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The GIMP UI Redesign

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the new-coat-of-wax dept.

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?"

18 of 549 comments (clear)

  1. Hmmmm by thammoud · · Score: 5, Insightful

    the most popular image manipulation program
    1. Re:Hmmmm by jayminer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Should be the most popular OPEN SOURCE image manipulation program

  2. Most Popular?? by masdog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I thought the most popular image manipulation program was Photoshop??

    --
    My Sysadmin Blog
    1. Re:Most Popular?? by NMerriam · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There's no 16 or 32 bit channel support, no adjustment layers, no colorspaces aside from RGB and greyscale, no usable colour profile support. Those four things on their own eliminate Gimp as a usable high-end photography tool. The interface is not the problem. The underlying libraries are.


      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.
      --
      Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
    2. Re:Most Popular?? by Bluesman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Gotta agree with the grandparent on this one.

      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.

      --
      If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
  3. This is exactly why I hate GUIs by nunyabid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Simple suggestion: multiple skins by jkrise · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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....
  5. wxWidgets! by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nothing beats having a program use the same widgets you have on your operating system.

    1. Re:wxWidgets! by PolyDwarf · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  6. How about by LM741N · · Score: 5, Insightful

    a name redesign.

  7. How about a new name? by HangingChad · · 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.

    --
    That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
    1. Re:How about a new name? by owlnation · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Agreed. I think Firefox's success is at least 50% attributable to the fact that it sounds exciting.

      "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.

  8. stupidest key combo decision ever by Annymouse+Cowherd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How about making delete be Delete instead of ctrl+K

  9. GIMP UI improvements by metamatic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I love the way the GIMP has two completely different File menus with different contents. That cracks me up every time.

    --
    GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
  10. Re:I second that... by jguthrie · · 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.

  11. Re:Umm...no by j-pimp · · Score: 4, Insightful

    My recommendation is to run gentoo before saying things like that.
    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.
  12. Have you tried to *USE* Krita? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  13. Re:I second that... by nine-times · · Score: 4, 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.