MArk Finlay wrote:

Before I begin, I've just joined the list so please excuse me if these issues have been rasied before:

I'll ask for the same forgiveness as a pure user/non developer. Just my 0.02 eurocents

1. Everyone loves a good splash screen, but now Gnome has startup-notification which kinda makes them superflous. Startup notification lets you know that your applications is starting but it is not as intrusive as a splash. I have edited my Gimp Launcher to add the line 'StartupNotify=true' and to change it to run 'gimp-1.3 -s'. To me this feels much snappier than before. And eventually when nautilus has integrated support for startup notification it would make sense to do the same for the gnome mime-type.

I want the splash screen! ;) I've seen Jimmac has done a new (or updated) one in the changelog for today, and already look forward to see it!

-!-

2. To a lot of new users the way Gimp works is quite alien. A lot of users just get used to it, but some find it too weird. One of the hardest things to get used to is right clicking on an image to access the menus. Personally I've been using gimp long enough for this to be second nature to me, but on my computer I've turned the menubar in the image window because other people who use my computer prefer it.

Yes but you agree that this right click menu is very practical. So the effort to learn to use it (not that hard to do, honestly, even windows explorer (=file manager) has a right click menu) is worth it.

I still use the right click, and never even notice the menu bar, but for every non-gimp user who sits down at my computer this effectively "un-breaks" the gimp for them. So what I am suggesting is that this toolbar be enabled by default.

For users who want to use the rightclick menu, the menubar is un-obtrusive and can be turned off if they really hate having it there, and for a lot of users this will be invaluable. I know the option is there already, but it's the defaults that matter. Newbies are not going to go looking for a menubar that they don't know exists.

Just to say I do not think it is "un-obtrusive". My default image size is 256*256, and the menu is too big to fit in the image window (or just creates a huge empty window).

However, this could be a "tip" for the tips and tricks window. Well, I know most users don't read this window anyway.

-!-
3. This one I'm stealing from Alan Horkan(who i've cced). It would make much more sense to me if the "Image->Transform->Rotate X Degrees" items where instead labeled "Fip Horizontal", "Rotate Left" and "Rotate Right"

Rotate 180° is not Flip horizontal. Flip horizontal of a "3" is a "3", Rotate 180° gives a "E"
Moreover, there is much more information in rotate 90° than in rotate left. rotating 30° is also a left rotation. It might not be perfect as it is now, but the best could be "rotate 90° (left)" or "rotate left 90°"

-!-

4. It be great in the Font selection dialog to be able to change the text from "my mind is going..." to see other characters in the font. Also it'd be better by default to replace this text with a selection of characters, numbers, upper and lower case letters and sysbols.

-!-

If these ideas are not totally rejected i'll file them as bugs....

that is indeed the best thing to do.

Regards,

Olivier.

I want the splash screen! ;) I've seen Jimmac has done a new (or updated) one in the changelog for today, and already look forward to see it!

It's funny. Splash-screens, and the ritual habitual changing thereof, have become a GIMP institution (where's that 'gimp splashscreen history' page nowadays?). I'd be sorry to see them go by default. :)

On Tue, 18 Mar 2003 17:48:32 +0100, Olivier Ripoll wrote:

MArk Finlay wrote:

1. Everyone loves a good splash screen, but now Gnome has startup-notification which kinda makes them superflous. [...]

I want the splash screen! ;) I've seen Jimmac has done a new (or updated) one in the changelog for today, and already look forward to see it!

Besides, not everyone is running the GIMP under GNOME. I use GNOME on all of my Linux boxes, but none of my Solaris boxes have GNOME installed so the startup notification would not work there.

2. To a lot of new users the way Gimp works is quite alien. A lot of users just get used to it, but some find it too weird. One of the hardest things to get used to is right clicking on an image to access the menus. [...]
For users who want to use the rightclick menu, the menubar is un-obtrusive and can be turned off if they really hate having it there, and for a lot of users this will be invaluable. I know the option is there already, but it's the defaults that matter. Newbies are not going to go looking for a menubar that they don't know exists.

