Re: [Usability] GIMP - CSDI and Toolbox

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sat, 12 Jun 2004, Marek Peteraj wrote:

> Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 11:38:31 +0200
> From: Marek Peteraj <marpet naex sk>
> To: Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>
> Cc: Gtk+/Gnome Usability MailingList <usability gnome org>
> Subject: Re: [Usability] GIMP - CSDI and Toolbox
>
>
> > Yeah that happens too.
> > Did i mention how much I hate the GIMP at the moment?
> > Care to troll the list by suggesting they copy Inkscape?  (and by
> > extension Adobe Photoshop)
> > I really think they dont want to improve the GIMP for anyone except
> > themselves.
>
> Well, to be honest, i don't share your opinion at all. :)

Please be a little more careful about bringing back onlist
conentious offlist posts (in response to a post you made offlist).

I try not to post about the GIMP to this list because the GIMP developers
dont seem themselves as being part of Gnome.  The GIMP developers are sick
of hearing these kinds of arguements, but dont seem to understand why
users continue to keep making them.

Now that we have started I feel obliged to respond.

If anyone wants to try and raise the level of discussion they might be
interested to read the recent small usability study done on the GIMP
(might just appear in Linux Magazine in time for GUADEC and GIMPCon)
http://www.relevantive.de/gimp/report/results_usabilitytest_05.04.html

Another Gimp usability discussion about reorgansing the Menus that
that might be of interest was going on at
http://wiki.gimp.org which is still down unfortunately.

> I think that gimp has one of the most well designed UIs.

I would argue that there has been very little deeply thought through
design has been done on the GIMP.  I'm borderline trolling but I have a
hard time getting explanations for why the GIMP does things a the way it
does, so althought it is possible that the original designers had a
careful well thought out plan there doesn't seem to be one anymore.

> There are a few sections in HiG that are absolute unusable crap and of

I can only hope that Calum Benson, Seth Nickell and all the others
who put so much hard work into the Guidelines wont take that personally
and will instead justify and explain the reasoning behind the guidelines.

The guidelines would be far to long if they provided detailed explanations
and rationalisations but because it is actively maintained it is possible
to find out the reasoning behind things and try and get them changed if
necessary.

> those few is the CSDI section. The HiG has 2 major misconceptions:
>
> 1. it suggest to not use CSDI for apps like Gimp
> 2. it suggests to organize tools in groups (like sodipodi does)

The fact is that few Applications use CSDI (Controlled Single Document
Interface), and that using it makes things complicated for people familiar
with the much more popular SDI (Single Document Interface) which
is used by Internet Explorer and Mozilla two of the most used
programs out there.  (The combination of a SDI in Mozilla with Tabs is an
interesting way to give beginners the simplicity of SDI and appease those
who want more complex ways to organise things).

It even makes things complicated for people familiar with Macintosh
interfaces, although in a different way because in the Mac interface the
control interface is coming from the menubar, not the toolbox.

One of the applications I'm familar with called Mathematica (by a company
called Wolfram) has a top level window with little more than a menubar,
and a toolbox.  It also provides options to help with window management
(tile windows, cascade windows, which arranges the windows in the
available space, that is the toolbox and menubar are taken into account).

Based on how Mathematica does CDSI, even taken on its own terms I dont
think the GIMP is doing CDSI properly.

>From anecdotal evidence I believe CDSI does have real benifits for users
with dual monitor setups, but they are a small minority and I'm not
convinced that other interfaces couldn't be fixed to work with such
setups.

There is a suggestion that CDSI is useful if you want to work on
several small images, I'd be interested if someone could to elaborate on
this idea because I'm not really convinced.

I will leave discussions about the cons and cons of differnt types of MDI
for another time.

> The philosophy of the Gimp UI is to have all tools and their options
> immidiatelly at hand. Click on tool, click your option.

> Inkscape can't provide this, and you'd probably notice if you opened up
> all option windows at once - no way to organize them.

I should point out I'm using a prerelease of the next version of Inkscape.
I also realise that Inkscape is rough around the edges but I'm very
enthusiastic about how user focussed the developers are and how much they
have done simply by reorgansing and making it easier to find functionality
that Sodipodi already had.

The important thing is The secondary toolbar, or tool option
palette/toolbar is now working properly.

Inkscape has the tools lined up in a neat row right up against the left
edge of the window, when maximized this makes them very easy targets
(fitts law).  Similarly having to tool options palette/toolbar arranged
horizontally in a thin row just under the menubar makes it a relatively
easy target.  I think this makes a much easier and less cluttered and more
ergonomic user interface than the way the GIMP organises its Toolbox and
Tool Options Dialog.

> The dock/tab UI is also superior to photoshop to be honest.

