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GIMP 2.8 Will Sport a Redesigned UI
ceswiedler writes "Ars Technica's Ryan Paul previews the upcoming release of the GIMP. It will include a single-window mode where the user can dock toolbar windows and switch between images via tabs. There are other improvements as well, including docking support in multi-window mode and improvements to the text tool." To get this early preview, Paul compiled version 2.7.1 from the active development branch, along with its dependencies.
Will GIMP finally get support for masks?
I'm glad they're doing this.
It makes it much easier to work on the images, instead of having to "mishap-click" on every single window, and having to click on the related window in order to get back into the image editor again. WAAAAY overdue, but finally here - good job guys!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Why not floating windows inside the main window?
Oh I know why: because the GTK designers don't like floating windows inside a window for whatever strange reason.
But great improvement nonetheless, kudos!
It will include a single-window mode
M. Bison: YYYES!!! YYYYES!!
I used to prefer GIMP to Photoshop back in the day because I could work so much more quickly with many, many open files and windows using GIMP thanks to the "lots of little windows" approach. It made fine-grained window management easy using a capable window manager and focus-follows-mouse.
I always found the Photoshop interface clumsy in comparison, but now with every release GIMP gets closer to it.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
That is a welcome change.. GIMP seems to want to restore itself when alt-tabbing in Gnome when it shouldn't. Sometimes when I actually want to restore it a window is left straggling. This should hopefully fix that problem. I will have to give it a build later...
But some of the screenshots look Photoshopped.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Are they still committed to breaking one of Gimp's best features: "Intelligent Save" ? (Inferring file type based on extension)
Splitting "File > Export" and "File > Save" is counter-intuitive; it's not DWIMish, and I guarantee more people will be frustrated that the Save dialog box is "broken" when they try to save a JPG and end up with an XCF file instead. "File > Export" reeks of being Designed By Developers, rather than actually taking user behavior into account.
(And stealing the keystroke for "Fit In Window" is just adding insult to injury...)
it will include a single-window mode where the user can dock toolbar windows
Kind of like Inkscape?
and switch between images via tabs.
Kind of like PS?
Great to have either way, though.
o hai
Thank god, if GIMP get this right I can finally drop Wine.
Like a lot of novice users I gave GIMP a shot. Loved the plugin system and spent many an hour trying to get older plugins working and tweaking other plugins to do some neat effects. But in the end the UI made it difficult and confusing to use. For YEARS the internal arguments over the UI made it seem unlikely something like single window mode would reach maturity (and become usable on Windows). Kudos to the developers. I'll give it another shot.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
First, and most important: I told you so! Really, I told you that you *had* to include a Single Document Interface while keeping the original Multi Window Interface!
Second: Seems like something pretty amazing; I've used it and prefered it over Photoshop for 3 years now, but I'm no artist. These changes make me think of sentences such as: "Oh my, oh my!! With this, I can draw letters in the sky!".
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
Since you can dock all your tool windows together, do you really need MDI emulation? The problem with the Gimp multi-window mode is really the tool windows, not the image windows.
I love Gimp and have used it for many years for conversions, touch-ups of pictures, website graphics etc. When I switched to a MacBook, I was pleased to see the OS X version. But it doesn't really work, I'm afraid.
Besides the obvious graphical shortcomings (doesn't use Cocoa), you also have to click in each window first to activate it, then you can select your tool, activate your layer or what have you. This is so non-intuitive, and so not part of the usual routines, that I just don't use Gimp anymore on OS X.
If the new single-window mode is available and ported to OS X, I'd definitely give it a new try.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
I can't wait until they make a GIMP app for the Ipad. Then I can do some smudgey finger painting on the go!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the prefix "re" usually means doing something again, which in turn requires that it was actually done in the first place.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Click-to-focus (and raise on focus) never made sense. It was a misunderstanding from the beginning.
Look -- my statement makes as much sense as yours. To each her own, OK?
I loved GIMP on linux. Even made an automatic compositing system with perl-fu.
But I really hate, hate-hate-hate GIMP on Mac OS X. Seashore and Leeshore also suck, having thrown out all the functionality I look for, but oh GIMP in X on the Mac has been utter pain.
I am sooo looking forward to this.
FYI Leeshore is the Cocoa minimized GIMP version called Seashore, but with Core Image effects added.
The site is all in Japanese but the program is in English.
