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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?"
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.
I'd be risking more psycho mails in my inbox if I posted under any of my usual accounts, so I'm posting this anonymous, even at the risk of it being modded down as a troll.
GIMP people, the biggest, quickest thing you can do to get good people back in the project and working well together is to finally, please, finally get rid of Carol Spears. I know 80% of you agree with me and have demonstrated in private to me or in public that you want her out, but she's pushing more and more people out with her weird shit, her stalking behaviour, her willingness to criticize anyone contributing to the project for insane reasons like stealing her boyfriend or taking her life from her, or accuzing people of having sex with conference organisers to sway them and obtain cash. Whatever, too many good contributors are sick of it. Yes, she has mental health issues, but the project has suffered too much accomodating those. There is only so much you can do for her.
Taking this public because all the private talking has failed.
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.
(1) a derrogatory term for someone that is disabled or has a medicial problem that results in physical impairment.
(2) An insult implying that someone is incompetent, stupid, etc. Can also be used to imply that the person is uncool or can't/won't do what everyone else is doing.
(3) A sex slave or submissive, usually male, as popularlized by the movie Pulp Fiction.
Look at that gimp in the wheelchair
Dude, quit being a gimp and take a hit!
Bring out the gimp!
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gimp
so to the "street" (or younger population who you should be targetting) its an insult (has been my whole life and im 39), hardly surprising nobody wants to use it
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."
I was working at the cottage, which is linked to the outside world by a noisy party line, which allows me to run @ 15Kbps (ie 1/3 of normal dialup speed). The etiquette up north is that you can check your email for 10 minutes or so, and in any case even ssh over that kind of link is a bit choppy. So I booted my notebook into linux mode and coded against the centos server running lamp. I wanted to use the Gimp so I would not have to keep flipping between OSs. The Gimp turned out to be pretty good, at least for the simple stuff (text boxes layered onto web-resolution jpegs etc) that I was doing.
However, when I got home, I found that the text tool boxes in my gimp files was rendered as shapes by photoshop. I then did a test in reverse and found the same to be true: text tool boxes created in photoshop rendered as shapes when loaded in gimp.
So until that fixed, the gimp is less than useful for most commercial purposes. If you were working on something that you were 100% sure you would never have to export to psd and share with a photoshopper, then sure. But otherwise no.
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?
Yeah, considering the utter disregard for decent interface design on any level that the GIMP team has shown in the past, I'm not really holding out much hope for this one. Perhaps we'll get a new coat of paint on top of the old interface, but the whole thing will still be a horrid programmer-interface mess.
Or perhaps they will really create a competent design team and let them dictate every detail of the interface. But with the usual open source ego contests, that seems a tad unlikely.
There's already Krita (part of KOffice, KDE) which uses Qt and looks and acts quite like Photoshop, so come KOffice 2.0, perhaps Krita will become the most popular open source image editor since it'll have native Windows and Mac ports.
You should also note that GTK stands for GIMP ToolKit as it was written as a widget toolkit for GIMP in the first place. I doubt they'll be changing it anytime soon.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
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
Call me wacky, but the UI isn't a problem. Any tool can be learned in a few days or weeks of using it.
Instead, here's my wishlist:
Being on Mac OSX, my top wish is for an updated Mac OSX build (even if it still must be under X11.app). The OSX-ready builds are far behind the main development releases, and for the glacial pace of GIMP development, that is really saying something. I bet all of the above items are ready on Linux, just not the officially recognized OSX-ready builds on macports or the website.
[
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 know I say this every time they have a story about GIMP, but Wilbur (the coyote) is the only icon on Slashdot that animates.
Watch, his eyes move very subtly.
Summation 2
Instead of opening up Photosho.. err, GIMP and cranking out a bunch of comps that are just mashups of existing UI concepts, why not talk to your users and design around their workflow and needs? Good UI is not born in a vacuum, good user experience doesn't happen without talking to users. For an app that seems to have the Rodney Dangerfield complaint, the team around it seems to do little to counter that. (You think Adobe doesn't test the hell out of its apps?)
