On Fri, 28 Nov 2003, bulia byak wrote:
A good idea would be to talk to the gimp developers and work together on UI usability issues in the future, the results would be included in next revisions of HiG for similar types of apps.
I agree with most of Marek's comments. In particular, the monster multisection toolbox is already removed in the latest CVS. As for working together on usability, I'm all for that! So...
Nathan, Mental, and I hopped over to #gimp this evening to feel out ideas for sharing UI code between projects. While we weren't really in a position to commit to new developments, there did seem to be some interest in perhaps one day working towards a general purpose picture canvas widget library of some sort.
Today I finally tested the latest development Gimp (1.3.23). Below are my impressions focusing on my area of interest in Inkscape, with my view on what is good and what is bad in Gimp (and what we should or should not borrow). Just a few first impressions, I did not do in-depth testing. Probably I'll have more to say after I've used it for some time.
Feel free to forward this to a Gimp list (drop me a note if you do so, so I could track responses).
Summary: Sure the new Gimp is impressive. And MUCH more usable than 1.2. But in the usability department, there are still things I strongly dislike. I do not want to say they are necessarily errors, since this is subjective, but I think there are other people out there who would agree with me on at least some of the points below.
The majority of palettes (dialogs) are sill not transient and "sink" readily when you switch to the document window that overlaps them. Working with a maximized document window is therefore next to impossible. Some of the dialogs/palettes are transient, though - I think it's those that can only apply to the current document and are more or less "modal", i.e. you cannot do anything on the canvas while such a window is active (examples are Levels, Color balance, etc.) Making such modal windows transient is indeed a step in the right direction, as in Gimp 1.2 even they could be buried easily (and confusingly for most users). However, having to dig out my primary toolbox from under a pile of windows still drives me crazy.
They gave Mental some feedback regarding real-world user feedback they were getting on this. Hopefully he can comment further.
Bryce