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The GIMP UI Redesign
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?"
They could start by using a better toolkit. Not flaming, just being honest.
I thought the most popular image manipulation program was Photoshop??
My Sysadmin Blog
They had better have a feature where the GUI looks exactly the same way it does now.
I don't want to learn a new gui.
To those who are moving in from Photoshop, and would like a similar looka and feel, provide a skin for them. For the true GIMP pros, assuming they exist - retain the existing stuff. And so on. Compared to the size and complexity of code handling images, the UI bit should be miniscule... atleast I suppose so.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Nothing beats having a program use the same widgets you have on your operating system.
a name redesign.
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.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
How about making delete be Delete instead of ctrl+K
The only thing that will get more users for GIMP is strict enforcement of software licensing (specifically, that of Adobe Photoshop). Which ain't happening.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
I can't see what's wrong with basic layout of the program. OK, more customisable palettes would be good so I didn't have to keep torn-off menus lying around, but other than that I've no problem getting it to do what I want.
This days krita is a very good (if not better, as it supports colorspaces) OSS alternative to the GIMP, without the user interface problems the GIMP has.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Does anyone remember Krita? URL: http://www.koffice.org/krita/ It's UI is consistent and easy to use - esp. from a newbie pov. What else? a name change? No. GIMP gets advertising from the tonnes of people who TALK ABOUT GIMP and about its 'wrong name'. Tabs - maybe. Add it as an optional feature. Opening multiple instances of an image may tax your resources too much. Make it pleasant - like Visual studio is. No joke. It's intuitive, you get 1 window (add tabs if you want to), menus on top, icons, left panel dividing into sections, with a right one dealing with properties. Hey, VS.NET-UI-like GIMP may be cool. But I welcome any new UI when it comes to GIMP. It's about time. (*Expecting new KDE4 UI effects* - just a thought)
Do I require the c-sig package to have a signature?
I love the way the GIMP has two completely different File menus with different contents. That cracks me up every time.
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I know, corporate naming standards are so kewl compared to the opensource stuff. Have you heard about the newest My Active DirectBullshit?
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.
Maybe Gimp could use a fork. It worked for Xorg when Xfree86 had these kinds of problems.
Most of the games I've played lately let you completely reconfigure the keybindings to your liking. I don't understand why all software apps don't incorporate this. Yeah it could be confusing if you hop onto someone else's machine, but all you have to do is keep a copy of your keybind config file on a flash drive you carry around.
Amen! There is nothing major wrong with the GIMP UI. Of course there are number of small quirks that should be fixed, but besides that, GIMP interface is actually fairly similar to that of Photoshop - the original Mac version, that is. The problem is that lot of people are now using GIMP on Windows. Windows, in spite of its name, has no concept of windows management. Basically each application is supposed to manage its own windows. That's why there are all those weird multiple document interfaces on Windows, like the braindead but common design where an application has one large window and every document creates a small window inside it. Photoshop people realized that when they ported Photoshop to Windows, and completely rewrote the UI and gave it a multiple document interface that Windows users are used to. As a result it is now somewhat painful to use for everybody who is used to PS on Mac or GIMP on Unix, but it is usable as a Windows application. GIMP was ported to Windows without any UI changes, and as a result it is very hard to use on plain vanilla Windows without third party software that makes managing windows on Windows easier.
As far as I am concerned, leave the UI, fix the quirks, provide alternative key bindings, and, most importantly, concentrate on the parents wishlist, rather than wasting time rewriting the user interface.
AccountKiller
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.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
I manage a small but successful wedding photography company. We use almost exclusively open source software including DigiKam, ShowFoto and of course, the Gimp.
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/ which allow for added (and usually tested) functionality
4) Enough people use it that most major bugs are squashed before a release is made
That's what I mean! Windows has no concept of windows management. On Unix using Xwindow with a decent window manager, applications rarely open documents in a full screen window. Each application window is relatively small, and when it opens, the window manager places it such that it minimizes overlap with other windows, or by some other user configurable criteria. You can then easily maximize and un-maximize windows using the keyboard or mouse. You can even make windows grow in only one direction, or only grow until they bump into another window. In addition to that, you have practically unlimited number of virtual desktops. If you want to, you can have each application place its windows on a separate virtual desktop, and just switch desktops to switch between applications. Windows does not do any of that, so each application has to do it for itself, using its main window as its own virtual desktop, and placing all its windows on it. The problem with that is that I rarely use only one application at a time, and I prefer to group my windows according to project rather than according to an application. You can easily do that with virtual desktops, but not with the one main windows and number of sub-windows. It's a decent work around for the shortcomings of Windows OS, but it completely lacks the flexibility of a good window manager on Unix.
AccountKiller
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.
word.
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.
"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" - Charles Caleb Colton in "Lacon" (1820).
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 graphics professionals or endorsed by graphics professionals. Consider is somewhat like free market research "These are core features that a considerable number of users want" while many ideas are completely insignificant, or depend on core features being there in the first place.
Yes, there are other strategies than just reimplementing other people's ideas. Porter defines three basic strategies - segmentation, differentiation or cost leadership. But both the first two requires you to have a decent product in the first place that can be specialized to be better than the generic one for some subset of users. The GIMP just isn't there, and that's also the case with a lot of other free/open source software. Most of them need to focus on core features, which inevitably has been done before. But anything else is just asking them to run before they've learned to walk.
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Do you really want to have sex with people who write a program called The GIMP? ;)
The first step to being cured is being able to cut through the denial and admit that you have a problem. Hats off the the GIMP folks for taking this first, difficult step.
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