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)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
In the case of the GIMP, I'm pretty sure it's actually less popular than it is commonly used.
Anyway, I think we can all agree that if Photoshop and the GIMP went to the same high school, Photoshop would be crowned prom queen, while the GIMP would have a bucket of pig's blood poured on it.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
The Gimp Bucket Fill Tool doesn't have a, "Blood", fill mode. The three fill modes are: FG Color Fill, BG Color Fill and Pattern Fill.
Lazy bum! (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Hmmmm (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Informative)
Most Popular?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Most Popular?? (Score:5, Informative)
Like Photoshop, GIMP features support for 8-bit per-channel images. Its Intelligent Scissors are similar to Photoshop's Magnetic Lasso tool, and many basic tools and filters have identical functionality in both.
Photoshop features several advantages in color management. It has support for 16-bit, 32-bit, and floating point images,[10] support for the Pantone color matching system, or spot color and support for color models other than RGB(A) and greyscale, such as CIE XYZ.[11] Photoshop features extensive gamma correction support.
GIMP features no or (with the PSPI plug-in) very weak support for plugins designed for Photoshop, such as 8BF filters.[12]
In addition, Photoshop contains several productivity features and tools not supported by the GIMP, such as native support for Adjustment layers (layers which act like filters),[13], undo history "snapshots" that persist between sessions, the history brush tool, folders in the layer window, a free transform tool to rotate, scale and move in one tool, and an interpolation code to draw smooth brush strokes using a tablet. The GIMP also requires basic programming knowledge to build an automation upon it, usually Script-Fu (scheme) or Python-Fu, while Photoshop can record your actions and repeat them with a "Play" button.
The GIMP's open development model means that it is much more readily available at low or zero cost than Photoshop, on more operating systems, and plugin development is not limited by developers; by comparison, access to Adobe Photoshop's SDK requires authorization.
So, it seems like the GIMP is just barely scratching the surface of what Photoshop can do...
Plugin support and availability (Score:4, Informative)
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There's some info on this at:
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=320005 [adobe.com]
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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
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.
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Sure, as long as you are using a broken window manager (read: windows) without virtual desktops.
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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.
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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 w
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.
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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.
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:5, Informative)
Krita from the Koffice suite is far more modern. It has all four of the above capabilities I mentioned. Some more polish and it'll be a very capable tool.
Anyone know what's really going on with GEGL?
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In both GIMP and Photoshop, I can add a drop shadow to a layer. But with Photoshop, I can make all kinds of adjustments to the shadow (angle, opacity, spread, etc) and see it updated in real time. When I edit the layer, (e.g. cutting away parts of it, moving it around) the shadow is instantly updated. In GIMP, the shadow just sits there doing no
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.
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: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"
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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 compet
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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"
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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
This is exactly why I hate GUIs (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't want to learn a new gui.
Re:This is exactly why I hate GUIs (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is exactly why I hate GUIs (Score:4, Informative)
I know it was a joke, but the GIMP already has a command line interface, if you can write Scheme. I think they do Perl now as well. It was horrible and undocumented last time I used it.
Rich.
Re:This is exactly why I hate GUIs (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.)
Simple suggestion: multiple skins (Score:5, Insightful)
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How about (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I second that... (Score:5, 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.
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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 gr
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.
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Sorry, but you are wrong. According to what I read on the mailing lists and what I see in the ChangeLog files, Carol does not contribute to open source. She had started a redesign of the web site several years ago, but then gave up and others had to pick up the pieces that she left behind (of course she accused the others of "destroying her work" after she quit but this is a different story). I have not seen any significant contribution from Carol
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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.
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.
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1. Firegimp
2. Gusty gimp.
GINP? (Score:3, Funny)
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I talked to them once. They think that you guys are lunatics and that they have absolutely no reason to listen to you. I even got banned [gnomesupport.org] for asking the question. So would you really be willing to do something about it, instead of just complaining on Slashdot?
stupidest key combo decision ever (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:stupidest key combo decision ever (Score:4, Funny)
It's seriously not a bad suggestion, but some UI decisions seem to have been frozen years ago and aren't really open to discussion.
Why even have static key bindings? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why even have static key bindings? (Score:5, Informative)
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Will a new GUI finally get more users (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Is it all that broken? (Score:2, Insightful)
LOL at the urban definition of a Gimp (Score:5, Informative)
(1) a derrogatory term for someone that is disabled or has a medicial problem that results in physical impairment.
(2) An insult implying that someone is incompetent, stupid, etc. Can also be used to imply that the person is uncool or can't/won't do what everyone else is doing.
(3) A sex slave or submissive, usually male, as popularlized by the movie Pulp Fiction.
Look at that gimp in the wheelchair
Dude, quit being a gimp and take a hit!
Bring out the gimp!
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gimp [urbandictionary.com]
so to the "street" (or younger population who you should be targetting) its an insult (has been my whole life and im 39), hardly surprising nobody wants to use it
Re:LOL at the urban definition of a Gimp (Score:4, Informative)
I don't have too much of a problem (Score:2)
Except that there are multiple menu bars, one for every window. Right now with the multiple window model I don't think there's any other good way to do it... they might have to go to a single window model to fix it.
Also I think MS had something with Office where they removed most of the menus. The GIMP team should try and slim their menus up.
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krita (Score:4, Insightful)
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So, does (the stable branch of) it run on Mac or Windows yet?
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the skin is not the problem (Score:2, Informative)
Krita (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
GIMP UI improvements (Score:5, Insightful)
UI isn't my problem with GIMP (Score:5, Informative)
Call me wacky, but the UI isn't a problem. Any tool can be learned in a few days or weeks of using it.
Instead, here's my wishlist:
Being on Mac OSX, my top wish is for an updated Mac OSX build (even if it still must be under X11.app). The OSX-ready builds are far behind the main development releases, and for the glacial pace of GIMP development, that is really saying something. I bet all of the above items are ready on Linux, just not the officially recognized OSX-ready builds on macports or the website.
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Wilbur Animates (Score:4, Informative)
Watch, his eyes move very subtly.
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: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
CMYK (Score:3, Insightful)
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Quit screwing with the UI and add CMYK support. I'm not talking about some half baked script- real CMYK support from the bottom-up.
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.
Forget Krita, forget UI redesign. (Score:3, Interesting)
OpenOffice has
So. Fix that. Please!
The first step to being cured... (Score:3, Insightful)
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
wxWidgets! (Score:5, 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.
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Seriously.. Also, if you can't do the widgets, at least have the decency to track (separately) last directory used for opening projects and saving images and use those by default in file open and save dialogs (Like most other windows programs). I imagine I'm not along, in that I keep my project files deep in one tree, while the images that are output are deep in another tree.. it's a pain in the ass to always have to go between them.
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.
If you're stuck with using Windows, why not give Paint.NET [getpaint.net] a try? It's under the MIT License. The features are really good and it has a Windows-style UI. Personally I prefer GIMP's UI, though, for the reasons many people seem to hate it (I despise MDI, floating windows ftw).
Give it a try. It's really good and actively maintained. If it only worked under Mono...
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just thinking about the gtk file browser gives me hives--its good i can get rid of it in at least one app that defaults to using it
Re:wxWidgets! (Score:5, Informative)
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:QT please (Score:5, Informative)
You should also note that GTK stands for GIMP ToolKit as it was written as a widget toolkit for GIMP in the first place. I doubt they'll be changing it anytime soon.
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:QT please (Score:5, Informative)
Boudewijn Rempt, Krita maintainer
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And before somebody mentions ImageMagick, yep, that works, but
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.
Re:One True Library? (Score:5, Informative)
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