So, I'll throw one out there, in the interest of PRACTICAL feedback:
Single window mode is a bad idea because it makes a photo retoucher's life much more difficult.
Here's an example why, an actual segment of a workflow and/or task, done in Photoshop to show the ease of this and why multi-window works well.
Grab a picture of a friend, ideally if they are drunk or have blotchy skin in the photo -- make it as unflattering as possible. Wedding pictures are ideal. Needs to be color.
Open it in Photoshop. Now, since I don't have another copy in front of me, this is the CS2 method:
Window>Arrange>Open New Window for [foo.jpg]
Window>Arrange>Tile Vertically
Now center both windows on the same area, ideally, said blotchy skin.
On ONE window, go to the layers/channels/paths palette. Switch to the Channels palette. Turn off all channels except green. Odds are, it looks pretty much like the color photo, just in B&W.
Now take the Clone tool and massage out some of the blotchiness in the green channel ("B&W") version. Ta-da, fixed in both. And you can see its effect immediately.
This is one way that your favorite babes are airbrushed to laughable non-human perfection for magazines. It's quick, it's got incredible feedback, and it's not possible in a tabbed or single window method.
Talking to your users, as opposed to a comp-off (or the cardinal sin, the designer assuming he knows everything), gives you all kinds of useful information like that.
Aimless brainstorming, bad. Brainstorming with a direction, productive.
I am not Herbert.
My biggest complaint about the difference between Gimp and Photoshop is not the UI. Photoshop kills Gimp on performance for images greater than 3k x 3k pixels. I don't know what the deal is, but Gimp crawls when trying to touch up large images. Things like the airbrush seem relatively unaffected by size in Photoshop, but not in Gimp.
And to say that Gimp's scissor tool is the same as the one in Photoshop would be a farce. I think the one in Photoshop was purchased from BYU and is under some kind of NDA between the two. Can somebody confirm this? Dr. Morse?
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.
You can turn the window menu bars off in your preferences. You will then have only one menu bar - on the main toolbox. That was the original design, and I prefer it that way, but so many people were bitching that they want menu bars on every window, that the developers implemented it and made it the default. It's the first thing I turn off when I install GIMP on a new computer.
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.
Switching to QT would be plain stupid. What however would be nice is the decoupling of the image manipulation functionality from the UI, so that not only different UIs would be easily doable, but most important of all, a no-UI mode would be possible. Currently is quite a a PITA to use Gimp on the command line, it somewhat works, but is far from being as easy to use at it should be and also not all of Gimps functions are accessible via scripting.
And before somebody mentions ImageMagick, yep, that works, but it doesn't provide the same filters as Gimp, so its often very complicated or impossible to automate a task that you just performed in Gimp manually.
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
I have been watching the development versions of Gimp for months, and I can say that there have been a ton of improvements in the UI and functionality of Gimp. For all the naysayers I recommend that they check out the release candidate of Gimp 2.4, which is included on development Ubuntu live CDs and possibly fedora. These improvements, along with the massive scripting potential, give the more-than-casual Gimp user something worthwhile to work with.
Er, Krita has a grid, and has layer groups...
Boudewijn Rempt, Krita maintainer
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.
Sorry, but you are wrong. According to what I read on the mailing lists and what I see in the ChangeLog files, Carol does not contribute to open source. She had started a redesign of the web site several years ago, but then gave up and others had to pick up the pieces that she left behind (of course she accused the others of "destroying her work" after she quit but this is a different story). I have not seen any significant contribution from Carol in the last two or three years, or maybe even more. Her only contributions seem to be rants, complaints and other things that drive people away from GIMP. She has some nice tutorials on her private web site, but she does not include them in the GIMP web site so I do not think that she is interested in any contribution to GIMP or open source, contrary to what you wrote.
