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Using GIMP for Paper Prototyping the Colors Menu

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Using GIMP for Paper Prototyping the Colors Menu Akkana Peck 27 Aug 21:43
  Using GIMP for Paper Prototyping the Colors Menu michael chang 27 Aug 21:50
   Using GIMP for Paper Prototyping the Colors Menu michael chang 27 Aug 21:56
  Using GIMP for Paper Prototyping the Colors Menu Sven Neumann 29 Aug 23:37
Akkana Peck
2005-08-27 21:43:43 UTC (over 18 years ago)

Using GIMP for Paper Prototyping the Colors Menu

Anyone pulling CVS has probably noticed that most of GIMP's color-related functions have been moved into a new toplevel Colors menu (as discussed in bug 116145).

There's some concern that the menu is a bit long, or could be organized better. Sven has been enthused about paper prototyping lately (see discussion in his blog entry) -- that's where you write things down on slips of paper and shuffle them around to come up with the order that seems most intuitive. The problem is, you need to get everybody together in a room for that, which is hard with a worldwide development community.

Apparently someone (in gnome?) is working on some sort of card-sorting app to help with distributed paper prototyping. But it occurred to me (based on an offhand comment I read on slashdot, of all places) that GIMP itself could be a pretty good paper prototyping system. After all, you can have lots of text layers and drag them around with the move tool, and there's even a way to save your work when you're done.

So I wrote a little quickie paper prototyping script-fu. It's at http://shallowsky.com/software/gimp/paperproto.scm Drop it into your ~/.gimp-?.?/scripts directory and Refresh Scripts. It registers under Xtns->Script-fu->Misc.

Fill the textarea with a list of your paper prototyping terms, one per line, and it will make an image where each phrase is a text layer you can drag around.

Anyone concerned with the Colors menu, please try this and drag stuff around and see if you find groupings you like better than the current ones.

For the current Colors menu, the strings to paste into the paperproto dialog are (copy and paste the whole block):

Image Mode Color Balance...
Hue-Saturation...
Colorize...
Brightness-Contrast...
Threshold...
Levels...
Curves...
Posterize...
Desaturate...
Invert
Value Invert
Auto
Histogram
Colorcube Analysis...
Adjust FG-BG
Alien Map 2...
Color Exchange...
Color Range Mapping...
Colormap Rotation...
Gradient Map
Palette Map
Sample Colorize...
Compose...
Decompose...
Recompose...
Border Average...
Channel Mixer...
Color to Alpha...
Colorify...
Filter Pack...
Hot...
Max RGB...
Retinex...
Semi-Flatten
Smooth Palette...
Draw HSV Graph...

Happy prototyping!

...Akkana

michael chang
2005-08-27 21:50:38 UTC (over 18 years ago)

Using GIMP for Paper Prototyping the Colors Menu

On 8/27/05, Akkana Peck wrote:

card-sorting app to help with distributed paper prototyping. But it occurred to me (based on an offhand comment I read on slashdot, of all places) that GIMP itself could be a pretty good paper prototyping system. After all, you can have lots of text layers and

As a side note, this is actually a very good way of using the GIMP -- I used it myself when trying to solve a puzzle I was given by a teacher. Quite handy!

It might help if you bind the text layers to a coloured layer, (either white, or white with an outline, or something), so they're easier to see. [Especially if trying to create a layout that fills multiple conditions.]

michael chang
2005-08-27 21:56:32 UTC (over 18 years ago)

Using GIMP for Paper Prototyping the Colors Menu

On 8/27/05, michael chang wrote:

It might help if you bind the text layers to a coloured layer, (either white, or white with an outline, or something), so they're easier to see. [Especially if trying to create a layout that fills multiple conditions.]

Sorry, said this before looking at the script. Very nice! [I don't believe it would be sane to say maybe considering optionally having coloured backgrounds/background outlines per layer (to catagorize items, maybe), nor to allow for all the pieces to be stuck in a pile in the corner -- but then again I believe I'm a very insane person. Although that's what I meant, on reconsideration, that would be too much work and looping IMO for such a simple script.]

Sven Neumann
2005-08-29 23:37:22 UTC (over 18 years ago)

Using GIMP for Paper Prototyping the Colors Menu

Hi,

Akkana Peck writes:

Apparently someone (in gnome?) is working on some sort of card-sorting app to help with distributed paper prototyping.

The application I am speaking of is being developed by the team behind openusability.org. The main advantage will be that it will includes code for analysing the results.

Anyone concerned with the Colors menu, please try this and drag stuff around and see if you find groupings you like better than the current ones.

For the current Colors menu, the strings to paste into the paperproto dialog are (copy and paste the whole block):

If you use the menu labels you imply that the user knows what the filters behind these names do. Otherwise you are just sorting the terms, not the actual meaning. We should try to avoid that and let users sort cards that have a short description of the filter instead of asking them to sort the menu labels.

But certainly your card-sorting prototype can already help the way it is. It just requires experienced gimp users.

Sven