I agree with this. As an experienced user, I would not use the menu on top of the image windows because I can work faster with the right-click menu, but it should be enabled by default so that new users do not feel lost for the first time they use the GIMP. I would go as far as suggesting that the default should be to have a WiW MDI model (at least for the Windows version, maybe even for other platforms) because this would allow the GIMP to be more similar to other image editing programs. Cross-application consistency is more important than the efficiency of any single application, for those who do not use this application frequently. The majority of GIMP users do not use it frequently.

So I think that the default configuration of the GIMP should have the menubar in the image window or even use a full MDI model. There could be a "tip of the day" suggesting to disable this menubar and to use only the right-click menu in order to save space and to work faster. The default mode should focus on cross-application consistency.

-Raphaël

On 18 Mar 2003, at 22:04, Raphaël Quinet wrote:

On Tue, 18 Mar 2003 17:48:32 +0100, Olivier Ripoll wrote: > MArk Finlay wrote: > > 1. Everyone loves a good splash screen, but now Gnome has > > startup-notification which kinda makes them superflous. [...] > > I want the splash screen! ;) I've seen Jimmac has done a new (or updated) one > in the changelog for today, and already look forward to see it!

Besides, not everyone is running the GIMP under GNOME. I use GNOME on all of my Linux boxes, but none of my Solaris boxes have GNOME installed so the startup notification would not work there.

Well, something could be written that notices if you're running a GNOME system and, if so, asks you at start-up if next time you want to see the splash window. GNOME users could deselect that option there and then or in the preferences.

2. To a lot of new users the way Gimp works is quite alien. A lot of users just get used to it, but some find it too weird. One of the hardest things to get used to is right clicking on an image to access the menus. [...] For users who want to use the rightclick menu, the menubar is un-obtrusive and can be turned off if they really hate having it there, and for a lot of users this will be invaluable. I know the option is there already, but it's the defaults that matter. Newbies are not going to go looking for a menubar that they don't know exists.

I agree with this. As an experienced user, I would not use the menu on top of the image windows because I can work faster with the right-click menu, but it should be enabled by default so that new users do not feel lost for the first time they use the GIMP. I would go as far as suggesting that the default should be to have a WiW MDI model (at least for the Windows version, maybe even for other platforms) because this would allow the GIMP to be more similar to other image editing programs. Cross-application consistency is more important than the efficiency of any single application, for those who do not use this application frequently. The majority of GIMP users do not use it frequently.

So I think that the default configuration of the GIMP should have the menubar in the image window or even use a full MDI model. There could be a "tip of the day" suggesting to disable this menubar and to use only the right-click menu in order to save space and to work faster. The default mode should focus on cross-application consistency.

If people want to check out how GIMP with MDI would work, Cinepaint (formerly known as Film Gimp--notice the capitalized 'GIMP' :-)) uses an MDI model on what the screenshots suggest all supported systems. The Windows version also comes with a nice mouse pointer the size of the current brush. Doesn't quite seem to work yet, but very handy.

See if you're interested.

Branko Collin (collin@xs4all.nl) wrote:

On 18 Mar 2003, at 22:04, Raphaël Quinet wrote:

On Tue, 18 Mar 2003 17:48:32 +0100, Olivier Ripoll wrote: > MArk Finlay wrote: > > 1. Everyone loves a good splash screen, but now Gnome has > > startup-notification which kinda makes them superflous. [...] > > I want the splash screen! ;) I've seen Jimmac has done a new (or updated) one > in the changelog for today, and already look forward to see it!

Besides, not everyone is running the GIMP under GNOME. I use GNOME on all of my Linux boxes, but none of my Solaris boxes have GNOME installed so the startup notification would not work there.

Well, something could be written that notices if you're running a GNOME system and, if so, asks you at start-up if next time you want to see the splash window. GNOME users could deselect that option there and then or in the preferences.

Please be careful not to introduce a gnome dependency because of this.

[CinePaint]

The Windows version also comes with a nice mouse pointer the size of the current brush. Doesn't quite seem to work yet, but very handy.

Since this pops up again and again, I thought I'd share my thoughts on how this might be implemented.

We could generate an outline of the current brush in the same way as we create an outline for the selection. The result would be a black/white image that roughly shows the size/shape of an brush. (For brush pipes we could simply use the first brush in the pipe or combine the black/white for the various brushes. Since the latter would be a pretty black image for huge brush pipes a better idea would probably be a bounding box or something like that.)

