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GIMP – 2016 in review
71–80 of 188 posts
Re: GIMP – 2016 in review
#72I have not personally used gump but I am going to have to download and try it out. Side question, does anyone know if you can put gimp on a rasberry pi ? hmm and I wonder if you can usb a drawing taplet to pi.
Re: GIMP – 2016 in review
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the GIMP has a more elegant UI GIMP must have come a long way for those words to form a sentence! Not that it was ever necessarily inelegant, but GIMP's reputation has always suffered from a big chunk of it's natural audience being experienced Photoshop users who find the transition jarring, and trash the UI for that reason. Hearing someone praise the interface is a bit unusual, still!
Its because GIMP's UI is designed for users that have more traditional Linux style window managers(tiling, focus follows mouse etc.) Whereas most other programs, including the Adobe suite, are designed for the more underpowered window systems in osx and windows. That's why it is painful to use in those environments and environments like gnome which follow a similar design philosophy.
"In summary, ICCCM is a technological disaster: a toxic waste dump of broken protocols, backward compatibility nightmares, complex nonsolutions to obsolete nonproblems, a twisted mass of scabs and scar tissue intended to cover up the moral and intellectual depravity of the industry's standard naked emperor.
Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes. - Jamie Zawinski"
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disast...
Re: GIMP – 2016 in review
#74Why stick with such an old codebase? Wouldn't it just make sense to start a new Rust project with editable shaders. It could have an extensible, clean task-based interface, instead of the antiquated control room with lots of buttons and switches. Or maybe even a dispatcher/server with protocols to send graphic commands from UIs to different image processors.
Re: GIMP – 2016 in review
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried using keyboard shortcuts to access the panels? I often switch between Layers , Align and Distribute , and Transform , but always use the keyboard shortcuts. Inkscape's UI is a point deserving of attention (the GIMP has a more elegant UI), but I can't say that I've found it to be in decline (on the contrary).
> the GIMP has a more elegant UI GIMP must have come a long way for those words to form a sentence! Not that it was ever necessarily inelegant, but GIMP's reputation has always suffered from a big chunk of it's natural audience being experienced Photoshop users who find the transition jarring, and trash the UI for that reason. Hearing someone praise the interface is a bit unusual, still!
Any changes to GIMP that make it more like Photoshop, or acknowledgement that there's anything about Photoshop that GIMP should emulate, are considered anathema.
It's always been a hot-button issue, so you get rationalizations like "The GIMP has lost its User eXperience (UX) maintainer. Jack Wallen thinks this could be good news for one of the most powerful open-source image editing tools," [1], and articles with touchy defensive titles [2] like "GIMP is Not a Photoshop Alternative", sections like "Why It’s Unfair to Compare GIMP to Photoshop", and quotes like "For example, when I’m talking about my Linux OS to a non-Linux user, and if he or she asks about Photoshop, my response is along the lines of “Nope, no Photoshop; I just use GIMP.".
It's like: "No puppet! No puppet! You're the puppet!"
And then there's the stubborn refusal to ever consider changing the name so it's not so offensive. That would be far too "politically correct".
[1] http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-gimps-bad-news-could...
[2] http://designinstruct.com/opinion/photoshop-alternative-gimp...
Re: GIMP – 2016 in review
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's the thing: "normal users" looking for a free-of-charge alternative to commercial apps are not the typical target audience of open source productivity tools. They're primarily targetted to scratch the authors' own itch, and secondarily to benefit anyone who finds it useful in the hopes of more contributions. Average Joes (nor non-contributing professional artists/photographers) are typically not beneficial to t…
I too have managed to do lots of image editing in GIMP. That doesn't mean it was a pleasant experience. I am not trying to tell the volunteers what to work on, but if we can't give honest product feedback to FOSS projects on the basis that they are volunteer efforts, then those projects will never succeed broadly. If you don't care about succeeding broadly that's fine, but I get the impression from gimp.org that they…
Yes, this is unfortunate but I don't see how it could change. I'm afraid that maintaining a scale big enough to include "normal users" and competing with commercial options would require more resources (read: money for full time development) than there are volunteers available. It's not just a matter of changing attitude.
The GIMP project has already exceeded the threshold of immortality and it's an invaluable tool, so I consider it a "success" regardless whether it's user friendly or competitive with commercial options.
Re: GIMP – 2016 in review
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the GIMP has a more elegant UI GIMP must have come a long way for those words to form a sentence! Not that it was ever necessarily inelegant, but GIMP's reputation has always suffered from a big chunk of it's natural audience being experienced Photoshop users who find the transition jarring, and trash the UI for that reason. Hearing someone praise the interface is a bit unusual, still!
FWIW I find Photoshop more intimidating and confusing than GIMP, because I never learned to use Photoshop. If you're looking at GIMP as something to attract Photoshop users, sure, the UI is bad because it's not the same as Photoshop. Sure, there are places you can look at Photoshop and say "wow, that's so much better for productive use" (ignoring feature differences where we know Photoshop is ahead of course). But th…
I don't mind GIMP's UI being different from Photoshop. I last used Photoshop over a decade ago and that would be plenty of time to adjust to any good UI. The things that annoy me about GIMP's UI are things like the focus always being in the wrong place so I have to use the mouse, or windows being placed over things I need to see, or having to reselect my font styling every time I retype something. The problem isn't that Photoshop does something different, it's that what GIMP does is bad. I happily use Blender's UI even though it's like nothing else on Earth.
Edit: Just so I don't come off entirely as an ungrateful asshole, I use GIMP regularly and I appreciate the work that goes into it. I just get tired of people claiming there's nothing wrong with the UI, when there so clearly is. Single Window Mode was a huge step in the right direction IMO.
Re: GIMP – 2016 in review
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the GIMP has a more elegant UI GIMP must have come a long way for those words to form a sentence! Not that it was ever necessarily inelegant, but GIMP's reputation has always suffered from a big chunk of it's natural audience being experienced Photoshop users who find the transition jarring, and trash the UI for that reason. Hearing someone praise the interface is a bit unusual, still!
It's as if some of the core GIMP developers and evangelists wear the fact that they have never ever used or know anything about Photoshop and never will as a badge of pride, and they are fanatically dedicated to never sullying themselves by ever even looking at Photoshop or especially listening to any of the complaints from Photoshop users. Any changes to GIMP that make it more like Photoshop, or acknowledgement that…
Further, GIMP suffers (as many mature products do) from a certain baroque-ness of feature. Its menus and features have grown from someplace less mature, to where they are. And it shows in the clumsy menus that make sense if you went along for the ride but for a 1st-timer are just confusing.
Re: GIMP – 2016 in review
#79I really like GIMP, but does anyone know why current stable release takes forever starting up when using Windows, and if there is anything you can do about it?
It's like what you do with `fc-cache`, but on Windows you get per-application caches for apps that uses fontconfig (they carry their own copies of fc). Every time you install a new font or update your system, you have to do a recache for each of these apps.
Re: GIMP – 2016 in review
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's as if some of the core GIMP developers and evangelists wear the fact that they have never ever used or know anything about Photoshop and never will as a badge of pride, and they are fanatically dedicated to never sullying themselves by ever even looking at Photoshop or especially listening to any of the complaints from Photoshop users. Any changes to GIMP that make it more like Photoshop, or acknowledgement that…
Its certainly OK for a product to innovate, as GIMP has. But sometimes the differences are gratuitous. That doesn't help with GIMP adoption, because admit it, most folks have some exposure to Photoshop already. Further, GIMP suffers (as many mature products do) from a certain baroque-ness of feature. Its menus and features have grown from someplace less mature, to where they are. And it shows in the clumsy menus that…
I'm not sure the GIMP's UI choices can generally be described as "innovating". I think they're generally just the obvious GTK+ default options, implemented without much testing or tweaking.