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Usability Eye for The GIMP Guy
TuringTest writes "The GIMP has recently signed up for
evaluation by OpenUsability.org. 'Many user interface decisions are being made by developers who often have little experience in user interface design. In order to improve this, we need the help of experts. To find them, GIMP has joined
the OpenUsability project. Here's a platform where Open Source developers and usability experts get together.' They also report their first experiences with the paper prototyping of a new Import PDF dialog."
having to click to expose just the root menu is excessive. The root menu should always be visible, IMO.
By "root menu" do you mean the menu bar at the top of the tool window, or the context menu in the document window? If the latter, then GIMP 2.0 and later have added that menu to the top of the document window. If the former, then try the Deweirdifyer extension on Windows or virtual desktops on *n?x.
I once saw something called gimpshop that wrapped everything in a window. That might work for you.
I don't preview or spellcheck.
In the newest version of Photoshop (CS2) you can move even the "document" windows outside the main window, including to other monitors.
People might be interested in Krita (http://www.koffice.org/krita/screenshots.php) as an alternative to GIMP. It has an interface similar to PaintShop Pro where all the interface windows are contained within one main window and it integrates well with KDE.
Anyone find that the ability to manipulate text in Gimp is... lacking? I was trying to make a basic logo in Gimp a few weeks ago, an operation that would take me five minutes in Photoshop, ended up taking me almost two hours in Gimp.
It's really difficult to resize text to fit the shape you want while maintaining good quality, while I believe Photoshop does this by maintaining the font's vector information until you rasterize the layer.
Also it was very difficult adding simple effects to it, such as a outline, glow or shadow. And at the same time, having it adjust dynamically when I alter the parent layer.
I found it very frustrating, and I've been using Gimp for many months now. >.< Maybe I'm missing something and still have more to learn, but I don't think many people would disagree that some of the interface on Gimp is unintuitive.
I'm happy to hear that they're trying to improve.
- shazow
It's called GimpShop.
There's mischief and malarkies but no queers or yids or darkies within this bastard's carnival, this vicious cabaret.
Usability reasons are largely why my wife hates the Gimp. She makes her living on Photoshop, but I use the Gimp for all my random junk. One weekend I decided to try her out on it and her experiences were like this:
-- Dialogs were inconsistent and many times didn't properly explain their function (filters)
-- Layers are handled 'quaintly'. No layer grouping, which takes it totally out of the running for her day-to-day stuff. She will often have documents with 100+ layers, grouped and folder-ized.
Those were two of her biggest compaints, most of the others were "this feels different from Photoshop", which you can't do anything about. But the large compaints were all layer and user interface related.
She didn't care about CMYK because she wasn't doing anything destined for print, but that would have killed her too.
Most of my personal beefs have to do with palettes that get behind other objects (like my workspace) and I have to track them down. But I'm not an artist.
Most of her compaints exist in previous versions of Photoshop too, to be fair, but if I even joked about "hey, why don't I install Photoshop 6 for you on that new machine", well, I wouldn't eat for a month.
The experience of trying to get her to use Gimp for a day scared me off of ever trying to get her using Inkscape or any of the other vector stuff, even for 5 minutes, instead of Illustrator.
Usability lab testing can only mean good things for this project, I hope a lot of good comes of it!
I like music
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en& q=xnest+--+:1export+DISPLAY=:0metacity+%26gimp&ie= UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Don't be a dumbass. There's no way to look something like that up on Google.
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