Not only have there been rumors about this for months, but I've seen at least one confirmation from a developer. Easy way to get a story on /., huh?
But of course I support this decision and think it's a great move away from the UIs of yesterday and all the rest of it.
I like it, it reminds me of Paint.NET and looks really good. The multiple windows didn't make things overly easy to manage. I like having everything in one spot and the little thumbnail ribbon at the top with open images makes it easier to go between different files. Very nicely done!
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Multi-window is nice if you've got a ginormous wide-screen or multiple monitors. Multi-window on a smaller screen, or god forbid a laptop, is a real pain unless you live in it day-in day-out. Kudos for letting users choose the right tool for the job.
> The GIMP is an impressive application that illuminates the potential of the of the open source software community to build free and open desktop applications that nearly rival some of the best high-end commercial software tools. The recent improvements reflect the vibrance of the GIMP project and demonstrate some of the benefits of enlisting professional usability experts to contribute to open source application design.
Bwahahahahahahaahaaahahahahahaha.
Well, I would have preferred at least an option for a "Gimpshop" GUI (it exists but it's out of date).
Since there is a good overlap in functionality, an interesting side effect of that is that you could follow the many, many PS tutorials in books and magazines - there are many more of them than interesting GIMP tutorials.
Where is the 'like' button...
So, after years upon years, GIMP has suddenly heeded the message of GIMPShop - That some features are simply good to have? I am talking about the monotone MDI background here, which does not distract people from editing their images as opposed to doing so with a desktop background and a dozen of icons behind.
GIMP is always compared to photoshop. There are some key features missing in GIMP that do not allow serious artists to move to it from Photoshop. Three of these are adjustment layers (which GEGL is suppose to eventually bring about, but it's been a long wait), proper 16 and 32 bit image editing and LAB and CYMK modes. (GIMP only does RGB). I'm greatful for GIMP and thankful for the developer's efforts but I'd rather they focus on these things than dicking around with windowing. The truth is once you get use to it, GIMP's windowing isn't THAT bad.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Me, I don't care much about the UI - I'll get used to whatever way it goes. The significant change, to me, is left at the very end of the article: GEGL and proper high-bit-depth color support it brings.
I quit using GIMP years ago in favor of other free alternatives, mainly because of it's terrible interface because the functionality was nearly all there. I wonder if this move will really win anyone back?
Seriously, the march of the "user interface police" in Linux and open source kills me.
We once had this uber-great Unix-like system: modular, customizable, efficient, intelligent. What was missing were drivers and applications.
Now we get drivers and applications only with them comes the same idiotic Windows/Mac-like interface and interoperability world that I spent so many years in Unix trying to avoid.
I guess you can't have a modular, customizable, efficient, intelligent system that also has lots of drivers and great applications. At least, nothing like this has yet existed in the world of computing, half a century on.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
OK, I know the project is trying to appease the knuckle draggers who can't use their brains to learn how to use a GUI. But, I'm hoping they retain fullscreen with the ability to basically hide all tools. When you're someone who actually knows what they're doing with image manipulation you want the maximum amount of space to work in. The toolbars and menus should be nearly non-existent until you need them. GIMP has done this for a LONG time. The idea of having a massive, ugly mess of toolbars "docked" is simply to cater to moronic users who have poor memory skills. So be it. The fact is that about 80% of the computer user base is moronic, so there IS mind share there which will only improve GIMP's adoption. But don't take away vital functionality for users who actually *think*.
TT
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Yes, this is *that* post. Just trying to keep it fresh in your mind. I use the GNU Image Manipulation Program all the time, and internally, I call it GIMP, and amongst friends in the know, I call it GIMP, but amongst people who are new to FOSS, I usually make an effort to use the full name. Every once in a while, I forget, and most people associate GIMP or "The GIMP" with Pulp Fiction these days, or worse, they've never seen Pulp Fiction because they would be offended by it, but they still know "The GIMP" through cultural allusions to that character, and thus are offended by any reference to GIMP.
Hell, I'd even take GIMPY (the GNU Image Manipulation Program for You), since that evokes a different, albeit still negative, emotional response.
The best suggestion I've heard is just drop GNU or make GNU separate from the acronym: IMP, GNU IMP.
for an iPad with a stylus and the Rosetta handwriting engine from the Newton MessagePad 2x00.
As it is, I'm struggling to figure out why I should pay $499 for it.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Well YOU are. Why not them? You're saying "Use Windows UI management limitations".
