Re: [Gimp-developer] Save/export, option to go back to old behaviour

[Robert Krawitz <rlk alum mit edu>]

On Mon, 19 Nov 2012 15:33:06 +0100, Simon Budig wrote:
> Robert Krawitz (rlk alum mit edu) wrote:
>> On Mon, 19 Nov 2012 14:44:12 +0100, Simon Budig wrote:
> [...]
>> > Layer information lost.
>
> (Note that this was just a specific scenario to answer Albertos Question
> if there is a workflow that actually loses data. Not intended as a new
> argument or anything)
>
>> Fine.  But after this happens once or twice, users will understand
>> what's going on.  It really isn't necessary for everyone to be
>> inconvenienced, with no way out, just to protect inexperienced users.
>
> That the "saved" flag gets set after an export to JPEG is just wrong. It
> has bitten users regardless of their experience. Even worse: Even typing
> a filename ending in ".xcf" doesn't guraantee that a xcf actually gets
> saved: you could have selected the jpeg filetype manually in the drop
> down box manually.

If a JPEG was opened, edited, and saved via file/save (rather than
file/save as), particularly if no layers have been added, I think it's a
reasonable assumption that that was the user's intention.  If not, there
could be a checkbox "Warn me next time" that the user could uncheck.
Firefox does this when you try to close a window with a lot of tabs
open; if you uncheck the box, you don't get the warning next time.  But
in that case you've made a conscious decision to ignore the warning.

Note that this doesn't apply if you've actually opened an XCF file, or
have ever in the session saved the file as an XCF file.  In that case, I
think you have a completely valid point.

> True, this is a contrieved example, but the whole point is, that it is
> not easy to tell at any given time, if an image currently is saved
> "safely" or "unsafely". Sure, people with good memorizing capabilities
> can track the state, but they shouldn't have to.

Perhaps it was never their intention to *ever* have an XCF file.

By the way, I suggest reading up on "alarm fatigue".  This is a problem
in hospitals, where there are lots of monitors designed to detect
changes in a patient's condition and sound an alarm.  This happens so
much that staff often ignore alarms just because they simply cannot
process them all.  It isn't even necessarily conscious; it's just that
after a while the alarms become so repetitive that they get ignored.

I suggest that the 2.8 behavior may inadvertently have the same result:
you get so many "unsaved file" dialogs thrown in your way to save a file
as a JPEG and never save as an XCF that you inadvertently forget to save
an *actual* open .XCF file (as opposed to 10 JPEGs you've been editing
that you never intended to save as an XCF in the first place).
-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk alum mit edu>

MIT VI-3 1987 - Congratulations MIT Engineers men's hoops Final Four!
Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom  --  http://ProgFree.org
Project lead for Gutenprint   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton