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GIMP receives a $100K donation

gimp.org

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Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#61

Post by brazzledazzle »

proginthebox wrote: post #53
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #41

"only" $100K - aren't we living in a world now where companies started in a garage make that amount of money ten times a second? I haven't heard anything from e.g. Google or Facebook's open source funding endeavours. IMO every successful company should do their part and set aside a sizeable percentage of their revenue to paying and supporting open source projects and developers. It's wrong that e.g. the developer of…

Just because someone can use a software does not mean they can/will pay for it. In other words, you'll can only earn money if your customers are rich.

To be fair curl’s users are wealthy. It’s used everywhere. What companies need to do is make it as easy (or easier) for projects/applications to allocate some budget for open source projects. But there needs to be a trusted and consistent way to do that otherwise companies would fret over possible abuse/embezzlement.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#63

Post by jrockway »

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).

Does Photoshop have a good UI? Everything good is hidden 36 levels deep somewhere, or requires you to press control-shift-command-alt-option-windows key + F26.

There are just too many special-use-case tools to make a "good" UI. Learn it and forget about what it looks like, it's the only way you'll ever be happy.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#64

Post by chrisseaton »

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.

> aesthetics

It's not aesthetics. You make it sound trivial. People aren't talking about things like how the icons are designed. They mean the workflow.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#65

Post by mschuetz »

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).

A proper and intuitive UI is one of the hardest and most time consuming things to do. From a design perspective, it takes a lot of effort, trial&error and user feedback to find out what works and what doesn't work, and to create something that's coherent and intuitive, rather than a patchwork of individual and differently behaving tools. From an engineering perspective, it's a very time consuming task. The work of doing a proper UI may be even bigger than the work on doing the actual image processing and other software core engine tasks.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#66

Post by mikebelanger »

My hope: whichever direction Gimp development goes, they should try doing something similar to Blender - where they bring a bunch of developers and artists into a space. While they're in that space (for a limited amount of time) work on some big project involving Gimp. Develop Gimp to suite that project's needs.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#67

Post by rootlocus »

mschuetz wrote: post #65
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).

A proper and intuitive UI is one of the hardest and most time consuming things to do. From a design perspective, it takes a lot of effort, trial&error and user feedback to find out what works and what doesn't work, and to create something that's coherent and intuitive, rather than a patchwork of individual and differently behaving tools. From an engineering perspective, it's a very time consuming task. The work of do…

There are plenty of drawing applications that have great UIs. The easiest solution for GIMP would be to copy one of them (arguably Photoshop, because it's closest in terms of expectancy / user-base).

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#68

Post by _carl_jung »

nothis wrote: post #58
scrollaway wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long do you think $100k lasts with two full-time devs exactly?

3 months of a professional UI designer could easily quadruple the usefulness of GIMP for me. The UI, in its current state (I always use this disclaimer and it never changed in like 10 years), is a horrible mess and makes GIMP unusable for most professional work. There is no trend of it getting better. They need to hire someone from the outside, accepting that kick in the butt.

Overhauling the GIMP UI would take way longer than three months of a single UI designer. As an operation, we are talking UI/UX design, implementation, testing, and not to mention having to refactor existing code such that it can actually handle such a radical UI change.

I'd put the (very fuzzy) estimate at something like 2 years of consistent (full time) effort from a team of, say, 5 people. That puts the cost of such a change closer to a million dollars.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#69

Post by chrisseaton »

sleepychu wrote: post #50
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).

What do you want changed about the UI? I don't even look at it most of the time. Single window mode/quick toggling of that was the biggest change for me.

> I don't even look at it most of the time

What do you do instead? Are you using GIMP entirely through the scripting interface? How are you using a graphical image editor without looking at the user interface?

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#70

Post by ginko »

enriquto wrote: post #47
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).

What is exactly the problem with gimp's UI? I find it intuitive and very easy to use (but then, I have not used many other interactive imaging programs). Is it missing something important? Has too many useless features? GIMP's UI is alright for me, what I need are more features that are sorely lacking: 1) ability to work with images having an arbitrary number of spectral bands 2) floating-point pixel values 3) comple…

This. If anything GIMP is missing features for me. Especially the non-destructive editing and disk paging support you mentioned feel sorely lacking.

Floating point pixel values should be supported as of GIMP 2.10, though.

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