...we can still complain about the name.
I.-
signs of impending apocalypse
Got to hand it to them - it looks more and more like Photoshop with each release!
In Unix, applications are traditionally modular and can interact with one another; file formats can be read in multiple ways (i.e. by loading a binary into Emacs and editing strings or bytes, or using ImageMagic in combination with GIMP and xpaint to edit images).
Thus it's only natural for a Unix user to think of things in terms of teamwork and ecosystems. "I am using all of these applications on my data at the same time."
In Windows, every application is limited in its ability to interoperate with others, and tends only to work well with one file format (its own) that other applications refuse to touch.
So it's only natural to Windows users to think in terms of a 1:1:1 correspondence:
data:application:task (one of each at a time)
Thus it makes absolutely no sense to have 10 tiled windows in focus-follows-mouse mode and to hop between them all. Instead, for each new task you buy one new application for $299, save all of "its" files in "its" My Documents subfolder, and run it full screen every time you use it.
The sad thing is that open source and Linux seem determined to go this route.
"You want lots of users, don't you?" seems to be the rhetoric.
Honestly I don't. Mostly all I ever wanted was more drivers; I very much liked the Unix Way. But (looking around at gconf, a GNOME+Xorg setup in Fedora that doesn't know anything about .Xresources, .Xclients, .xinitrc, .xsession, etc., with zero command line options to affect the behavior of most applications and no non-GUI mode, and with exactly zero window manager configurability on my desktop) it appears as though the Unix way is no longer the Linux or OSS way.
Unfortunately, back in Unix land there are still no drivers. :-(
I actually prefer [Inkscape] over Illustrator for a lot of simple tasks (especially since it's footprint is much smaller[...])
Inkscape's footprint isn't small enough to fit on a laptop with a 1024x600 pixel screen. I tried installing it through the repository on Ubuntu 9.10, and its window was taller than the laptop's screen even after I tried to resize it down.
Hell, I'd even take GIMPY (the GNU Image Manipulation Program for You), since that evokes a different, albeit still negative, emotional response.
I wonder how the citizens of Gympie would feel about that assertion!
Anyway, I'd rather that time were spent so that Gimp worked in linear colour space (~ 16 bits per channel) rather than botching all the operations in 8bit/channel sRGB. As it currently stands, filtering operations etc are wrong.
For example (at least in 2.6) it still thinks that the average of sRGB black and white is 0x808080, which is far too dark. It should be something more like (doing a back of the envelope calculation) 0xBABABABA.
They were saying "use any window manager you want as long as it supports feature X or Y" - a far more reasonable request.
That's a hard sell if the default window manager in a top 3 desktop distribution (AFAICT the top 3 are Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu) doesn't support these features.
Why fix one application when you can fix all of the applications at once?
Because other applications running under the same user account depend on the brokenness of the far-more-widespread default window manager.
Now if they provide an option to enable photoshop keyboard shortcuts, it would be uberw00t.
...while I totally sympathize with you, and without trying speak for anyone else -- I've wished for at least the option of a dockable interface since first trying Gimp. I've tried switching to it a few times, and I understand that it's quite capable of doing everything I need from such a package -- but I just personally can't get used to its interface while at the same time learning its features. My frustration level reaches the point where I just give up and get what I need to get done in Photoshop or an old copy of Paint Shop Pro -- even though I think Gimp is faster and more effective in many respects.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
And the reasons for this are political, with a side of history. The GIMP developers invented GTK+, and now they're tied to it.
Know what? GTK+ is great under X11. It looks and behaves like crap under everything else, regardless of what theme you select. Basic UI principles say that your applications should be consistent with the OS, and that means using standard widgets (menu bars, icons, buttons, file open dialogs, and other things that match the look and feel of your OS). When GIMP was first released there WERE no standard widgets for Linux, so the devs hacked some together and released them as a separate library. A couple other devs saw the work that had been done, and figured that GTK could be used to save work on their own projects, and before long a ton of apps and window managers used it. Some of those app developers wanted to port their apps to Windows and Mac OS, and so GTK+ was ported as well. But because GTK+ manually renders all the buttons and widgets and so on, the ports look out of place. Strike that. They look godawful. Really this isn't GTK's fault, it's just not the right tool for the job. It's not just that they look bad, but users have to learn things like how to interact with a new file manager. It's unprofessional, it robs the user of time and effort, and it makes ported open source software seem inferior to native apps.