'To be honest' it is not bad at all and a significant improvement, if you
could get the dock to stick/dock to the main document window too it might
help.  From a user point of view I dont think the Dock is all that
different from the way Photoshop palette click together (photoshop has a
dock/well in the top right corner).

> But there that clutter problem everyone is talking about.

> What everyone hates about the Gimp is that cluttered feel you get with
> multiple windows. But *that* is a *responsibility* of the WM, not Gimp!

Havoc Pennington where are you?
I would be very eager to hear what he thinks the responsibility of the
Window Manager is.

Metacity is the default Window Manager for Gnome (and Sawfish too) and the
reality is that it is what most Gnome users will be using.
Most KDE users will be using the default that ships with KDE (kwm?) and
Microsoft 99.99% of users will

The GIMP is difficult to manage without a complex window manager.  Sure
you can blame the window manager but by expecting users to have a better
window manager than their default that is an attempt to force the users to
solve a problem the developer dont want to deal with.  It is not nice to
blame your userbase for not doing what they are told (and that attitude is
probably the biggest reason why I get annoyed by the GIMP).

However the Dock is really just reinventing window management.
Window management is not a problem the developers can simply ignore, so
stop blaming the users.

> You can perfectly threat CSDI interfaces with a WM so that they give you
> a very comfortable feel.
>
> One major misconception in current WMs is that they threat each window
> of a CSDI as a separate window. They don't threat them as a group of
> windows, which belong to one application.

Cant say this bothers me particularly.

> For SDI, a separate window means a separate application. For MDI, each
> window represents *both* the document and tools, almost like a separate
> app, let's call it another instance of the same app. So the dumb WM
> model fits perfectly for the purposes of SDI/MDI. Not so for CSDI where
> the tools/options and documents are separate entities.

In general Gnome has been going for a document centric application model,
which the GIMP is totally out of step with which immediately puts it at a
disadvantage.  I'd like to hear more convincing arguements of the benifits
of CDSI and if it is so good why are more applications not using it?

> If each WM would threat CSDI as a group of windows that belong to one
> application and that have a certain behaviour with respect to each
> other(clicking in the window list brings all docks on top, always on top
> option for all docks, tab moves them to fore/background etc), you'd end
> up with a perfect Gimp - UI wise. A Gimp people would love to use.

I believe an 'always on top' option has been added to Metacity recently.

> Note that Photoshop is a typical Window-inwindow [WiW] environment where the
> parent window manages the child windows. No such thing in CSDI therefore
> the *WM* has to take care of all that.

Photoshop for the Macintosh doesn't use Window in Window (which those
against a WiW bring up), which goes back to my arguement that I dont
believe the GIMP is even doing CDSI very well.

I dont think WiW is necessarily the answer but what is important is that
people keep suggesting it because they have a problem they want solved.

> So suggesting that we should scrap CSDI isn't at all a good idea and i
> doubt that Seth is using gimp professionally.
> Scrapping CSDI would be the worst thing that could happen to the HiG.

If there was better understanding of when a CSDI interface was the best
choice of interface the HIG might be able to make better
recommendations on when to use it, but at the moment it instead just
advises not to use it at all.

> What i would scrap is the horrible sodipodi like toolbox, which the HiG
> suggests.

I would agree that this should be revised.

> For professional work there's no need to categorize the tools.

Why, please explain?

> Each tool although it might have similar properties with another tools,
> represents a *separate* tool that is easy to learn and work with and
> should stay at the same place no matter what.

> 2. The purpose of hiding the tools should be to save some extra space
> and to organize tools in a logical way. More nodes will introduce even
> more space consumption so it's not a win at all to use it for that

Arguements about use of onscreen space are interesting.
The HIG doesn't yet address how one should design dialogs that are
expected to be left permanently open (which i prefer to call palettes).

If space is a concern why is it so hard to use the GIMP if you dont leave
all these palettes open all the time?  It is not fun to try and use the
GIMP without lots of palettes always left open.  For example there are
features buried in the context menu of the Layers dialog (which is an odd
place to have a context menu) that are not accessable from anywhere else.
There is also a feature to hide all but the current layer by shift
clicking on the 'eye' visibility icon, which is totally undiscoverable.
I had been told dismissively that such a feature existed already without
any explanation of where it was and how i could use it.  I actually wrote
a script to add this functionality, and only found it after reading
through all the 'Tips of the Day'.

> 4. In a professional environment, where you need to work fast and
> reliable, a static toolbox is the most efficient thing you'd find.
> Once you learn it, it never changes.

There is work being done to make the toolbox configurable (show/hide
which tools are there).

> That said, i'm pretty sad the Inkscape devs aren't following the Gimp
> path.

You still have Sodipodi, GIMP users dont yet have an alterntive with an
interface like Inkscape.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan