On 12/7/06, Adrian Likins wrote:

1. In the toolbox, the fg/bg color, and brush/patter/gradient boxes should be on.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=365226

Sven mentions Colors editor palette there. I would also suggest revisiting it and giving it some UI love. In particular, color picker button and HEX entry filed could go into same row, and BG/FG switcher could have a twice smaller height. That would save some pixels for those running GIMP on laptops. We care about compact UI, am I right? :)

Alexandre

On Wed, 06 Dec 2006 18:36:53 -0500, Adrian Likins wrote:

Sven mention on irc the issue of choosing what the default setup for 2.4 should be. So here are some of my thoughts:

1. In the toolbox, the fg/bg color, and brush/patter/gradient boxes should be on.

Maybe. But another option (mentioned in your point 2) would be to make sure that the color selector tab is always included in the default session (even when upgrading from a previous gimp version!) and that it is visible by default (first tab). In this case, I am not sure that we need the separate indicator. We can save some precious desktop space by not having it on by default.

2. Add color selector and palette dialogs to the default "Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo | Brushes, Patterns, Gradient" dialog that comes up currently.

Yes, it should be there by default.

The default left-side panel should be: Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo | Color, Brushes, Patterns, Gradients. Adding Palettes there by default could also be useful, especially with the new (and very useful) palette color picker in the color selector.

3. Change the default image size (any particular reason it is 377x233?) I'd suggest 1024x768

I'd suggest VGA (640x480) or even less, so that it fits on a 1024x768 screen. Web statistics from July 2006 show that only 19% of the users have screens larger than 1024x768. While I expect this percentage to be higher among GIMP users (maybe close to 40% or 50%?), we should still make sure that the default settings work fine on a typical laptop screen (widescreen laptops are not so common yet even if they represent the majority of the new sales in many countries).

4. Don't show the devices dialog by default. It's a bit redundant with #1, and only shows one device for most users.

Right.

5. It might be nice to have the stock round/square brushes be dynamic brushes by default. (If I understand correctly, theres a small concern that this might break some existing scripts?)

This has been discussed before. From my point of view, I am not concerned at all about the scripts but I am more concerned about usability aspects. The current bitmap brushes allow you to quickly switch between different predefined sizes without having to play with the brush size slider. This is not so easy to do with scalable brushes.

6. A wider selection of basic brushes would be good, especially with the #5.

Agreed. Any proposals?

7. I'd like to see some high resolution brushes included, especially now with brush downscaling being easy to get to.

Again agreed. Any proposals? ;-)

8. Maybe some more examples of pixmap/hose brushes. I kind of hate that green pepper and vine brush (and I made them...). Not sure what exactly yet, but I have some ideas:
a. something that makes obvious use of the directional pipes would be good.
b. Maybe a simple tube drawing brush (aka, a rendered sphere with the spacing set to a low value) c. Maybe a couple more (bigger) sizes of the Pencil Sketch brushes
d. a wilber brush? (totally useless, but hey... it's wilber) e. a series of flipped versions of the "Caligraphic Brush" series

Some time ago, I found some nice examples of directional brushes: one with ants and the other one with feet. Alas I don't have them anymore and I am not sure about their licence terms. But something like that would be nice to include in the default GIMP package.

I have seen many PSP brushes showing random water drops, snowflakes or other things similar to the animated "Sparks" brush. Adding one or two of those could also be nice. These may not be very useful for graphics professionals, but it would certainly be nice for the amateur web designers or for those who want to impress their friends by creating cheezy Christmas cards with GIMP.

9. I'd turn on "Save Tool options on exit" by default. We have a "reset to default" in the dialogs if someone wants to reset the tools.

Hmmm... I'm not sure about that one. I easily forget that I had lowered the brush opacity in my previous gimp session and sometimes it takes me a while to see that something is wrong. I prefer to start in a predictable state. Of course I can turn off the auto-save feature. But I am not sure about what the default should be...

10. Man, am I ever tired of those default pattern options. (Mostly my fault unfortunately). They didn't age very well. Not sure if we can do much about it without breaking scripts.

We could add more without breaking scripts. On the other hand, I am not sure if it is worth it. I do not use them much anyway.

11. Ditto with the gradients, though we should probably add another example or two of using the dynamic color stuff in gradients

Agreed. The first 4 gradients after the FG to BG ones are not so interesting (Abstract 1, 2, 3 and Aneurism).

-Raphaël

Hi,

On Wed, 2006-12-06 at 18:36 -0500, Adrian Likins wrote:

1. In the toolbox, the fg/bg color, and brush/patter/gradient boxes should be on.

The brush/patter/gradient boxes are pointless as these can be accessed from the respective tool options. I haven't been using those for years. The fg/bg color selector is different as the Colors tab is not a completely equivalent replacement. It lacks the color history.

