Re: [Gimp-user] Gimp interface sucks

[Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre prokoudine gmail com>]

On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 4:50 AM, Steve Kinney wrote:

> To change the brush size during tablet use, it should be possible to
> set up any unassigned keyboard shortcut to do the same thing in
> whatever size steps suit the user's needs.  Caveat:  I have not done
> this myself so I am only "presuming" it's an available option.

To the best of my knowledge (that is, from what I see in the
LinuxInput dialog in front of me), you can't combine keyboard buttons
and LinuxInput (e.g. Wacom) events.

> As to whether the whole GIMP UI sucks, yes.  Yes it does.  I think
> that's more because it's an image editor, than because of any
> specific shortcomings in design.

It doesn't really matter what kind of an application you write. If you
pile solutions on top of each other while they seem sorta kinda work,
you end up with a horrible user experience.

There are, of course, specifics -- certain user interaction solutions
that work better for some apps and worse -- for others. But uncareful
UI design got GIMP into the situation where both photographers,
retouchers, painters, and even scientists are not exactly fine with
its UI.

Simply put, many existing user interaction decisions in GIMP appear to
be based on the obsolete idea that dialogs are a great UI for
anything. But the world has moved on since then, and on-canvas
controls have been the new norm for quite a while. E.g. if you ever
used on-canvas gradient fill tool in Inkscape and then tried editing a
gradient in GIMP, I bet you said a few words you'd be ashamed to
repeat in front of children :)

GIMP is getting there -- with new on-canvas progress indicator and a
new text tool in 2.8, with Unified Transform tool and Warp Transform
tool (which substitutes iWarp filter) in 2.10 etc. But it's going to
take to become relevant again -- in terms of state-of-the-art UX
solutions. Feathering of selections is just another example of
on-canvas interaction clearly missing.

Alexandre