Re: [Gimp-user] HATE the new save vs. export behavior

[Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre prokoudine gmail com>]

On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 2:28 AM, Jay Smith wrote:

> As many husbands have taken decades to learn (or else they are no longer
> married), sometimes "writing all the reasoning down" won't make the wife
> feel better.  Right now, the developers are responding to an emotional
> situation by saying something like "but we did what was logical, we even
> wrote it down first".  In the recorded history of human relations, I doubt
> that response has worked on a regular, consistent basis.

Jay,

Let's not try fooling each other. The only thing the former community
is really going to accept is "Sorry, we screwed up, and you were right
all the time. We are going to revert, sorry again".

The former community will probably also accept "OK, we are going to
make this optional", except no two people so far agreed on how exactly
this should be done, and noone so far seems to have understood how
badly it would affect usability and code maintenance.

People just want the old stuff back at any cost. Not gonna happen.

> Users become very attached to the software they use.

You make it sound like there are generations of people who passed the
habit of Ctrl+S for saving to PNG from father to son, whereas personal
digital image editing is barely 30 years old :)

> When software evolves in a direction different from that user/workflow, the
> user experiences *very personal* feelings of *loss*.
>
> The strong feelings expressed in all these "yet another long threads" are
> users expressing their feelings of _loss_.
>
> And it is not just their _feelings_.  Some of them will decide that they
> will have to migrate to other software which does include them it its
> "target user group".  That migration comes at a very real cost of time,
> effort, learning, and perhaps money.

Excuse me, but what is wrong with that picture? Human civilization
always needs time to adapt to new things. It was ever so.

Would you tell Wright brothers that they shouldn't have had come up
with their Flyer, because, ye gods, a hundred years later people still
got to spend some time to learn how to get the bloody thing take off?
:)

> If the developers have made a mistake, it was possibly overlooking these
> "feelings issues" and not expecting such a strong reaction.  That is not to
> say that the developers did not have to do what they did.  However, they
> should not have been surprised by the reaction.

We knew it was going to be crying and moaning all over the place. We
had early warnings of that, too. And actually we made few adjustments
to the new model to clarify things, e.g.

http://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?h=gimp-2-8&id=f4ce57aa9709e492666c16259e81625a3e4a7796

http://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?h=gimp-2-8&id=c3e904fab1b29224b7dd55bb5b4af49f34c3b335

Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org