Changing the X11 Mousepointer itself is most probably not an option, since some platforms have a size limit on that pointer (32x32 or so - pretty small). Also moving an additional shaped window synchronously with the mouse pointer sounds like a bad idea to me, since complex shaped windows have a big performance impact on the X Server.

So we could simply XOR the image on the image view window. The GimpDrawTool could be extended with functions to draw a bitmap on the image and the GimpPaintTool would optionally use this feature to place the above mentioned image on the view area.

Should be pretty straightforward, except maybe for the image generation from the brush, since reusing the code for the selection is most probably not possible.

I won't implement this - the Path tool is more urgent (Hi Jimmac! :-)

Bye, Simon

On 18 Mar 2003, at 23:14, Simon Budig wrote:

Branko Collin (collin@xs4all.nl) wrote:

[CinePaint]

The Windows version also comes with a nice mouse pointer the size of the current brush. Doesn't quite seem to work yet, but very handy.

Since this pops up again and again, I thought I'd share my thoughts on how this might be implemented.

We could generate an outline of the current brush in the same way as we create an outline for the selection. The result would be a black/white image that roughly shows the size/shape of an brush. (For brush pipes we could simply use the first brush in the pipe or combine the black/white for the various brushes. Since the latter would be a pretty black image for huge brush pipes a better idea would probably be a bounding box or something like that.)

Changing the X11 Mousepointer itself is most probably not an option, since some platforms have a size limit on that pointer (32x32 or so - pretty small). Also moving an additional shaped window synchronously with the mouse pointer sounds like a bad idea to me, since complex shaped windows have a big performance impact on the X Server.

So we could simply XOR the image on the image view window.

I take it the infamous XOR patent is not longer valid? (, applied for in 1980.)

I won't implement this - the Path tool is more urgent (Hi Jimmac! :-)

Yea path tool! Go Nomis, go Nomis, go Nomis! :-)

Branko Collin (collin@xs4all.nl) wrote:

On 18 Mar 2003, at 23:14, Simon Budig wrote:

So we could simply XOR the image on the image view window.

I take it the infamous XOR patent is not longer valid? (, applied for in 1980.)

Invalid because of not enforced up to now - the GIMP already XORs for a lot of years now... :-)

I won't implement this - the Path tool is more urgent (Hi Jimmac! :-)

Yea path tool! Go Nomis, go Nomis, go Nomis! :-)

I just started a bit hacking on it. I went at bug 108318 first but removing the strong reference causes all sort of weird crashes in other places. How could the vectors tool be notified when its path gets removed? GIMP_IS_VECTORS () most probably won't help, since the location where the pointer points to most probably still is a valid GimpVectors - on the Undo Stack...

Mitch? Sven?

Bye, Simon

Raphaël Quinet wrote:

On Tue, 18 Mar 2003 17:48:32 +0100, Olivier Ripoll wrote:

MArk Finlay wrote:

1. Everyone loves a good splash screen, but now Gnome has startup-notification which kinda makes them superflous. [...]

I want the splash screen! ;) I've seen Jimmac has done a new (or updated) one in the changelog for today, and already look forward to see it!

Besides, not everyone is running the GIMP under GNOME. I use GNOME on all of my Linux boxes, but none of my Solaris boxes have GNOME installed so the startup notification would not work there.

2. To a lot of new users the way Gimp works is quite alien. A lot of users just get used to it, but some find it too weird. One of the hardest things to get used to is right clicking on an image to access the menus. [...]
For users who want to use the rightclick menu, the menubar is un-obtrusive and can be turned off if they really hate having it there, and for a lot of users this will be invaluable. I know the option is there already, but it's the defaults that matter. Newbies are not going to go looking for a menubar that they don't know exists.

I agree with this. As an experienced user, I would not use the menu on top of the image windows because I can work faster with the right-click menu, but it should be enabled by default so that new users do not feel lost for the first time they use the GIMP. I would go as far as suggesting that the default should be to have a WiW MDI model (at least for the Windows version, maybe even for other platforms) because this would allow the GIMP to be more similar to other image editing programs. Cross-application consistency is more important than the efficiency of any single application, for those who do not use this application frequently. The majority of GIMP users do not use it frequently.