Recognizing the inherent problem, several other developers made toolkits so that apps would look normal again. A wxWidgets program compiled for Linux uses GTK+ to draw the dialogs and menus, but calls the native widget functions under Windows. The result is a program that looks like it was designed specifically for each OS on which it runs. Take a look at screenshots of Audacity for a great example.
They could design the UI in wxWidgets or Qt to make it actually look decent under every OS, but they won't-- and really at this point they can't, because the former would be seen as pandering, and the latter would be seen as abandoning GTK+. But to everyone outside the community, it looks like the GIMP devs are rallying to prove the superiority of GTK+ using the flagship Linux graphics app, at the expense of the open source movement. It only pisses off those of us who are trying to ease migrations to a free OS by gradually replacing existing non-free apps with free alternatives like OpenOffice. OO is a drop in replacement for MS Office in many cases, and behaves almost exactly like a native app under Windows. On the other hand, Inkscape is a great program with a decent UI, but I can't wholeheartedly recommend it as an Illustrator replacement to Windows users because it doesn't look or act like what they're used to. And if I can't get my mother weaned off the crippled photo editor that came bundled with her camera, I'm never going to get her to switch completely.
Face it, folks, GTK+ is cross platform only by the loosest possible interpretation. I realize a lot of time and effort has gone into the 2.7/2.8 "redesign", but these UI changes to GIMP are too little, too late. At this point the only thing which is really going to save The GIMP on other platforms is a complete UI redesign using something other than GTK+. If GEGL is ever finished this shouldn't be too hard. Conveniently this would also allow us to change the cringe-inducing name as well. The result would be a Photoshop replacement that would look like it wasn't cobbled together by two bearded guys in a basement.
I tried GIMP, really I did, but it just didn't have the options I needed (like say the ability to add text to an image, really is that so hard?), and the interface just... pained me.
It would have been bearable if clicking on a picture window brought up the editor window as well, but having to bring both up manually just grated on me.
The new interface will have pros and cons but what is really needed are more image editing/management features. There is still no IPTC and EXIF support viewing editing and if I remember IPTC data is actually stripped out. 8 Bit Color Support is too low and CMYK is a must i know these will come with future GEGL improvements, but still. None of these are on the road map for 2.8. I don't even do that much photo work and have hit the wall so I am sure there are others out there that do much more than I that have even bigger feature needs.
Now that the #1 Superficial complaint about gimp has been taken care of, maybe when people continue to not use it, the developers will realize the actual horrible UI decisions they made in the past, and fix those. I suspect the current conversation goes something like this:
[Gimp developer] What UI improvements would you like to see in Gimp?
[Average Joe] Well, to start with, I'd love it if it didn't have all these windows everywhere. Different parts of the interface keep covering each-other! I can't work at all!
[Gimp developer] Okay, that's actually the Window Manager's fault. What else?
[Average Joe] I don't know, I couldn't actually figure out anything because I couldn't see anything half the time.
Now, finally, after years of waiting, the conversation can be upgraded to:
[Gimp developer] What UI improvements would you like to see in Gimp?
[Average Joe] (actual problems with gimp go here)
[Gimp developer] *dies of old age before Average Joe is finished talking*
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I first heard about this over 6 mos ago and still they're talking about it coming soon. Starting to feel like it's never actually going to come out. I mean, release version is only on the 2.6 branch and they're talking the 2.8 branch. Grr! Do want, now!
I've been meaning to try it, so I have two questions for you:
1. How powerful is Krita compared to GIMP? Assuming I get some time to become familiar with it, is there anything GIMP can do that Krita cannot do, or cannot do as well?
2. How easy is it to learn? There are several books out there on using GIMP, like "Grokking the GIMP", but I don't see any about Krita, so I'd have to rely on the UI to learn. (I'm not going to hope for anything useful from the KDE Krita Online Manual, which, from experience, will probably have useless explanations like: "Boogliboo button - this activates the boogliboo feature.")
Bonus question if you know: any difference between KDE 3 Krita and KDE 4 Krita that people should know about?
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
I hate having to click a window once to bring it into focus, then again to select something within it.
Hopefully if it's all one window it will bypass osx's quirky window focusing behavior.
It's open source. Renaming the sucker would be the easiest fork *ever*.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I love having a free alternative to PhotoShop. I really do. GIMP does well and I’m satisfied with it.
