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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.
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!
The fact that you use focus-follows-mouse notes that you have a very special taste regarding GUI. Photoshop changed too, more or less in the same direction (less little windows floating all over)
My other signature is a car
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?
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.
Yeah, this is always the problem that big software projects have... I don't claim that users are perfect and "know" what they want, but it has to be said: if you are making a USER interface, it's probably best if the USER gets some say in that and that you listen to the USERS especially when a large of them speak up. Other parts, sure, you can say "We don't work that way" but the user interface is sacred and your *only* interaction with the program as a user. Mess that up, you might as well not have the program at all.
And I'm sorry, but I'm a single-window person. I've work in IT for years and the *easiest* way to work is on a commandline or in a full-screen window (alt-tab's, multiple desktops etc. vital, of course). Rarely do I need two things side by side on the screen but when I do, it's usually TWO and that's it, and that's easily handled by tiling the windows. Bear in mind that I have 18 windows open on my machine at the moment, everything from instant messengers, shell sessions, folder views, web browsers, development environments etc. The only "non-full-screen" ones are two shell windows where I'm referring to one file in another and need to check consistency between the two, and the instant messengers (because they don't need full-screen, are minimised, and are only on the taskbar so that they flash when I get a message). MDI is an invaluable tool - I can't web-browse without my Opera tabs - and ignoring it because of some "religious" argument is stupid. I've seen even the cheapest paint programs offer a "Do you want an MDI or SDI interface?" dialog on first run... Serif software springs to mind.
The only other program I ever really used a lot that didn't do single-window nicely was some of the old versions of Visual Basic. But there they had a reason - you were designing a UI within an UI, so it's not an easy task to do.
At last, though, GIMP has woken up to the protests of almost *every* non-professional-user that's ever wanted to use it. When the new version is released, it will be downloaded and tried, if for no other reason than to add another number to the download stats for the single-window-capable versions.
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.
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.
Agreed
Adjustment layers are a messed up paradigm from being stuck in a 1D compositing 'stack'. A node-based compositing workflow, however...
cinepaint seems to have gone nowhere particular fast simply because not enough people (read: businesses) were/are interested in this. It's sad, but there you go.
Seems pretty far off the priority list for most "serious artists".. unless the only serious artists are those who print their work and have it exhibited. Let's face it - most Photoshop users, and I admit I'm including all the warez kiddies and the family members they installed Photoshop for - will only ever used Photoshop to make images suitable for display on monitors; LCD ones at that.. they won't be bothering with even calibrating their display and making sure Photoshop uses that color profile information. By the time they do want a print - they'll either send it off to one of the many online printing services who have excellent staff who deal with RGB->CMYK(and then some) conversion if their machines flag out-of-gamut results, or they'll just send it to their own inkjet/color laser printer and not really care if the colors are a bit off.
You shouldn't have to 'get used to it' - although I agree that there's other areas that need love more than how one manages their windows; although 'losing' your layer window under some other non-GIMP-related because it's separate from everything else, or being fooled once again and trying to do a color adjustment in image A but ending up doing it in image B because you forgot that each window has its own little menu for doing these things.. can get quite annoying.
Now.. a unified transform tool and a macro recorder (not every artist wants to dive straight into script-fu.. which in itself isn't exactly the most human-readable of languages) - that's what I've been making donations for; although perhaps I should hire a programmer instead and pray to the OSS gods that they'll actually include the code, as I haven't seen any headway made into these areas.. just years and years of discussions.
At least there's a bit of a push for GEGL so maybe it won't be so swaptastic to work on large images anymore.
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.
It's not the user's job to change themes. It's the toolkit's job to detect when a theme is overpadded for a given application and automatically correct for it.
Sorry, but as much as I want applications to automatically do stuff on this one I have to disagree.
The application ought to honor the styles set by the Windows manager, and not run off and do its own thing. How is the application suppose to know that the user did not want it overpadded? Or do you really want every single application to have all kinds of little settings to modify the display and break the central theming provided by the Windows Manager?
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
It still goes against what most other programs are doing and exposes the program's internals to the user: Just because it makes a difference to how the program handles saving internally the user is expected to use two different methods of acquiring the same goal - turning the stuff he worked on into a file on the disk. While meaningful to the developer, this distinction is fairly useless to the user.
Yes, you can lose information by saving in certain formats. That's why they show you a warning dialog if you would. If they're worried about users losing the information anyway, make the dialog friendlier.
A real problem is that the new behavior is completely unintuitive in some regards. Open a PNG file, edit and save it. You get asked where to save your new XCF file because "Save" means "save as XCF", not "save in the current format"; for that you'd go to "Export" (which doesn't allow you to choose your format; that would be "Export As").
It also makes the menu less intuitive. I don't care about what the GIMP does internally, when I want my picture written to the disk I want to save it as a PNG, not export it. "Save as" is the logical place to look for a way to save in various formats.
And they don't have an "Import" menu item for opening files in a non-XCF format. If I can't natively save to non-XCF files, why can I natively read them? File formats tht are alien enough to require export functionality also require import funcationality to be used in most other programs.
We end up with a weird hybrid approach that isn't consistent with itself on whether non-XCF formats are considered native or not. Cue the people who look at the GIMP for a few minutes and conclude that it's no alternative to Paint.NET or Photoshop because it doesn't support PNG and JPG well enough to include them in the save dialog.
It would b more reasonable if they renamed "Save (as)" to "Save as XCF (to)" and "Export (as)" to "Save as other format (to)". Bonus points of the menu item for "Save as other format" repaces "other format" with the name of the current format if applicable.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)