So I think that the default configuration of the GIMP should have the menubar in the image window or even use a full MDI model. There could be a "tip of the day" suggesting to disable this menubar and to use only the right-click menu in order to save space and to work faster. The default mode should focus on cross-application consistency.

-Raphaël

After a good night of sleep ("la nuit porte conseil" ;) ) I had of one more of my stupid ideas that may solve the "default configuration" issue. When one launches gimp for the first time (even on multiple user systems), there is this orange dialog which asks you where you want the gimp config directory to be set, and what is the resolution of the screen. Perhaps it could be asked there, together with an image illustrating it, which of the "with" or "without" menu style the user wants. Of course, there would be a mention that it can be changed afterwards in the preferences.

Regards,

Olivier.

"Adam D. Moss" wrote:

I want the splash screen! ;) I've seen Jimmac has done a new (or updated) one in the changelog for today, and already look forward to see it!

It's funny. Splash-screens, and the ritual habitual changing thereof, have become a GIMP institution (where's that 'gimp splashscreen history' page nowadays?). I'd be sorry to see them go by default. :)

I think a nice collection of splash screens have been collected by Carol for the next gimp.org website
http://mmmaybe.gimp.org/about/
Tigert also have some on his web page IIRC. Regards,

Olivier.

Hi,

MArk Finlay writes:

1. Everyone loves a good splash screen, but now Gnome has startup-notification which kinda makes them superflous. Startup notification lets you know that your applications is starting but it is not as intrusive as a splash. I have edited my Gimp Launcher to add the line 'StartupNotify=true' and to change it to run 'gimp-1.3 -s'. To me this feels much snappier than before. And eventually when nautilus has integrated support for startup notification it would make sense to do the same for the gnome mime-type.

huh? I doubt that most of our users use Nautilus or even GNOME. The current CVS version of The GIMP now properly supports startup notification and there's a command-line option to disable the splash. What more could you possibly ask for?

I still use the right click, and never even notice the menu bar, but for every non-gimp user who sits down at my computer this effectively "un-breaks" the gimp for them. So what I am suggesting is that this toolbar be enabled by default.

If the menubar wouldn't be cut off at the right side but wrap, we could even consider to do this. Since it is rather broken at it is now, I don't want to see it as the default. Of course packagers are free to change the default if they are bundling GIMP for newbies That's as easy as changing one line in the system-wide gimprc.

4. It be great in the Font selection dialog to be able to change the text from "my mind is going..." to see other characters in the font. Also it'd be better by default to replace this text with a selection of characters, numbers, upper and lower case letters and sysbols.

you should at least look at the latest version before you start to criticize things that are known to be under construction.

Salut, Sven

On 19-Mar-2003, Sven Neumann wrote:

Hi,

MArk Finlay writes:

1. Everyone loves a good splash screen, but now Gnome has startup-notification which kinda makes them superflous. Startup notification lets you know that your applications is starting but it is not as intrusive as a splash. I have edited my Gimp Launcher to add the line 'StartupNotify=true' and to change it to run 'gimp-1.3 -s'. To me this feels much snappier than before. And eventually when nautilus has integrated support for startup notification it would make sense to do the same for the gnome mime-type.

huh? I doubt that most of our users use Nautilus or even GNOME. The current CVS version of The GIMP now properly supports startup notification and there's a command-line option to disable the splash. What more could you possibly ask for?

I use openbox by itself, with no desktop environment at all. I guess I represent the majority?

sisob@eircom.net (2003-03-18 at 1624.31 +0000):

1. Everyone loves a good splash screen, but now Gnome has startup-notification which kinda makes them superflous. Startup notification lets you know that your applications is starting but it is not as intrusive as a splash. I have edited my Gimp Launcher to add the line 'StartupNotify=true' and to change it to run 'gimp-1.3 -s'. To me this feels much snappier than before. And eventually when nautilus has integrated support for startup notification it would make sense to do the same for the gnome mime-type.

Probably could be done in the gimp.desktop and other files that apply for that cases.

3. This one I'm stealing from Alan Horkan(who i've cced). It would make much more sense to me if the "Image->Transform->Rotate X Degrees" items where instead labeled "Fip Horizontal", "Rotate Left" and "Rotate Right"

The rotates should keep the degrees, "rotate 90 degrees right" and "rotate 90 degrees left" (or CW and CCW maybe, but that is criptic that way or long if expanded to words), that way you know it is a fixed rotation, not a free rotation, it is clear about what it does.

But you have to check what flip horizontal is, the proper name it should get is "rotate 180 degrees", it is not a horizontal flip, but "double flip"... which is even more complex than "rotate 180 degrees" to understand. It also makes the menu items look as a group.

GSR

Hi,

MArk Finlay writes:

One idea is to put a toggle for it in the view menu and have it on by default. This way it will only take an expert user a second to turn it off(obviously it would stay off in future sessions too).

there is (of course) a toggle for it in the menu. But this menu only affects this particular view (again of course).

I think that Gnome2 has proven to an extent that what works for newbies in not necessarily restrictive for expert users, but I made that point in my origional e-mail so I'm not going to start waffling about it again

umm, this is the first time I hear this opinion. What I heard so far is that Gnome2 lack so much of the beloved configurability that a lot of expert users prefer to stay with the 1.4 version for now.

Salut, Sven

On Tue, 18 Mar 2003 23:14:47 +0100, Simon Budig wrote:

Branko Collin (collin@xs4all.nl) wrote: [CinePaint]

The Windows version also comes with a nice mouse pointer the size of the current brush. Doesn't quite seem to work yet, but very handy.

Since this pops up again and again, I thought I'd share my thoughts on how this might be implemented.

We could generate an outline of the current brush in the same way as we create an outline for the selection. The result would be a black/white image that roughly shows the size/shape of an brush. (For brush pipes we could simply use the first brush in the pipe or combine the black/white for the various brushes. Since the latter would be a pretty black image for huge brush pipes a better idea would probably be a bounding box or something like that.)

Changing the X11 Mousepointer itself is most probably not an option, since some platforms have a size limit on that pointer (32x32 or so - pretty small).

But if the brush is small at screen resolution (size of the brush * zoom factor), then using the X cursor is the best option because it will probably be the fastest solution. So it would be better to check what is the largest cursor supported by the X display and to use the cursor for drawing the outline, as long as it fits in the acceptable dimensions. Unfortunately, it looks like GDK does not provide direct access to XQueryBestCursor(), which would be the correct way to check the sizes accepted by the current display. Another option is to use gdk_cursor_new_from_pixmap() and check if it fails.

Also moving an additional shaped window synchronously with the mouse pointer sounds like a bad idea to me, since complex shaped windows have a big performance impact on the X Server.

So we could simply XOR the image on the image view window. The GimpDrawTool could be extended with functions to draw a bitmap on the image and the GimpPaintTool would optionally use this feature to place the above mentioned image on the view area.

Some servers are relatively fast at XORing large bitmaps over the image, but some others are slow. For other servers, it could be faster to draw a set of lines showing the outline of the brush (if the outline is not too complex). Even for a given server, the optimal choice can change if the GIMP is used remotely (over the network) instead of locally.

Also, at some zoom factors, the brush outline could as large as the screen, or even larger. Using a bitmask for this could consume too much memory, while using line segments would not have a big impact.

All these things are summarized in bug #32498: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32498

In particular, check the comment that I posted on 2002-01-08, quoting Mattias Engdegård about line segments vs. bitmasks.

-Raphaël

On Tue, 2003-03-18 at 17:48, Olivier Ripoll wrote:

Just to say I do not think it is "un-obtrusive". My default image size is 256*256, and the menu is too big to fit in the image window (or just creates a huge empty window).

However, this could be a "tip" for the tips and tricks window. Well, I know most users don't read this window anyway.

I'm working with very small images (icons) all the time and the menu just feels weird since I can only access a minimal number of items.

On the other hand this is about a sensible default. Having it on by default may help new users find the functionality they would fail to find in a right click menu. Those are the people that would use gimp to sharpen their image, crop it, rotate it and save to a different format. People like me and Olivier would have no trouble turning it off. I think it's less of a pain for us to turn it off than to spoil new-user experience with a trivial UI issue like hiding basic functionality like this.

cheers