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GIMP 3.0 is on the way

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Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#151

Post by tuna74 »

James_K wrote: post #73
squigz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://developer.gimp.org/core/submit-patch/

I fell for this before. Wasted a few weeks' free time adding thumbnails to the GTK file chooser, only to find out that the library itself has bugs which they refused to fix that make it difficult to do. Now I just have a patched version installed locally. The only way to improve these projects is to change how they're managed, which you can't do with a patch.

There is thumbnails support in the GTK4 file chooser now. That probably required shitloads of fixes in GTK, but now it works.

The way to change projects is to write good code and work together with the other devs that made something you wanted to contribute to and then improve it together.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#152

Post by mixmastamyk »

carlosjobim wrote: post #135
mixmastamyk wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given enough resources, floss tools are often best in class. With your short-sighted attitude, Linux, Firefox, Blender, etc wouldn’t exist and we’d all be a lot poorer for it—fully controlled by the Oracles of the world without option.

FOSS tools are usually worst in class for the actual user, with some exceptions. The exceptions are generally dev tools and sys admin tools. Linux is not best in class in anything unless you're a developer or a server admin. The free market is a much more effective process for getting quality tools for the rest of us. There's nothing short sighted about it. As a professional I pay a fair price for my tools and the de…

As I said, a very short-sighted attitude. Four dimensional thinking is harder but not hard. Also, you don’t seem to get the beer/freedom distinction.

Mobile has been won, “Windows Server is dead” (read on this site many times), many desktop tools are floss now, even M$ is writing them. Your small industry not withstanding.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#153

Post by cmyk_student »

James_K wrote: post #144
cmyk_student wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify, I wasn't talking about the developers' priorities as a whole. I personally get inspiration for "big" projects to work on by scrolling various platforms and seeing what the most frequent complaints are, but that's not how development decisions are made. And I can promise you, non-destructive editing was repeatedly requested by users, not just software developers. I have also seen a large number of users ha…

> compared to the larger number of users asking for more CMYK support, shape tool, built-in Resynthesizer etc This is because people with the complaint about text tend to open the software, see how bad moving text is, then close it and never open it again. They aren't the ones going onto your forums to complain. And when they do the bug stays open for 8 years (and counting) with the best response currently being to t…

Actually, implementing vector layers and a shape tool is my next planned project after 3.0, so we'll hopefully get that first. :)

I've worked on 21+ year old issues, so I'm well aware of longstanding requests. For instance, I helped to implement built-in editable text outline options - another commonly searched for question about GIMP. The time we spent on that could have been spent on a number of other issues, and fixing each of those issues would have saved time for some users and annoyed others who'd prefer we'd work on something else.

Feedback from more users is always good, and I have watched Photoshop users work with GIMP. The immediate sticking points from those people were multi-selection, NDE, and a full CMYK mode - the text tool wasn't as big of a deal to those particular users as it is for you. That doesn't mean we don't want to make the UX better there, just that certain features are not equally important to everyone.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#154

Post by James_K »

tuna74 wrote: post #151
James_K wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fell for this before. Wasted a few weeks' free time adding thumbnails to the GTK file chooser, only to find out that the library itself has bugs which they refused to fix that make it difficult to do. Now I just have a patched version installed locally. The only way to improve these projects is to change how they're managed, which you can't do with a patch.

There is thumbnails support in the GTK4 file chooser now. That probably required shitloads of fixes in GTK, but now it works. The way to change projects is to write good code and work together with the other devs that made something you wanted to contribute to and then improve it together.

I fundamentally disagree. The problem isn't that there were no thumbnails, but that it took decades to implement them. The cause of that problem can't seriously have been that people weren't programming hard enough. I think lots of code was likely written in that time. If we assume, as you seem to, that the issue was not enough code being written, then GTK would need to increase its count of contributors by 120 times to ship that feature in the span of two months. Your implication here is that it takes thousands of people multiple months to program a file chooser with thumbnails. I think one person should be able to do it in that time, and that the problem was something other than writing code. What has changed about the project to guarantee that the next important feature won't take 20 years to implement?

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#156

Post by James_K »

cmyk_student wrote: post #153
James_K wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> compared to the larger number of users asking for more CMYK support, shape tool, built-in Resynthesizer etc This is because people with the complaint about text tend to open the software, see how bad moving text is, then close it and never open it again. They aren't the ones going onto your forums to complain. And when they do the bug stays open for 8 years (and counting) with the best response currently being to t…

Actually, implementing vector layers and a shape tool is my next planned project after 3.0, so we'll hopefully get that first. :) I've worked on 21+ year old issues, so I'm well aware of longstanding requests. For instance, I helped to implement built-in editable text outline options - another commonly searched for question about GIMP. The time we spent on that could have been spent on a number of other issues, and f…

And it's great that you're doing that, but what if you get hit by a bus? Does the issue just go back into the "never gonna happen" bin? Why do you think it took 20 years to get started on implementing this, and what have you done to ensure that won't happen again?

Also, you should implement a raster shape tool before you try to implement a vector one. You'll get the feature out much faster that way.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#157

Post by carlosjobim »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #152
carlosjobim wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FOSS tools are usually worst in class for the actual user, with some exceptions. The exceptions are generally dev tools and sys admin tools. Linux is not best in class in anything unless you're a developer or a server admin. The free market is a much more effective process for getting quality tools for the rest of us. There's nothing short sighted about it. As a professional I pay a fair price for my tools and the de…

As I said, a very short-sighted attitude. Four dimensional thinking is harder but not hard. Also, you don’t seem to get the beer/freedom distinction. Mobile has been won, “Windows Server is dead” (read on this site many times), many desktop tools are floss now, even M$ is writing them. Your small industry not withstanding.

Short sighted is to believe that future generations can have the luxury of previous generations to live so extremely comfortably that they have ample free time and energy to make open source code (for the benefit of billion dollar companies mostly). I'd rather pay for quality apps, where I know that my money pays salaries for the developers. That is much more sustainable and far-sighted.

And I'm getting much more in return as a customer, where I can actually report a bug and get it fixed or ask for a feature and get it implemented, instead of being told to f myself or fork the code, by some angry free developer.

If normal non-developers don't have software tools that they can use to be creative, then you're just throwing all these people into the bin of being only consumers. Who benefits from that?

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#158

Post by asddubs »

James_K wrote: post #156
cmyk_student wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, implementing vector layers and a shape tool is my next planned project after 3.0, so we'll hopefully get that first. :) I've worked on 21+ year old issues, so I'm well aware of longstanding requests. For instance, I helped to implement built-in editable text outline options - another commonly searched for question about GIMP. The time we spent on that could have been spent on a number of other issues, and f…

And it's great that you're doing that, but what if you get hit by a bus? Does the issue just go back into the "never gonna happen" bin? Why do you think it took 20 years to get started on implementing this, and what have you done to ensure that won't happen again? Also, you should implement a raster shape tool before you try to implement a vector one. You'll get the feature out much faster that way.

This comment strikes me as non-constructive. What do you actually want this person to do? Clone themselves? Yes, gimp needs more people working on it to get features out faster. Berating the people actually doing the work until they also quit is certainly not helping

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#159

Post by init2null »

prmoustache wrote: post #136
idoubtit wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago, I lost my work because of this "unique UI" and pledge never to use Gimp again, unless its behavior changed. When you open a non-Gimp file, for instance a PNG, and you want to update the source file, you need to "export" to PNG. And if you close the tab, Gimp warns you that your work isn't saved, because it hasn't been saved in its native xcf format. There is no way to know if the work has been saved t…

There is literally an "overwrite file" command in the file menu. You didn't lose data because of bad UI but because you are illiterate. You just said it, it warns you. If you can't understand what "none of the images was saved" means, there is no UI that can save you except autosave. But autosave is something you clearly don't want in a photo/image editor, even smartphone apps do not autosave photo edits.

That's a rude and somewhat inaccurate response.

Photoshop has autosave that works well, even for files with hundreds of layers, so it can be done. That being said, I can see that it's less useful when someone chooses not to save.

As for export, a single-layer file should be considered saved when one exports to lossless. A multi-layer file needs a different prompt, and I note Gimp has that now. It flags the file as "Exported to xxxxxx.png" in the Quit dialog.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#160

Post by asddubs »

prmoustache wrote: post #134
asddubs wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not sure if i would call taking 20 years for a release "steady"

There have been many many releases between 2.0 and 3.0. And many releases in the 2.99.x branch specifically. Many other projects would have simply switched to a different versionning scheme and got rid of beta versions to simply iterate on releases like web browsers do nowadays.

Yes, my comment was mostly meant tongue-in-cheek. I have my gripes about GIMPs UI but I have all the sympathy in the world for complicated updates taking a long time when done by volunteers, especially because they wanted to combine all plugin-breaking features into one release.
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