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As a gimp user of several years, with 18 years in the professional
retouch and design arena, I would like to chime in on the topic of
the UI. Yes the UI has a ways to go. That's called a milestone. Something to reach towards. The Gimp team has achieved many milestones over the years with great success. Some of that success comes at the cost of a delayed release. Personally, I would prefer a stable release that is late over a buggy release that is on-time. The UI has improved quite a bit during the present development cycle. Tool bars and pallets in the window with the graphics are working in the development release and are expected to be in the stable release. The tabbed windows are a brilliant addition BTW. Though I was not part of the workflow study, I can attest to my workflow relying on keyboard shortcuts. Much faster than menus and less clutter than toolbars. If a user is willing to take the time to learn the shortcuts, they may find the toolbars to be redundant and can hide them - opening more workspace. Gimp is not more for the amateur user than photoshop is. What this small team of under-funded developers have accomplished in their spare time is amazing. Their sacrifices ( working late nights and holidays, being away from family and friends, etc. ) is admirable and honorable. I invite any user, including myself, to remember that this project provides us all with a fantastic tool without the expense of a commercial application. Let's honor the developer's efforts! If we have suggestions and feature requests, we should submit them with kind words and supporting real-world information on how the idea would be useful to the user base as a whole. In the case of a toolbar, create some illustrations showing your idea, add some supporting copy as to why it's a good idea and submit it at: http://gimp-brainstorm.blogspot.com/, then be done with it. If the developers like it and it fits in with their strategy, they will implement it. Have trust that they know what they are doing and are doing the best they can with what they have. Also keep in mind that many features can be implemented as a plug-in. If what you are seeking is a feature that is a better fit for a select few, rather than the whole user base, then seek out assistance from a plug-in developer who would be willing to work on your idea. This concept frees up the time of the developers to work towards a stable core application. The more we users poke at them for changes, the longer the stable release will be delayed. Thank you again to the development team for all you do! It would be wonderful if we can rel;ease this present conflict and return the mailing list to positive forward motion. On 02/16/2012 08:34 AM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote: On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 7:24 PM, Aleksey Midenkov wrote:We consider it crucial to satisfy the needs of advanced users in the first place. That involves studying their workflows (which we did in 2006 and then again in late 2011), working out strategies for further development, writing functional specs and, finally, writing the actual code. All of that is a huge amount of work, but we do it anyway. Looks like you trying to build a bulldozer forgetting than much more people just need a good car.Designing interactions and interfaces is more than just throwing an occasional toolbar to UI and thinking your job ends there. I'm sorry to hear that you are against relying on strategies for designing consistent UIs, but we won't go for an amoeba as a common denominator, and the matter ends there. Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org _______________________________________________ gimp-developer-list mailing list gimp-developer-list gnome org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer-list |