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

[Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre prokoudine gmail com>]

On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 9:17 PM, Daniel Jensen <jensend iname com> wrote:

> My main reason for writing here is to warn about the elitist attitude
> starting to show itself, which would harm the project in the long run.

> Saying "Look, your use case means you might not understand the reasons
> behind our design decision right now" is perfectly fine. But some posts here
> have gotten way too close to "You're not 'high-end' enough to be a gimp
> user, so go away" which is destructive.

Daniel,

Every change that touches workflows causes hatefests. In any software.
Always. As a rule :) Even though we didn't so much _change_ workflows
as _introduced_ one at last.

That change is there for a reason. And the reason is that we are
trying to target a special group of users who have certain workflows
and work on files in certain ways.

It's not possible to make this change without losing part of the user
base. This had been understood from the very beginning. The work on
usability improvement started in 2006 from interviews with
_professionals_. If we targeted people with unsafe workflows, we would
interview non-professionals. The direction of the development was
publicly declared years ago (OK, it does sounds a bit like Vogons
destroying Earth, I admit :)).

Now, personally, that is, not on behalf of the team, I think that
anyone who is trying to imply that we hate users, or ignore users, or
try to force something on them simply needs to calm down, go outside,
breath some fresh air and spend a great time with friends or family.
Then go back and discuss this as a grown-up person.

Honestly, I'm quite tired of all the shouting. If we didn't care about
users, we wouldn't make this software freely available for everyone in
the first place, or write the docs or do technical support, or answer
the question why we made this change again and again and again.
Somehow people tend to forget such things.

So, again, we never expected everyone to just love this change -- we
have neither will nor means to enforce GIMP loving. But so far this
change is an integral part of the product vision. It could be adjusted
in the future. Or maybe not.

Simply put, it's all a matter of perspective and really boils down to
how one approaches things that happen in life. One could view this as
an opportunity to create an awesome image editor for people who never
save project files, or start using such an editor. Or one could view
this as another sign that the end of the world is rapidly approaching,
and it's about time to start wearing paper bags on the head.

Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org