The interface, however, did need improvement. I would almost say it was awful.
In version 2.6, every toolbox was its own window. This cluttered your taskbar, but it’s nice to be able to have them off to the sides while working on your image. Of course, to minimize/restore GIMP, all of the toolboxes had to be minimized separately and restored separately, which was a hassle.
Somewhere after 2.6.0, they changed the toolbox windows into non-standard windows that didn’t have minimize buttons. I hated this. As soon as you need to get to an icon on the desktop (which is conveniently positioned near the edge of the screen where you can hit it as long as nothing is maximized), the toolbox is covering it, and the toolbox won’t go away. You have to slide the toolbox to somewhere else to get to the icon, and put it back afterward.
It had a very irritating flaw, though: some hotkeys only work when an image window is selected. If you click a layer or tool and then hit the hotkey, nothing happens. You have to click the title bar of the image window before the hotkey will work again. I wish they would fix this. (I can’t reproduce it in 2.6.0, so maybe they introduced this glitch at the same time they changed the window type of the toolboxes.)
My own personal two cents:
These few improvements alone would be a vast improvement in the interface. I really can’t think of a way to improve on the interface any further if they would just do these things.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
...is one of the most innovative open source programs ever to hit our lucky-bum-lives.
Not only did they revolutionize the way UV-Rework works, even Maya users envied Blender so much, but the coders behind the UV-tools even made a UV-Plugin for the Maya users to get that very specific tool - free of charge. This is the power of the Open Source Community!
The great thing about software like the Gimp & Blender, is that it's not only freely available to everyone without deep pockets - but it's actually powerful enough to serve you commercially.
I know - because I've been using these programs for over 10 years - commercially - earning a living. Sure - I've used 3dstudio max, paid for a full license too, full CS suite as well - but these packages...powerful as they are, don't Cather for the small audience, they Cather for the big studios.
Once I had trouble with my 5000 dollar 3DS suite, no one helped me, I wrote over 6 months pleas to the devs at discreet, but no one cared. They finally offered a bug-fix, but only if you subscribed to an 1000 dollar upgrade!!!!
I switched to OpenSource from then of, The Blender devs. responded to my bug-woes in less than TWO DAYS fixing the bugs I reported... ...I never saw that day - from the commercial counterparts.
OpenSource ROCKS!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Or are you working down at the actual pixel level
When developing for a platform whose video output is quarter-VGA or smaller, that's what one often has to do.
They allready
I have found a screenshot of what they have planned as the final interface for GIMP. ...weird... but definitely better than what they had before. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
No I agree a bit with the original poster.
Focus follows mouse is the better api. The problem is that the marching morons are not used to it and everybody is scared to death of being incompatible.
Instead we have to force every single program to use a single giant window and then make the tiles inside that window obey focus follows mouse (take a look at how 3D programs in particular work if you don't believe me). This is stupid when if we changed the overall api to the system we could get the benefits in a way that allows them to be used with more than one program at a time.
Clicks also have to stop raising windows, too. This is something all the modern Linux WM get wrong though KDE is somewhat close.
I know you will scream and cry about how I am saying we are being "unfriendly" to the poor users. I also remember in 1983 working on word processors that spend 5 to 10 PAGES in the manual trying to explain how "insert mode" worked and defaulting to "overwrite" because they were scared to death of being "unfriendly". Why not wake up and learn that things CAN change for the better, if we stop being scared!
I'm very glad they finally made this change. Working with three separate windows was hell. I'm no professional, but I'm usually working from a reference image. With one monitor on 1280x1024, I like to have the toolbox and layers/undo/brushes windows narrow, on either side, leaving the image window in the center, maximized, zoomed in as necessary. Because of this, I'm always alt-tabbing back and forth between the reference and the editor. Eventually, I'll open another window or something, and the window order will get all messed up, or the image window will come forward without the toolbox, or the toolbox will just disappear from the KDE panel and I'll have to minimize all my windows to find it again.
Why bother? Let's face facts here, a tool as unpolished as the Gimp can never approach the market share of the Photoshop franchise. With Photoshop Elements and even an iPhone app available widely now, there is no excuse for not embracing Photoshop, no matter how poor you are. Friends don't let friends use the Gimp. 50 cents per post.
At least, that's what I thought this article was about when skimming through headlines..