ought to be done.
Re:I second that... (Score:3, Insightful)
On slashdot we spend an incredible amount of time discussing all the ways corporations *don't* give their customers what they want. It seems that sometimes we tend to forget that at their base, companies still 80%+ of their time think "You're willing to pay for that feature? Let me see what I can do about that." If a feature is in Photoshop, you can bet it's been through a business case and it's either been proposed by graphics professionals or endorsed by graphics professionals. Consider is somewhat like free market research "These are core features that a considerable number of users want" while many ideas are completely insignificant, or depend on core features being there in the first place.
Yes, there are other strategies than just reimplementing other people's ideas. Porter defines three basic strategies - segmentation, differentiation or cost leadership. But both the first two requires you to have a decent product in the first place that can be specialized to be better than the generic one for some subset of users. The GIMP just isn't there, and that's also the case with a lot of other free/open source software. Most of them need to focus on core features, which inevitably has been done before. But anything else is just asking them to run before they've learned to walk.
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, as long as you are using a broken window manager (read: windows) without virtual desktops.
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows works with one desktop, that's what MDI applications are for. Other Window managers have multiple desktops and don't need MDI, but Windows does, so if your application can profit from having multiple desktops with a dedicated desktop just for the program, don't try to stick to using SDI on a platform without multiple desktops where SDI is very, very uncommon, but try using MDI instead.
MDI works well enough for Windows users, so just use it if there are loads of toolbars and floating windows.
Re:Risking flaming here (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:5, Insightful)
it's funny because even a year or two ago when a GIMP article would come up, people would ask why it hasn't replaced Photoshop and I'd say that the primitive (well, it would have been state of the art in 1993) color support just kills it out of the box for anyone doing anything more advanced than web graphics. Of course, everyone would reply and say I was just a luser artist who was obviously just too stupid to possibly learn anything other than the Photoshop UI and that's why I secretly hated the GIMP, and no regular user will ever need to use anything other than 8-bit untagged RGB.
And of course now consumer-level cameras -- point and shoot $500 models -- are shooting in RAW and saving 12-bit tagged images that the GIMP has no hope of dealing with in any usable way.
If the GIMP developers had listened to the professionals back in say, 1999, when we told them their fundamental assumptions about color were hopelessly naive, they might have been able to do something about it. As it is, I don't imagine anything short of a Mozilla-style "throw out all the code and start over" will keep the GIMP from eventually fading away as more modern open-source apps port the GIMP's features onto a better foundation.
The first step to being cured... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Out of all of the ways to fit many windows onto one screen in a usable manner, properly done virtual desktops are the least bad.
Personally I think "windows" are a horrible idea, but if you're going to have them, having a bunch of nested sub-windows inside a larger window is just awful.
What I'd really like to see is the Gimp copy some of the old Amiga paint programs like Digi-Paint 3 or Deluxe Paint, which kicked so much ass it wasn't even funny.
I'm gonna go suggest that.
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are plenty of professional UI & usability folks happy to help. Developers, by and large, don't want to hear from us. We can't program and provide them with a neat patch to merge into CVS, so that means all we can do is give them more work to do, and in the process criticize what they think was a good design of their own making.
Also, many, many programmers have a clear disdain for anything as nontechnical and nonobvious as usability, since most usability research is experiential and similar to psychological research. I can't tell you the mathematical explanation for why people respond to particular elements or cues the way they do, all I know is that they do.
Part of the developer contempt for usability/UI folks (as can be seen on any UI thread on slashdot) is that programmers generally can't differentiate between mere aesthetics and taste and actual usability or UI mechanics. Changing the color of an icon or making something "pretty" has nothing to do with usability or UI design, but those sorts of things are generally used as a way to dismiss any criticism of an UI. "We just updated the icons, what do you mean our UI isn't modern!??" or "The program kicks ass, anyone who needs pretty buttons to use it is obviously too dumb to understand what it does"
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course it's not the ONLY Linux app I've ever tried. Do you honestly believe that there are people out there who would (or even could) do that to themselves?
You can call it biased and inflammatory if you want, but it's a perfect example of taking something beautiful and well engineered, copying it, and making something that's almost unusable.
I couldn't believe how bad simple things like wheel acceleration and fonts were.
I don't doubt that it was fun for you, but this is something for people who want to run Linux on their toaster. Once you remove the novelty of that, there's no there there.
iPod Linux might be a particularly bad case, but it's typical of FOSS.
If you're not happy with my iPod example, how about OpenMoko [openmoko.org]? It's like somebody went out of their way to make an iPhone clone that totally misses the point.
To be fair - I haven't used the latest versions of Open Office, Gnome, KDE, so maybe things have changed dramatically in the last year or so, but my experience with iPod Linux was absolutely typical and representative of my experience with other open source software.
Developers make shoddy, half-assed copies of closed source software and then bitch and moan when somebody points out that it's a poor imitation that totally misses the point. It's the user's fault! We're just biased against Linux!
It's probably no coincidence that the one piece of open source software I have used (and actually continue to use on a daily basis) with a UI that doesn't suck is Eclipse. In addition to having solid commercial roots, I'm sure that its quality stems in no small part from the fact that it's used primarily by developers (and even then, it leaves some things to be desired).
You say yourself that you're a longtime Linux user - well I'm sorry, but there's your problem. You're too close to this to see it clearly. You are by definition someone who is willing to put open source ahead of usability.
This is why I like OS X.
It's certainly not perfect but Apple has teams of people who sweat the small stuff. You can feel it - it permeates almost every aspect of the OS.
In the interest of equal time, it's also why I like Microsoft's Office 2007 Ribbons.
Somebody actually went out and did usability testing, and measured things like how long it takes a novice or expert to perform a given task. They moved things around, played with it, and spent a lot of time and effort on things that most of the FOSS community seems to think are hardly an afterthought.
Just for emphasis - I'm not against open source.
In fact, I would argue that by being realistic and pointing out things that can and should be fixed, I'm doing more to promote the use of FOSS than someone who turns a blind eye and pretends that it's all wine and roses.
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:3, Insightful)
You have the 800 window problem if you're using another type of MDI anyway, it's just that they're contained in another window. Same problem, pushed down a level.
And the latest version of the Gimp lets you dock any window that you want, so you can tab between commonly used tools. I find it quite flexible.
The only problem I really see is that there aren't typically shortcuts for everything, so there are extra clicks if you want to see the main toolbox, for example.
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, you don't. You don't have 800 items on your taskbar, you don't have 800 different items clogging your alt-tab hotswitch menu, you don't have multiple copies of the same basic OS menu, you don't have 800 different places for the focus to be. And most of all -- most insanely! -- you don't switch to another application, then switch back to the original app only to find that each window has to be brought to the foreground individually. Because after all, they are not windows of a single application, they're 800 separate applications!
Sensible applications, built by people with UI experience, make toolbars and palettes behave like toolbars and palettes, not like completely separate applications. There are a number of different ways to approach this problem, all of which are superior in almost every manner to what the GIMP team has implemented.
How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (Score:2, Insightful)
No individual is more valuable than the community.