GIMP UI Future - Past And Present
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To be honest the only issue I have ever had with GIMP is the inability do vertical text. I am not talking about attempting (badly) to do single letters over one another, I am speaking of the ability to take a word or a phrase, only to make it go from horizontal to vertical. That is all I am asking for. Yet anytime I mention this, I get flack for it with excuses.
Others, do not care for the floating windows with regard to the UI. And I can understand the argument against them. Personally, I say allow the user to dock them with a click of an option box. Or undock them, whatever the case may be.
Despite me being quite friendly with the GIMP UI myself, Photoshop users such as my wife tend to find it annoying to use. Personally, I just blame this on her being a Mac user. And she in turns, calls me a Linux nerd. Clearly, it’s a podcast waiting to happen.
2 Comments
dandellion
May 27th, 2009
at 2:59am
Docking the windows would be great. But still…. I will accept being called a Linux geek but I still find GIMP’s UI terrible. I got used to Photoshop and it was a nightmare switching to GIMP. Over the years, I learned to live with it, and it improved in some ways but nothing beats the simplicity of PS. It’s still like programmers made it without ever watching a designer working.
One of the tricks of PS is that there is always several ways to do something. Other one is prediction. E.G. why on Earth pressure sensitivity control is closed every time I need it? And I need it all the time, especially right after selecting drawing tool. That thing is not supposed to be hidden in one of the tabs.
Glenn Roberson
May 27th, 2009
at 1:14pm
“Personally, I just blame this on her being a Mac user. And she in turns, calls me a Linux nerd. Clearly, it’s a podcast waiting to happen.”
LOL! :-D
Yes, there are pluses and minuses in comparisons with any app out there, and GIMP, PhotoShop, et. al. are no exceptions. I read the article and comments you linked to (floating windows
with regard to the UI) and agree with some and disagree with others. Of course, these opinions will vary from individual to individual, and if a distro was created that was easily customizable to each individual preference, that distro would become bloatware beyond belief, let alone the fact that some would always find some other feature to make customizable, making it a constant work-in-progress (which they are anyway, but it would be one more thing to customize constantly).
Something that I noticed; it WOULD be nice if the toolbars would minimize along with the main window, and it would be nice if, when you maximized the main window, that it would not be maximized underneath the toolbars. Of course, if you must work with the part under the toolbars, it’s not really a problem to move the toolbar, but sometimes one wants to see the whole project as large as they can get it, and you can’t, short of closing down the toolbars and then re-opening them when you want to continue editing. I also notice you can’t close the Toolbar without closing the entire app. One thing that would facilitate both of the above minor irritants would be the ability to minimize the toolbars independently and bring them back from the taskbar.
Like I said, each person sees things that person would like to see, and others would rather they keep those things the same. Myself, though I have preferences (who doesn’t?), I can always find work-arounds, and though they are irritants, they are minor irritants that I can compensate for, considering that the software is free…both price-wise and being open source.