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?"
Risking flaming here (Score:5, Interesting)
GIMP people, the biggest, quickest thing you can do to get good people back in the project and working well together is to finally, please, finally get rid of Carol Spears. I know 80% of you agree with me and have demonstrated in private to me or in public that you want her out, but she's pushing more and more people out with her weird shit, her stalking behaviour, her willingness to criticize anyone contributing to the project for insane reasons like stealing her boyfriend or taking her life from her, or accuzing people of having sex with conference organisers to sway them and obtain cash. Whatever, too many good contributors are sick of it. Yes, she has mental health issues, but the project has suffered too much accomodating those. There is only so much you can do for her.
Taking this public because all the private talking has failed.
Re:Simple suggestion: multiple skins (Score:2, Interesting)
I second that... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Simple suggestion: multiple skins (Score:3, Interesting)
Alternately, admit that GIMP has run its course, and start porting the interesting bits to Krita [koffice.org]
And while we're at it, rename the bloody thing. "The program formerly known as GIMP" would be a step in the right direction, since the average user community thinks it refers either to cripples, or a submissive in a zippered leather suit who's kept on a chain in a box most of the time.
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not holding my breath here (Score:5, Interesting)
Or perhaps they will really create a competent design team and let them dictate every detail of the interface. But with the usual open source ego contests, that seems a tad unlikely.
Re:krita (Score:3, Interesting)
So, does (the stable branch of) it run on Mac or Windows yet?
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't even think it's about copying the UI. I don't think people mind different UIs, but I think they mind having to use less efficient UIs. I don't think the UI designers for GIMP really thought that one through. I counted the number of steps it took to perform an action for the actions I often use, and Photoshop beat it. That's not even counting the vertical menu thing in GIMP. I don't know how other people are, but for me, moving the mouse cursor side to side is more efficient than up and down, and the vertical menu has just been more irritating than the standard horizontal menu bar, even if the horizontal menu bar drops down to a short vertical menu.
Re:krita (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:1, Interesting)
On the other hand - thanks to the freedom provided by GIMP - people have seen that GIMP could use a redesign (and they are DESIGNING - inventing, _not_ cloning) and that's what appears to be taking place. Cheers to the developers who bust their asses with little/no compensation other then knowing they have contributed to a world driven by free software.
Here's a wild idea: (Score:5, Interesting)
So, I'll throw one out there, in the interest of PRACTICAL feedback:
Single window mode is a bad idea because it makes a photo retoucher's life much more difficult.
Here's an example why, an actual segment of a workflow and/or task, done in Photoshop to show the ease of this and why multi-window works well.
Grab a picture of a friend, ideally if they are drunk or have blotchy skin in the photo -- make it as unflattering as possible. Wedding pictures are ideal. Needs to be color.
Open it in Photoshop. Now, since I don't have another copy in front of me, this is the CS2 method:
Window>Arrange>Open New Window for [foo.jpg]
Window>Arrange>Tile Vertically
Now center both windows on the same area, ideally, said blotchy skin.
On ONE window, go to the layers/channels/paths palette. Switch to the Channels palette. Turn off all channels except green. Odds are, it looks pretty much like the color photo, just in B&W.
Now take the Clone tool and massage out some of the blotchiness in the green channel ("B&W") version. Ta-da, fixed in both. And you can see its effect immediately.
This is one way that your favorite babes are airbrushed to laughable non-human perfection for magazines. It's quick, it's got incredible feedback, and it's not possible in a tabbed or single window method.
Talking to your users, as opposed to a comp-off (or the cardinal sin, the designer assuming he knows everything), gives you all kinds of useful information like that.
Aimless brainstorming, bad. Brainstorming with a direction, productive.
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:5, Interesting)
But doing something remotely practical like that would first require the GIMP developers having to admit they made a mistake; I pointed the mistake out to the developers over 2 years ago and even went so far as to draw mock ups of a new, better gui. I was quickly abused on the irc channel, kicked and then banned. If that is how the GIMP developers react to contributions then they can take their blog, roll it into a tiny roll and cram it.