There are several other women contributing to GIMP and open source. And they are praised for their contributions. If you look in the GIMP ChangeLog, you will probably see several contributions from edhel (Karine Delvare). Several other women contribute tutorials or help users in various forums. On the other hand, many users (men or women) describe Carol as being a poisonous person. So I do not think that there is any sexism involved here.
"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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I have around 400 gigs of Photoshop files. GIMP is completely and totally worthless to me until it can open and save every single last one of them (the vast majority having been created with Photoshop 5 or 5.5), including full support for all blending modes, masks, color modes, and fonts.
.doc support. Why does GIMP's .psd support suck so much ass? The goal here shouldn't just be grabbing new users, it should be trying to sway or convert established, deeply entrenched users of other software. I can't use the GIMP not for any gui reasons (there's plenty of gui reasons, but if nobody used ugly or badly designed apps, then neither linux nor windows would have ANY marketshare) but for the simple fact that it doesn't open my damned documents. Even if I were to switch, I'd still have to keep PS around for working with my thousands of older documents.
OpenOffice has
So. Fix that. Please!
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Just FYI:
wxWidgets for Mac OS X (wxMac) uses the Carbon API. (Carbon is the procedural Mac native application programming API for both Classic and OS X, Cocoa is object oriented and builds on Carbon, but is only for OS X.)
http://www.wxwidgets.org/manuals/stable/wx_wxmacport.html
Ginp Is Not Photoshop?
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.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
I cant figure out freeserifsoftware.com - right next to the "Its all FREE!!!" "amazing VALUE!!!" banner there is a "buy online" banner. "Visit our AMAZING SHOP!!! Save $$$ where they try and sell you stuff that is also free? and have a ridiculously high "original price" discounted with ridiculous margins. Sorry, but the site alone hit many of my red flags.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Its OSS, you can code your own Blood Fill if its that important to you! -- All Too Common OSS Advocate
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
to repost from earlier
Exactly. ...having discussed things on the GIMP Usability Forum, it's obvious that the GIMP developers (to misquote Kanye West) don't care about designer people.
The general attitude is "We're not going to change anything because even though the similarity of constant anecdotal 'complaints' may actually constitute user testing, we refuse to believe it until someone does systematic user testing." Of course, imgimp is the answer to their request, but automated testing does nothing. They're missing the point that assisted user testing is needed, where you give someone a mock up and ask them where they expect to find things, and how they expect to do things. What they've been getting, in droves, is people who are GIVING THEM THIS EXACT INFORMATION, in forums, in blogs, in wikis and slashdot posts. Things like "Why are script-fu and filters two different things?" and "what are Xtns?" not to mention "Why does the palette take up so much space?". Then there's the whole MDI/SDI thing. The horrible fact is that the GIMP is an MDI application. There is a shared set of tools that act on multiple document windows. Gasp. Unfortunately most X window managers have no idea what this means, and the concept of 'tool windows' is meaningless (i.e.: if I have 8 tool windows open, I have 8 task items in my task bar, and sometimes you have to click-to-focus and click-to-invoke on a non-focused window).
There are some very simple things the GIMP developers could do to fix the application:
For the love of God, do some paper testing.
Get real designers, and I don't care if they're familiar with Photoshop... hell, Adobe just redesigned the damn thing on us so it's not like we're shocked by the New. Get them and sit them down with paper mockups and ask them how to do common design tasks, common painting tasks, common editing tasks.
Admit that a lot of us have done this already ourselves. Sure a lot of it seems to you to be "oh that's just because they know photoshop", but damnit man, it's not photoshop we know, it's everything. Photoshop, MacPaint, ColorIt! (yeah, I said it), PhotoDraw, whatever. There is a common language to these tools and you keep trying to miss it just to be different.
Look again at this [lostgarden.com]... especially the part about "All that touchy-feely junk is the main reason why people are bu
No individual is more valuable than the community.
"Follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind.