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Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

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Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#171

Post by jimmaswell »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #167
Hemospectrum wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced. The UI in early Blender was as arcane as any I have ever seen, worse than GIMP's by a mile. Contemporary commercial 3D software did not have the same quantity or quality of weirdness. (Remember SoftImage?) The commercial version of Blender failed in the marketplace, and after it was open sourced, it was not taken seriously again for quite a few years. Blender's dogfooding efforts were a powerful fo…

> The UI in early Blender was as arcane as any I have ever seen, worse than GIMP's by a mile. That's just not true at all. GIMP's UI has no redeeming workflow . Even if you master it, you must still constantly navigate it's clunky menu of features. Blender 2.x had an intentional UX flow. When you mastered it - which really wasn't nearly as difficult as whatever work you were doing with it - you could be very producti…

GIMP's UI is perfectly fine to me. I frequently use it for editing, design, and even drawing, and I have no desire to use other programs instead. What's so bad about it specifically?

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#172

Post by SebastianKra »

crazygringo wrote: post #152
jonhohle wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS has had the ability to search menus for what seems like a decade. It should be a feature of the toolkit, not something apps need to implement themselves. This doesn’t extend to other UI elements (like System Prefs/Settings), but I agree that it should (and again, should be a toolkit feature).

> macOS has had the ability to search menus for what seems like a decade. Wow, TIL. Talk about a hidden feature. So it turns out it's under the "Help" menu, and it just says "Search". I had always assumed that this searched help topics, not menus. But it's also pretty miminal, seemingly without support for synonyms or features inside of dialog boxes -- e.g. if you type "pref" it won't find "Settings". It also doesn't…

There are various apps that present this index in a more accessible way.

Raycast for example. It still wont find synonyms, but it works well enough that I frequently use it in Affinity and similar apps.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#173

Post by johnchristopher »

Hemospectrum wrote: post #92
pavlov wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental difference between Blender and Gimp is that Blender started life as a commercial product, designed by 3D professionals for other pros. Yes, the interface was different and the learning curve hardcore, but it had an internal logic that enabled fast workflows when you’d mastered it. Gimp was designed by open source hackers with no input from professional designers, or seemingly even any interest in thei…

I'm not convinced. The UI in early Blender was as arcane as any I have ever seen, worse than GIMP's by a mile. Contemporary commercial 3D software did not have the same quantity or quality of weirdness. (Remember SoftImage?) The commercial version of Blender failed in the marketplace, and after it was open sourced, it was not taken seriously again for quite a few years. Blender's dogfooding efforts were a powerful fo…

> (Remember SoftImage?)

I loved Softimage's look ! Flat and minimalist zen design way before ! Then I got the credits for that course and moved on to different pastures.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#174

Post by Euphorbium »

torstenvl wrote: post #60
ohdannyboy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would not shock me to learn that GIMP has been a multi decade study to find out how bad a UX has to be before the FOSS community starts to care.

GIMP has one of the best user interfaces of all community driven open source software. I frankly can't think of any that are better, now that Firefox followed Chrome in hiding all its most important features.

Ummm, have you used ANY software ever?

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#175

Post by jrumbut »

crazygringo wrote: post #152
jonhohle wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS has had the ability to search menus for what seems like a decade. It should be a feature of the toolkit, not something apps need to implement themselves. This doesn’t extend to other UI elements (like System Prefs/Settings), but I agree that it should (and again, should be a toolkit feature).

> macOS has had the ability to search menus for what seems like a decade. Wow, TIL. Talk about a hidden feature. So it turns out it's under the "Help" menu, and it just says "Search". I had always assumed that this searched help topics, not menus. But it's also pretty miminal, seemingly without support for synonyms or features inside of dialog boxes -- e.g. if you type "pref" it won't find "Settings". It also doesn't…

> e.g. if you type "pref" it won't find "Settings".

I find the OSX search feature close to useless as a "help" feature because of this.

I came to the realization that it's more like a power user shortcut tool than something to help new users. If you know exactly what you're looking for and exactly what the application calls it then you can skip navigating through nested menus.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#176

Post by benhurmarcel »

crazygringo wrote: post #73
542458 wrote: post #14

Universal search in UI is cool, and I’m all for it, but it shouldn’t be the only/primary way of accessing tools as tool discoverability is very low. The author tries to deal with this by putting the a menu next to a search bar and putting hints in the bottom menu (which I don’t think would really work here, as raster tools are less selection-specific than 3D tools). Search fixes the speed-of-access issue, but doesn’t…

Universal UI search is great, and at this point it should be present in all but the simplest applications. I first saw it introduced in Google Docs, and it's precisely for things you suspect exist, but it's not even remotely clear which menu, submenu, or dialog it's in. (Apple OS Settings is another great example of it.) E.g., you want to apply a hanging indent in Docs? Just type "hanging" into the menu search, and i…

> But it bothers me that even in Docs, almost nobody knows about menu search because it's hidden under the "Help" menu, rather than being a nice prominent rounded search box in the upper-right corner like you'd expect.

They changed it recently. Now it’s a nice prominent rounded search box in the upper-left corner.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#178

Post by rpgbr »

EspressoGPT wrote: post #142
wruza wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Paint.NET, which does maintain aspect ratio on shift.

I switched to macOS several years ago and the only thing I still miss from Windows is something like Paint.NET.

Have you tried Pixelmator Pro?

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#179

Post by SebastianKra »

I'm surprised there's uncertainty about how Gimp should be redesigned. Just copy Photoshop! Select tools on the left, configure the current tool at the top, global options on the right. Affinity does this and nobody complains. Thanks to MacOS help search, we even already have the command search that this video proposes. And it has interaction hints too.

Gimp isn't more complex than Photoshop. We don't need it to reinvent drawing applications.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#180

Post by riotnrrd »

nabla9 wrote: post #123

All these programs like GIMP, Blender, Dune, should split into two. There should be a library that has the functionality and data structures to manipulate data. The UI should be a separate project with different people. There could be multiple GUI's for the same project or same GUI framework for multiple projects.

This is what we did at ILM, with our in-house software package Zeno. The lowest level of complete functionality was the "Sg" namespace (short for Scene Graph). Above that lived user-and-SDK-friendly commandline utilities layer (SgCmd) that was used for all scripting. Above that, finally, was the Oz layer -- the graphical UI. Oz actions called SgCmds, but never saw or touched the Sg layer.

In theory, Oz was UI toolkit agnostic but, as anyone who's ever done UI work will understand, it rapidly became wedded to the toolkit we used (a heavily customized version of Tk). This made the eventual switching to Qt very, very difficult. So difficult it nearly destroyed the artists' faith in the R&D group. (Extremely late delivery, buggy, and coming at the manpower cost of not doing any improvements on the tool itself for a year and a half.)

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