Paint.NET: The Anti-GIMP?

Arno contributes a link to Paint.NET, a free-of-charge raster-graphics program for Windows XP machines. "Quote: 'Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows XP. Paint.NET is jointly developed at Washington State University with additional help from Microsoft, and is meant to be a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with all Windows operating systems. The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#, with GDI+ extensions.' It really seems like a nice tool. I definitely prefer its UI to GIMP's."

Comments

Any GPL code in there?

[DuckWing]

The real question is any of GIMP's code that isn't tied to the UI (GTK+) in this program? Microsoft steels everything it can't have. Quite frankly the UI doesn't look as good as the GIMP IMHO.

GIMP cop out: blame it on the Window Manager

[SimHacker]

Wimpy excuse for bad UI: "The toolbox staying (or not) on top is something you ask the WM to do."

Now I realize why X-Windows is still so popular with crappy GUI application developers.

They can blame all their horrible user interface problems on the X-Windows-Manager, so they don't have to bother fixing them.

-Don

From the X-Windows chapter of the Unix-Haters Handbook:

Ice Cube: The Lethal Weapon

One of the fundamental design goals of X was to separate the window manager from the window server. "Mechanism, not policy" was the mantra. That is, the X server provided a mechanism for drawing on the screen and managing windows, but did not implement a particular policy for human-computer interaction. While this might have seemed like a good idea at the time (especially if you are in a research community, experimenting with different approaches for solving the human-computer interaction problem), it can create a veritable user interface Tower of Babel.

If you sit down at a friend's Macintosh, with its single mouse button, you can use it with no problems. If you sit down at a friend's Windows box, with two buttons, you can use it, again with no problems. But just try making sense of a friend's X terminal: three buttons, each one programmed a different way to perform a different function on each different day of the week -- and that's before you consider combinations like control-left-button, shift-right-button, control-shift-meta-middle-button, and so on. Things are not much better from the programmer's point of view.

As a result, one of the most amazing pieces of literature to come out of the X Consortium is the "Inter Client Communication Conventions Manual," more fondly known as the "ICCCM", "Ice Cubed," or "I39L" (short for "I, 39 letters, L"). It describes protocols that X clients ust use to communicate with each other via the X server, including diverse topics like window management, selections, keyboard and colormap focus, and session management. In short, it tries to cover everything the X designers forgot and tries to fix everything they got wrong. But it was too late -- by the time ICCCM was published, people were already writing window managers and toolkits, so each new version of the ICCCM was forced to bend over backwards to be backward compatible with the mistakes of the past.

The ICCCM is unbelievably dense, it must be followed to the last letter, and it still doesn't work. ICCCM compliance is one of the most complex ordeals of implementing X toolkits, window managers, and even simple applications. It's so difficult, that many of the benefits just aren't worth the hassle of compliance. And when one program doesn't comply, it screws up other programs. This is the reason cut-and-paste never works properly with X (unless you are cutting and pasting straight ASCII text), drag-and-drop locks up the system, colormaps flash wildly and are never installed at the right time, keyboard focus lags behind the cursor, keys go to the wrong window, and deleting a popup window can quit the whole application. If you want to write an interoperable ICCCM compliant application, you have to crossbar test it with every other application, and with all possible window managers, and then plead with the vendors to fix their problems in the next release.

In summary, ICCCM is a technological disaster: a toxic waste dump of broken protocols, backward compatibility nightmares, complex nonsolutions to obsolete nonproblems, a twisted mass of scabs and scar tissue intended to cover up the moral and intellectual depravity of the industry's standard naked emperor.

Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes. - Jamie Zawinski

Re:Interesting

[M1FCJ]

Gimp is open source, code is downloadable. Grab a copy and start hacking the UI. When you have a usable UI, let me know as well.

What studies have you done to back up "500%"?

[SimHacker]

And where did you get that "500% more efficient than Photoshop" number from? Sounds like you're onto something.

Have you published the results of your usability studies in a peer reviewed journal so the rest of us can read them and try to reproduce your results?

Or are you just pulling the number out of your ass, and bullshitting your head off?

The emperor has no clothes, and you're totally blind to that fact, going on and on about how well dressed he is.

Yet another brainwashed fanatic does no good for the cause, only harms its credibility.

-Don

Re:Mirror

[kaustik]

Well, I see why you waited 5 years to post....
Give it another 5 and try again.

Re:Here it comes.

[Snaller]

Even Photoshop never used that clunky interface originally. The Photoshop MDI originated from the fact that on the Macintosh, Photoshop looked a lot more like the GIMP -- except that the menubar was on top, mac-related stuff, etc. However, the Photoshop programming team didn't want to figure out how to do that on Windows, so they simply made a "container window" to hold everything.

Interesting anecdote, but doesn't change the fact that some of us, me included, prefer to have windows in a "container" window as opposed to spread all over the desktop (perhaps because we are able to multitask ;)

Re:It's a .NET product. Ewwww...

[Snaller]

First of all, the .NET framework is not badly designed. It's one of the best-designed products Microsoft ever came up with.

Just a pity it takes up so much space ('so much' is a subjective measurement) especially since you can make programs that run without it.

Re:A few questions about it..

[Snaller]

I agree, it doesn't have some of Photoshop's features, but we need to stop complaining about the UI.

Sure, as soon as they change it or you lot stop trying to pretend its so great everybody else should be forced to use it.

As I see it, we shouldn't try to convert the professional full-time users of Photoshop, but rather the people who pirate it. Piracy is a bigger threat to Free Software than it is to entrenched industry standard software, IMO.

Ie, when you can't pirate a program with a good interface you are stuck with a free program with a bad one?