On 05/02/2012 10:53 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:It is certainly important for the authors and developers of an application to know who their targeted audience is.I thought of the best reply to all of this, and I think the shortest way to explain it is to tell you that you are probably not a targeted GIMP user. I'm curious, though... Do you know what percentage of the people who actually use GIMP now are part of that target audience? I mean, let's just say, for the sake of argument, that 50% of your current users are not part of the target audience you envision and will find GIMP harder and harder to use as it is further and further optimized for its target audience, until in the end they go use something else. Would the folks working on GIMP be OK with that? Also, it seems to me from the stuff at the URLs you sent that the potential size of the user base for the audience you are targeting is much smaller than the potential user base of more "casual" image editors like me. Do I understand correctly that you are consciously aiming to design the application to be attractive primarily to that much smaller user base? I am already aware of that. As I explained in my first email message in this thread, it does not solve this particular problem because of the incomprehensible decision to make "Overwrite" work the first time but "Export" work after that. What that means is that the key I hit to save an image the first time while I'm working on it can't possibly be the same as the key I hit if I need to save the image subsequent times.By the way, you can freely map any shortcut to any menu command. Try it :) If you changed this one single thing... If you just made the Overwrite command work repeatedly, then yes, people like me could just bind Overwrite to ctrl-S and (mostly) be happy. But even that is not possible in the interface as it is currently implemented, for reasons which escape me. I use many of GIMP's features. I'm not just removing red-eyes from my family photos. Yeah, I'm not a professional designer; no one is paying me for the output of my work, nor am I publishing it as art. But it feels to me like perhaps the GIMP team's vision of its target audience is overly limiting and in the end will benefit neither GIMP nor its user base.Other than that, if you don't do complex work and don't care about accidentally not saving non-destructive changes such as layers and masks, perhaps you don't really need GIMP. There is a fair amount of free image editors that will suit simpler workflows just fine. Overall, I love GIMP, and am exceedingly grateful to everyone who has devoted time and effort to making it better. You are, of course, entitled to make the program whatever you want it to be and target whatever audience you want to target. But I am saddened to learn that perhaps I am not part of that audience, which suggests that over time I am going to love GIMP less and less. jik |