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GIMP Interface Proposals?
Anonymous Coward asks: "It would seem that naught but its developers themselves like the GIMP's UI. How would you like the GIMP to look? Reply with links to GIMPed (or Photoshopped, if you swing that way) screenshots. Individual features, the menu structure, or (preferably) default workspaces after you open up a blank new canvas." With the release of version 2.2 in the bag, 2.3 development should now be in full swing. What aspects of the interface do you think the GIMP team should make for the next release and for future relases down the line?
All I'd want is a proper MDI, all the windows in a main container, I hate having them all free, loose, and can fall behind everything else and.... ugh.
And I kinda like the GIMP UI. :-)
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
At best, it should look almost exactly like the Photoshop UI, with a few annoyances fixed. I don't have too many ideas but I'm sure the GIMP devs can compile Photoshop annoyances and outdo it.
Open it up... provide an API to the backend and allow anyone to code their own interface.
Since day one, GIMP users have been complaining en masse about free-floating tool windows. And since day one, we have all been told "it's a feature not a bug". So why bother with even more feedback? It will only get ignored again.
The UI is non-intuitive, but once people use it they swear that it is better than every other 3d program available. Either Blender has the best UI in the world or it's just a tendancy of human beings to rationalise their decisions after they have invested in them significantly. Either way, Blender's complex non-intuitive UI has done a lot to build the Blender community. I believe the same is true of GIMP but to a slightly lesser extent. Why change anything?
How we know is more important than what we know.
As much as I'd like for the GIMP team to be innovative in their UI design, I believe that they will find that impossible, as the GMIP's feature-set has come to resemble that of Photoshop so closely that the two UIs will be VERY similar.
Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro have very different UIs because they are conceptually different (that's not to say that PSP is any good. I'm not a fan). The GIMP and Photoshop were both conceptually similar -- in other words, by copying features from PS, the GIMP team has forced themselves to make their UI very similar to Photoshop. In other words, copying the PS GUI exactly will create the most efficent UI for the gimp. In my mind, this is a bad thing.
But not all is lost. Here are my suggestions
1) Implement a darn menu bar and clean up the menus. The right-click system sucks.
2) Please handle pallettes like every other program does and NOT create an additional taskbar icon for every document, toolbar, and pallette.
3) Implement a Slices tool like ImageReady has
4) Rename the program. GIMP does not convey an image of a good, reliable program
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I can't comment specifically on it, however the text interface and how you deal with text in gimp really needs to be worked on. Moving and manipulating text on that thing is simply confusing and frustrating
You can tack together the free-floating tool windows and make them one if you like. Admittedly, this should be one of the first startup tips and isn't.
So yes, they did respond to that particular feedback, even if you didn't find out about it yet.
It's also relatively trivial in most WMs to make those floating windows always-on-toppish like the PS ones (only more flexible).
It could also be stated with much fairness that PhotoShop users form a disproportionate population of those complaining about same. And that if you don't like it, you're at liberty create a fork or a parallel patch set to implement the windows however you like them. Before anyone OMFGs me, compare the amount of effort involved in doing that with the amount of effort involved in creating the whole GIMP in the first place, and remember that with PS it's pretty close to impossible to do anything of this nature.
BTW, my sister-in-law uses The GIMP heavily, and swears by the floating windows and the tearoff menus.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This is simply not true. It's the same old effect that only those who really dislike a feature have the motivation to speak out about it, while those who have no problems with it have better things to do than to post about how they haven't had any problems with it today either.
Never, _ever_ judge something like this simply based on volume of posts - and the same goes for letter feedback to media and politicians, as well, of course.
I like the Gimp UI. And you can snap toghether or pull apart the windows in whatever combinations you want, so I don't see why people are still complaining about "free-floating" windows.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
The best thing they can do is simplify, simplify, simplify. Get rid of all those confusing filters or figure out how to combine them into one.
Figure out a clean way to handle "floating layers" I never understood that. Photoshop makes the most sense.
And PLEASE change the name. GIMP is an unprofessional name.
I miss it a fair bit when using PS.
Have you used GIMP 2.2 (or even a late 2.0)? They have menus on every image window. Purists will complain that it's cluttered, but I find it very handy to have a choice of right-clicking if you happen to be a long way from the menu bar, or clicking on the menu bar if it's not a function you use often (hunt and peck made easier) or the bar happens to be nearest.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
- Add the Free/FixedAspect/FixedSize options from the Rectangular Select tool into the Crop tool.
- Add a "macro recorder" to make writing Script-Fu easier
- Add a simple "debug mode" to trace Script-Fu execution and/or hand off to the Script-Fu Console from the invokation dialog box
- Add a de-red-eye tool that's a bit more intelligent, specifically
- that identifies round or ovoid red-eyes rather than anything red
- that uses soft edges rather than doing scalpel-like total excision
- build a Script-Fu to do this either straight from the camera or with all of the layers in a designated image.
There's lots more, that's just what's on the tip of my mind right now.Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Well I for one think The GIMP's UI is fine just how it is. Then again, I learned its UI when I was 13 or so, around the time I got addicted to sloppy/strict mouseover focus. Being able to point at a window and save its document by just striking Control-S is very efficient.
:)
I thought GIMP was weird at first (I was a Photoshop 2.x user) but I rapidly came to appreciate its advantages. Basically, I love it because it's efficient and lightweight. If I want to do something to an image, I right-click the image. Simple, right? In Photoshop I have to hunt under some menu and I have to care about which image is in the foreground. And of course, in both, I can just use key accelerators -- in GIMP, even assign my own -- to speed things up.
You can't master GIMP in a day, and you sure as hell can't master Photoshop in a day either. Most of the complaining I hear is Photoshop users pissy about having to think a little differently to use GIMP. Maybe you should write a "tricks of the UI" tutorial for the unadventurous...?
Now if I were directing the GIMP project, I'd say:
Never adopt MDI. Well, okay, you can, just make it optional. There are a lot of Windows users who would love it, but a lot of current users who would dump GIMP in a second if it were mandatory.
Please rip off Photoshop's styles palette. It's one of the main reasons I use Photoshop primarily these days.
Please add serious ICC profile support wherever you can in the image workflow. Even if you don't support CMYK, good color support would rock, and it would make professionals take GIMP more seriously. Bonus points: add a calibrator like Adobe Gamma/Colorsync/Supercal.
Yeah... I think that's about all for now. Watch everyone disagree
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I would like to see the document window keep focus, the only problem i've had with the interface is when i forget to click on the document window after selecting a different tool.
of course i don't know how easy this is, and it hasn't stopped me from using the gimp as my primary raster program.. so all in all keep up the good work.
These guys seem to have a pretty nice gui for a graphic editing program.
But a native port of GTK+ to OS X (via quartz/Aqua and not using X11) would be of great benefit.
I've been a GIMP user since its early days. I was a former Photoshop aficionado, and by far I think the GIMP's UI is easier to use and more intuitive of that of PS. The right-click menu just rocks, the floating and dockable toolbars and panels are really practical.
Almost 1 year ago I moved from Linux to OS X on the desktop. GIMP is still my favorite image manipulation software, but I would *really really* love to see it more integrated with the OS, as X11 is slow, bloated and unstable and just doesn't looks natural.
I know the GIMP developer aren't to blame for this, but a native port of GTK+ and its related tools to the OS X framework would be great, to eliminate the dependency on X11 and get a more 'at home' feeling with the app. It was already done for Windows and OS X *should* be easier AFAIK because all the underlying *NIX stuff is already there.
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since its either illegal or financially unfeasable to create a complete look/feel clone of photoshop, allow the _ability_ to skin it and let 3rd parties (torrents, anyone?) create an exact look/feel of photoshop. gimp guys can't be sued and yet we'd still be able to have a feel-alike photoshop on unix.
.so that does 'bad' things yet the framework doesn't, so the framework guys can't be sued) and you have all kinds of new power possible.
detach legal responsibility this way (like an
if we could make gimp look and feel very close to what pshop is like, we could get more of the artists who use and know pshop by heart - to give our side a try. and maybe even have an interest in porting the filters over, since that's where the real power lies.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I'd like to see an Visual-Studio-like interface (hear me out!) for a graphics program.
I like things to dock. It's nice to work with the document maximised and not have the palletes cover the document. It's nice to be able to customise menus and toolbars to your heart's content. It's nice to have tear-off menus for common actions, such as tearing off the menu for centring something.
It's strange how Photoshop isn't nearly as customisable as Word when it comes to interface.
A good user interface should allow people to do the job they want to do. I think the interface should be so simple that everyone can use it. I have been designing user interfaces for building energy programs that are so easy to use you don't even have to know anything about buildings or energy to use them. Maybe that is a bad thing?
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Add colour management and 16-bit depth *now*.
At the risk of quoting Manfred from Ice Age... oh, and look, they're demoing it with a GIMP fork with up to 32-bits-per-channel and colour management.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
OK, I have never tried it on Windows, but on Linux Metacity for all its faults (and they are legion) does a reasonable job of keeping the components where I can find them.
Seems to me that the main complaint is that the GIMP doesn't follow the conventions set by MS Paint or Photoshop, and as far as I'm concerned, that is unfair. It doesn't follow that just because people are too lazy to learn how to use a tool effectively, there must be something wrong with the tool.