[Gimp-developer] Usability for icon-editing

[Thomas W <twhitmore nz gmail com>]

Here are some usability points which I commonly notice during icon-editing.

1) Icons open at 100% view, which is tiny in the window & far smaller than
what I want for working at. This always requires two steps -- increase
magnification, and then drag the window larger. Not very optimal workflow I
don't think.

2) Brush defaults to 20px tapered-circle. For 16x16 icons, does it really
make sense to always default to such a brush?

3) Not very easy to test icons. There's no quick way to get rid of the
selection border, layer borders & background checks to view the overall
tonality & see how it looks against a white background.

4) Feature idea:  Especially nice would be the ability to view & test
icons, or transparency in general, by dragging it against a white/ and
variegated background (or over the whole desktop)  with a range of zoom
levels from 100 - 400%.

5) Exporting the icon:  do I have to choose PNG options each time?  As I
understand it, PNG is a lossless format. Options might be valuable for JPEG
sometimes, other times some standard presets would be fine.. But for
600-byte PNG files picking some defaults once would be sufficient for me.
Every time after that it comes up, it kinda seems just like an unnecessary
step.


Perhaps icon-editing is a little bit different from the "photographic
editing" usecase, but it's quite common. Does anybody else find areas where
GIMP could support the user/ workflow better? Suggestions welcome.

Regards
Tom