This is, however, a symptom of a bigger issue; programmers failing to realise that they're programmers and failing to listen to usability people; let the usability experts design the interface - heck, there are tools to allow the separation between the two; then glue them together at the end. Let each team work on the area which they're good at. Admitting your weaknesses doesn't make you a bad person, it makes you an adult who understands what their limitations are.
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps you mean the most popular pirated image editor.
There was a time when everyone I knew had photoshop installed. I never did, just because I failed to see why I should install such a huge program for the kind of trivial image editing I was doing at the time (not because of some moral high ground I hasten to add, I just didn't want it). Most of my image editing needs nowadays are served by paint.net, or gimp, or if I need graphs, Gnu R, openoffice, gnuplot,or I'll write my own thing if its easier, such as to graph out the contents of data structures.
Re:I don't have too much of a problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:QT please (Score:3, Interesting)
And before somebody mentions ImageMagick, yep, that works, but it doesn't provide the same filters as Gimp, so its often very complicated or impossible to automate a task that you just performed in Gimp manually.
Re:Will a new GUI finally get more users (Score:5, Interesting)
That's simply not true. Retail versions of CS3 require activation, which discourages the casual pirate. A lot of businesses absolutely will not use pirated software.
If there were a free alternative to Photoshop that did everything Photoshop does as well as Photoshop does it, a lot of people would use it. Photoshop isn't cheap, and it doesn't "come with the computer" (which is how most people get Windows and Office).
There are a couple problems with GIMP. First, it's lacking some things like CMYK support. Also, it gives inferior quality in some cases. I've been in situations, for example, where I really needed to optimize JPEG quality for file size, and GIMP couldn't match the quality of Photoshop. Third, the name "GIMP" rubs professional users the wrong way. And finally, the interface isn't very good.
To anyone who works on the GIMP, I apologize if my post seems offensive. I think the GIMP is a very good program, but the reason professional graphic designers use Photoshop is that Photoshop really is a better program. Not everyone needs Photoshop, but if you do need Photoshop, GIMP might not be a good enough replacement.
Re:Here's a wild idea: (Score:4, Interesting)
A case in point in that regard would be the old Quark Xpress. For years it tortured people with parent windows and child windows, a truly clunky interface, and all manner of f*cked up weirdness. BUT: once you learned it, it TOTALLY rocked and was light years beyond Pagemaker, ReadySetGo, and all the other page layout apps, even when those apps were easier to use.
InDesign arrived, and was deeply bug ridden. Then they fixed it, and its workflow is sooo powerful and easy to use, as it is combined with a fairly rational UI, it's eating Quark's Lunch.
Workflow proceeds from fundamental capabilities - the above note demonstrates that clearly. But merely possessing them isn't good enough - it has to be in a UI that is familiar, especially when going up against the likes of Photoshop. There have been plenty of powerful apps with bizarro UI (Kai's powerTools, Metasynth, etc.) and their power often went untapped. So, the discussion of UI is relevant. However, the UI is of no value if the workflow is hampered by inferior basic features.
GIMP's support of CMYK is miserable. That needs to change. One should be able to INVENT colour spaces on the fly - an ability to make (x) colour separations. Multiple windows as above noted needs to happen. The tool palette is absurd and needs to be aligned with other apps in that market segment - heck PAINTER was/is more like Photoshop than GIMP, and it has a great interface and Painter's brushes are incredible.
Frankly, fixing the UI is a bit like putting lipstick on a pig. GIMP needs fundamental and architectural adjustments to its fundamental feature sets and workflow.
I don't care if it EVER runs on Windows or Mac - if done right, it could be a killer app for Linux (along with OO), and help put Linux over the top.
RS
Re:wxWidgets! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Give it a try. It's really good and actively maintained. If it only worked under Mono...
Re:This is exactly why I hate GUIs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is exactly why I hate GUIs (Score:4, Interesting)
This no longer applies. OS X doesn't do it. Windows doesn't (and never did) do it. Linux GUIs don't (and never did) do it. GIMP is using a 1984 GUI model in the modern era, and it's simply not working. (Personally, I liked Mac Classic's model, but I'm also pretty good at coping with reality when things change.)
Even worse, each of the GIMP windows have menus in them, leaving you in that mysterious position of not being to figure out exactly which ones are supposed to be palettes and which are supposed to contain the image. (Especially when you, as a new user, first open the program.) To make things even worse-worse, GIMP used to have two seperate File menus, one of which was actually used to open an image file, and the other one... totally different.
So my first suggestion is for GIMP to implement its palettes like virtually every modern application does. Paint.NET would be an excellent model on Windows... its palettes can exist happily in the main window, or outside it, but it's always clearly obvious which windows are palettes. (Don't use the Macromedia/Dreamweaver Flash example, which constantly pisses me off.)
Secondly, and this is a major change that will probably take a few revisions, but ditch your widget library. GTK, I believe. It requires a seperate application package on Windows, which gives the user a headache for virtually no benefit. It requires that the Mac OS X port run in X11, which is a usability nightmare on Macs. (And has irritating bugs on Mac that never seem to get addressed and/or fixed: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391461 [gnome.org] has been a thorn in my side for a year now, and it's still "unconfirmed.")
But what GIMP really needs is lots, and lots of development. This means community-building, the way the Firefox team did before the release of 1.0. GIMP needs a totally new UI, it needs a ton more features if it desires to be competitive with Photoshop, and it needs the community with the size and activity to make this happen. Right now, GIMP development is glacial. (My first suggestion would be to change the name, so people could say in public "I work on GIMP" without being laughed at or feeling embarassed.)
Forget Krita, forget UI redesign. (Score:3, Interesting)
OpenOffice has
So. Fix that. Please!
wxMac uses Carbon (Score:2, Interesting)
wxWidgets for Mac OS X (wxMac) uses the Carbon API. (Carbon is the procedural Mac native application programming API for both Classic and OS X, Cocoa is object oriented and builds on Carbon, but is only for OS X.)
http://www.wxwidgets.org/manuals/stable/wx_wxmacport.html [wxwidgets.org]
Re:CMYK (Score:3, Interesting)
It's on the way, and has been in process for quite some time. GIMP is getting an entirely new graphics engine called GEGL [gegl.org] that supports different colorspaces (incl. CMYK and all of the other widely-used spaces), 32 bit per channel color, support for adjustment layers, and a lot more.
Re:UI is not the only diff (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, this is something that harder to explain or take a screenshot of, but it it 90% of the reason professionals who have tried GIMP won't use it. Adobe has spent almost 20 years refining the behavior of the tools, of the memory managment, of the behavior of the application. Yes, it's easy to make a tool that works "like" one of the tools in Photoshop, but that doesn't mean it will be just as good. Even something as "simple" as how to antialias a selection can (and has) filled several PhD theses.
You can find many, many large discussions online of the theoretical underpinnings and practical differences of different text antialiasing techniques used by Windows and Mac OSes, and that's a mere fraction of the decisionmaking that is made by the programmers of something like Photoshop.
Which is not to say that the GIMP can only succeed by making the same choices and duplicating the existing Photoshop tools, but in my repeated trials of the GIMP it has become clear that most of the tools have been developed by programmers who don't even know that there is a large body of work on these subjects, and that complex behavior is a necessity if you want the best quality possible.
Re:wxWidgets! (Score:4, Interesting)
wxWidgets always seems to be just as bad as a foreign toolkit in the apps that I've used it in. The interfaces always wind up being awkward and clunky.
I'd argue pretty strongly that GTK+ is the more versatile of the platforms. Pidgin feels pretty darn close to native on Windows. If you can come up with another toolkit that comes close, I'll retract my claim.
Firefox also does a great job, although I'd disqualify it for having tons of OS-specific code, not to mention a shitty Mac version.
Re:wxWidgets! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's far easier to program with and distribute on multiple platforms than GTK or wxWidgets, also.
wxWidget's API is reminiscent of the horrible old Windows API's -- it's just ugly and makes for hideous code, imho. QT is clean and elegant, and the signals/slots mechanism makes thread-safe gui code dead simple.
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Of course not, I was being facetious.
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.
It was more about hacking than copying. I particularly liked the pointless notepad app where you used the fairly functional scrollwheel to input text by scrolling through the qwerty keyboard. Oh, and running doom.
I couldn't believe how bad simple things like wheel acceleration and fonts were.
Very true, but I didn't consider this software even gamma (nevermind beta). Precisely my point.
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.
It didn't take me long to restore the Apple firmware and sell it. It didn't make the ipod more effective. Unless I had meant to buy a pda and got confused. And it still wasn't much of a pda.
iPod Linux might be a particularly bad case, but it's typical of FOSS.
It's ironic that FLOSS people often accuse MS of considering their users unpaid beta testers.
I would agree with your statement if it was directed at early, unpolished software. However, before I run a program I generally have an idea of whether I'm running something stable and polished.
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.
There were betas and screenshots available when the iphone was a half-believed rumor. The openmoko is only out or coming out this month though. Trolltech's greenphone looks better but is still only available to developers for a hefty price. I wouldn't say that smartphones are a much better example than turning an mp3 player into a pda. But I see your point. How about the Sharp Zaurus if we're talking of paid developer projects. Or sony's Location Free TV. Or Tivo.
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.
IMO Firefox and OpenOffice.org look better on *nix. Gnome and KDE get screwed up pretty dramatically in appearance depending on the distro. Fedora's default settings tend to look decent to me eyes. And while I don't use SUSE, it looks good. I'm no graphic designer, but I use a lot more than Linux.
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!
Most complaints on the GIMP relate to it not copying Adobe enough. I think oss looks worse when they try to copy closed source apps. Probably there's more art or pride in doing your own thing. maybe not true of gimp...
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).
I wonder if your experience is colored by developer apps. I think they are generally acknowledged to lack a polished gui when oss.
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 s
The GIMP Developers hate us. (Score:3, Interesting)
to repost from earlier [slashdot.org]
Exactly. ...having discussed things on the GIMP Usability Forum, it's obvious that the GIMP developers (to misquote Kanye West) don't care about designer people.
The general attitude is "We're not going to change anything because even though the similarity of constant anecdotal 'complaints' may actually constitute user testing, we refuse to believe it until someone does systematic user testing." Of course, imgimp is the answer to their request, but automated testing does nothing. They're missing the point that assisted user testing is needed, where you give someone a mock up and ask them where they expect to find things, and how they expect to do things. What they've been getting, in droves, is people who are GIVING THEM THIS EXACT INFORMATION, in forums, in blogs, in wikis and slashdot posts. Things like "Why are script-fu and filters two different things?" and "what are Xtns?" not to mention "Why does the palette take up so much space?". Then there's the whole MDI/SDI thing. The horrible fact is that the GIMP is an MDI application. There is a shared set of tools that act on multiple document windows. Gasp. Unfortunately most X window managers have no idea what this means, and the concept of 'tool windows' is meaningless (i.e.: if I have 8 tool windows open, I have 8 task items in my task bar, and sometimes you have to click-to-focus and click-to-invoke on a non-focused window).
There are some very simple things the GIMP developers could do to fix the application:
For the love of God, do some paper testing.
Get real designers, and I don't care if they're familiar with Photoshop... hell, Adobe just redesigned the damn thing on us so it's not like we're shocked by the New. Get them and sit them down with paper mockups and ask them how to do common design tasks, common painting tasks, common editing tasks.
Admit that a lot of us have done this already ourselves. Sure a lot of it seems to you to be "oh that's just because they know photoshop", but damnit man, it's not photoshop we know, it's everything. Photoshop, MacPaint, ColorIt! (yeah, I said it), PhotoDraw, whatever. There is a common language to these tools and you keep trying to miss it just to be different.
Look again at this [lostgarden.com] [lostgarden.com]... especially the part about "All that touchy-feely junk is the main reason why people are bu