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GIMP receives a $100K donation

gimp.org

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Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#11

Post by krautsourced »

rasengan wrote: post #6
nothis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to support GIMP but, especially for fast, professional use, the UI makes it impossible. Their raw features are on par with anything I'd want to do in Photoshop, it's 100% a UI issue at this point. And I don't get why it's this hard for open source projects to realize that (the only notable exception I know is Firefox, which I love).

Sometimes when there isn’t unlimited funding and the ability to spend unlimited time, the efforts are probably spent on core functionality over aesthetics. GIMP is a highly featureful project with powerful scripting capabilities. I wouldn’t say it isn’t already on par or more powerful than Photoshop.

I think that's more a thing of personal preference. Many developers (me included) consider working on UIs a chore compared to implemented new features. And since they are free to do whatever they want, they stick to the features. Commercial apps are usually pretty far from "unlimited funds". However, they know how important a good UI is for applications when you ask people to pay money for it, so they pay people to work on the UI and not on anything else. It's out of their hands, thus, it get's done.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#12

Post by djschnei »

rasengan wrote: post #6
nothis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to support GIMP but, especially for fast, professional use, the UI makes it impossible. Their raw features are on par with anything I'd want to do in Photoshop, it's 100% a UI issue at this point. And I don't get why it's this hard for open source projects to realize that (the only notable exception I know is Firefox, which I love).

Sometimes when there isn’t unlimited funding and the ability to spend unlimited time, the efforts are probably spent on core functionality over aesthetics. GIMP is a highly featureful project with powerful scripting capabilities. I wouldn’t say it isn’t already on par or more powerful than Photoshop.

> I wouldn’t say it isn’t already on par or more powerful than Photoshop.

Having just woken up, deprived of my morning caffeine, this sentence sent my brain for a real loop :)

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#13

Post by RankingMember »

rasengan wrote: post #4
darkwinx wrote: post #2

I hope that someday GIMP will have major change just like Krita & Blender. The UI of GIMP have received many complains.

There are actually many different ways you can customize the UI to your liking, including themes among other things. You can also run GIMP in window mode which encapsulates all sub windows into a single app window, just like the other apps you mentioned. If none of these are your cup of tea, please make a PR - It’s open source. :) That said, Krita and Blender are very very nice.

This is the thing that the open source projects whose UIs I've been disappointed by always seem to tout: customization. I think it's great you can customize stuff, but I posit that the vast majority of people just want something that's ready to roll out of the gate. Something that's endlessly customizable isn't necessarily a "pro" to me; if people need to customize something a bunch to make it usable for them, you've built a framework instead of an application.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#14

Post by Benjamin_Dobell »

> ... will use the money to do much overdue hardware upgrade for the core team members and organize the next hackfest to bring the team together

$100k is a sizable donation. I would have hoped that it could do more for the project than update some hardware and organize a hackfest. That's not to say donations in general shouldn't be used for those things. I just would have assumed that a donation of this size would have been best utilised as salary/salaries, allowing contributors to focus a more significant portion of their time on GIMP, and be compensated accordingly.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#15

Post by ensiferum »

nothis wrote: post #5
darkwinx wrote: post #2

I hope that someday GIMP will have major change just like Krita & Blender. The UI of GIMP have received many complains.

I want to support GIMP but, especially for fast, professional use, the UI makes it impossible. Their raw features are on par with anything I'd want to do in Photoshop, it's 100% a UI issue at this point. And I don't get why it's this hard for open source projects to realize that (the only notable exception I know is Firefox, which I love).

In my experience these problems typically boil down to not having a "product manager" or "product owner" who has both the skills and the authority to drive the usability side of the product.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#16

Post by emilfihlman »

>We thank both Handshake.org and GNOME Foundation for the generous donation and will use the money to do much overdue hardware upgrade for the core team members and organize the next hackfest to bring the team together, as well as sponsor the next instance of Libre Graphics Meeting.

I don't like this. The money should be used for paying a developer or a couple to develop full time a central feature, like the UI, not to buy new hardware or organize hackfests.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#17

Post by rqs »

Create news, hope GIMP can use that money to work out a better and intuitive design.

For example, currently, many Filters don't have previews (Or the preview window is too small), which make apply them become a slow try and error game.

Also, the Text in the picture can be hard to select, as sometime you mistakenly select the underlying layer instead of the text.

Also again, Filters cannot be directly applied to editable text. Sure, GIMP will convert the rasterized text back to editable text, but doing so will discard all the applied Filters.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#18

Post by nothis »

rasengan wrote: post #6
nothis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to support GIMP but, especially for fast, professional use, the UI makes it impossible. Their raw features are on par with anything I'd want to do in Photoshop, it's 100% a UI issue at this point. And I don't get why it's this hard for open source projects to realize that (the only notable exception I know is Firefox, which I love).

Sometimes when there isn’t unlimited funding and the ability to spend unlimited time, the efforts are probably spent on core functionality over aesthetics. GIMP is a highly featureful project with powerful scripting capabilities. I wouldn’t say it isn’t already on par or more powerful than Photoshop.

I'm sorry but I believe this a mistake in priorities. This is an image editing program. The UI is the core functionality. They could cut half their features and focus on a better UI and it would make it a better program.

There are web-based photoshop clones that offer better usability than GIMP. I shiver in disgust saying this out loud but it's true at this point. They're slow, more minimalist in terms of features but they don't have buttons that overlap or scroll bars popping up out of nowhere. The GIMP UI is an unusable mess. It's the UI equivalent of "programmer art".

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#19

Post by ethelward »

Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #14

> ... will use the money to do much overdue hardware upgrade for the core team members and organize the next hackfest to bring the team together $100k is a sizable donation. I would have hoped that it could do more for the project than update some hardware and organize a hackfest. That's not to say donations in general shouldn't be used for those things. I just would have assumed that a donation of this size would ha…

In Europe (and I guess, the US too), $100K is not even enough to hire an engineer at an average rate for a year.

I'm not sure what you'd propose to do with it exactly?

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#20

Post by lbriner »

nothis wrote: post #9
rasengan wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are actually many different ways you can customize the UI to your liking, including themes among other things. You can also run GIMP in window mode which encapsulates all sub windows into a single app window, just like the other apps you mentioned. If none of these are your cup of tea, please make a PR - It’s open source. :) That said, Krita and Blender are very very nice.

I know it's well-meaning but this is not the issue. It's not about "customization" or singular problems with a simple fix. It's about having a well-ordered, uncluttered, snappy GUI that never gets in the way. As a default. Until the GIMP team realizes that this isn't a separate issue but the central purpose of an image editing program, it will never be a serious option for professional work. They should invest those…

Agreed but it's harder than that. You could get a professional UI designer but their results are not objectively good or bad, they are subjective. The benefit of a larger UI-focussed organisation, e.g. Adobe or Apple, is that you have a large enough team of UI professionals so that work is peer-reviewed and controversial ideas have to be justified. I assume that the Gimp team would be too small to have that kind of group-based UI sign-off?
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