3. Change the default image size (any particular reason it is 377x233?) I'd suggest 1024x768

The default image size is 420 x 300. The weird 377 x 233 size is only in unstable releases. It is there to make sure that developers work with odd-sized images when testing new stuff.

4. Don't show the devices dialog by default. It's a bit redundant with #1, and only shows one device for most users.

I don't think the devices dialog has ever been part of the default setup.

9. I'd turn on "Save Tool options on exit" by default. We have a "reset to default" in the dialogs if someone wants to reset the tools.

No, please not. We have had tons of complaints from 2.2 users who didn't understand why their tools changed behaviour. We changed this early in the 2.3 series to not to save the tool options by default and this has so far turned out to be the better choice. Changing the tool defaults should be left to expert users who know what they are doing.

Sven

Hi,

On Thu, 2006-12-07 at 15:34 -0500, Adrian Likins wrote:

5. It might be nice to have the stock round/square brushes be dynamic brushes by default. (If I understand correctly, theres a small concern that this might break some existing scripts?)

This has been discussed before. From my point of view, I am not concerned at all about the scripts but I am more concerned about usability aspects. The current bitmap brushes allow you to quickly switch between different predefined sizes without having to play with the brush size slider. This is not so easy to do with scalable brushes.

Why isn't this as easy with scalable brushes? We should have a decent set of read-only parametric brushes in different sizes. That way you can switch as quickly. But you get the advantage that the brush is also nicely scaled with the new brush size control in the paint tool options. While this also works with pixmap brushes, parametric brushes scale a lot nicer. IMO we should only keep pixmap brushes for brushes that can not be implemented as parametric ones.

hard and soft circles, hard and soft squares, hard and soft "calligraphy" brushes, maybe
a wider set of "grunge" brushes. I'll see if I can come up with an actual set.

Having more good brushes in the default setup would indeed be nice. We should probably also throw out some old ones then or move them to gimp-data-extras. Adrian, perhaps you want to take this overhaul of the brushes set into your hands? Would be good to have a single person to coordinate the effort and to make sure that a nice coherent set of brushes ends up in CVS at some point.

Sven

Hi,

On Fri, 2006-12-08 at 11:00 +0100, Sven Neumann wrote:

The fg/bg color selector is different as the Colors tab is not a completely equivalent replacement. It lacks the color history.

We discussed this shortly on the gimp-user list and it seems that it would be very much appreciated if we would turn the color history into a color selector. It would live in it's own tab in the Colors tab like the other color selectors (triangle, watercolor, palette, ...). That way the Colors tab would become equivalent to the color selection dialog and we could actually consider to ship without the FG/BG color indicator in the toolbox.

Anyone interested in doing this change? For now it would probably be OK if the color history color selector would live in the core (just like the palette color selector). So all that would have to be done is to move some code from app/widgets/gimpcolordialog.c to a new widget derived from GimpColorSelector. The files app/widgets/gimpcolorselectorpalette.[ch] can serve as example.

Sven

Hi Adrian,

On Sun, 2006-12-10 at 21:24 -0500, Adrian Likins wrote:

Yup, I'll take this and start putting together a set of brushes.

will you also address http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=322176 ?

Sven

Hi,

On Mon, 2006-12-11 at 11:31 -0500, Adrian Likins wrote:

And on the subject of defaults for 2.4, I wonder if it would be useful to include a set of default tool option presets for each tool?

I can't think of any useful presets right now and I think we have loads of more important things to fix before 2.4. In the long run, yes, perhaps we should provide such presets.

Sven

Raphaël Quinet wrote:

On Wed, 06 Dec 2006 18:36:53 -0500, Adrian Likins wrote:

1. In the toolbox, the fg/bg color, and brush/patter/gradient boxes should be on.

Maybe. But another option (mentioned in your point 2) would be to make sure that the color selector tab is always included in the default session (even when upgrading from a previous gimp version!) and that it is visible by default (first tab). In this case, I am not sure that we need the separate indicator. We can save some precious desktop space by not having it on by default.

I prefer to have these showing in the toolbox. When I lost them a some time ago after a cvs up, the first thing I did was find out where they went and how to get them back.

I run with a screen resolution of 1280x1024. The two main GIMP dialogs fill almost the full screen height near the right side of my desktop so I work with image windows over on the left side of my screen.

I don't see any real benefits from the amount of desktop space that can be saved by turning the display of these features off.

Hi,

On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 15:18 -0500, Kevin Cozens wrote:

I prefer to have these showing in the toolbox. When I lost them a some time ago after a cvs up, the first thing I did was find out where they went and how to get them back.

You could at least have tried to live without them for a while before judging about this change. That's one of the main problems with the GIMP user interface. People are afraid of trying new things and miss what they have learnt to use. So, the fact that you immidiately renabled these widgets only show us that you are reluctant to changes. It doesn't show that these widgets are in any way important and should be part of the default setup.

I don't see any real benefits from the amount of desktop space that can be saved by turning the display of these features off.

It's not primarily a question of screen estate. The question is whether these widgets are useful enough for the average user to have them enabled by default. We have to try not to add too many things or new users will be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of user interface elements.

Sven

Hi,

to avoid misunderstandings, I would like to point out that I very much welcome the discussion about the defaults for 2.4. But I think that we should better have it on the gimp-users list. I don't think that developers are good at doing user interface decisions. Most of us (and that includes me) are way too used to the way that things are and used to be for years. We are not capable of seeing the problems and possible solutions unless we listen to our users.

That doesn't mean that we should do whatever the users tell us to do. By no means. But we should listen to them and give them a chance to participate in such decisions. I would very much welcome a merge of the users and developer lists.

Sven

On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 10:04:38PM +0100, Sven Neumann wrote:

to avoid misunderstandings, I would like to point out that I very much welcome the discussion about the defaults for 2.4. But I think that we should better have it on the gimp-users list. I don't think that developers are good at doing user interface decisions.

Well unfortunately we users are ultimately at the mercy of you developers, so all we can do is *hope* that you are good at the UI decisions, since we have to live with them....

That doesn't mean that we should do whatever the users tell us to do. By no means. But we should listen to them and give them a chance to participate in such decisions. I would very much welcome a merge of the users and developer lists.

That is an excellent idea! I, as a user, got onto this developer list some time ago for some forgotten reason. But it has been fascinating to watch you discuss the evolving 2.4. There seem to be some who are interested in what we poor schmucks out here in Userland have to say, while others seem to take the attitude of "Let them eat cake". Free software is a wondrous thing.

Scott Swanson

Sven Neumann writes:

On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 15:18 -0500, Kevin Cozens wrote:

I prefer to have these showing in the toolbox. When I lost them a some time ago after a cvs up, the first thing I did was find out where they went and how to get them back.

You could at least have tried to live without them for a while before judging about this change. That's one of the main problems with the GIMP user interface. People are afraid of trying new things and miss what they have learnt to use. So, the fact that you immidiately renabled these widgets only show us that you are reluctant to changes. It doesn't

I'm not Kevin, but I had the same reaction he did. In my defense (and maybe Kevin's), when the toolbox selectors disappeared, the new dialogs didn't automatically make themselves visible, so it just looked like a bug that they were suddenly gone, and getting back my color selector was my first priority. A new user wouldn't have that problem.

But Sven is right (even though he's talking to Kevin) that some of us didn't give the new layout a fair chance. So I've been doing that for the past couple days, and it actually works fine. I like not needing the popup any more, and for most operations it doesn't require any more clicks than the old layout.

There are still two things I miss. Neither of these will stop me from using the new setup, but I wonder if they might cause a problem to non-geeky users:

1. Being able to drag from the foreground or background swatch into the image. Sometimes I use the keybindings (ctrl-, and ctrl-.) but other times it seems more natural to drag the color, and if the swatches aren't exposed (because they're hidden in a tab), it would take two extra clicks to drag them (two clicks assuming that I need the layers dialog visible most of the time, so I need to switch back).

2. The sliders for RGB. I can do HSV adjustments in the big color rectangle, but if I want to adjust RGB values (for instance, to ensure that I'm getting pure red) I have to use the HTML field or click the R, G and B buttons in sequence. I can't just glance at the three sliders like with the old dialog.

Hi,

On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 11:13 -0800, Akkana Peck wrote:

I'm not Kevin, but I had the same reaction he did. In my defense (and maybe Kevin's), when the toolbox selectors disappeared, the new dialogs didn't automatically make themselves visible, so it just looked like a bug that they were suddenly gone, and getting back my color selector was my first priority. A new user wouldn't have that problem.

Unless we change something, users upgrading from 2.2 will have exactly this experience though. Currently we migrate the sessionrc, so the docks setup is kept when upgrading to GIMP 2.4. The gimprc is also migrated, but since we have changed the default value, the fg/bg color indicator is going to disappear when upgrading.

I see several ways to fix this:

(1) we decide that the fg/bg color indicator is kept by default (2) we don't migrate the user's sessionrc and force her to start with the default dock layout
(3) we do major hacks during the migration process

I don't like the third option because such hacks are likely going to introduce bugs. Especially since the migration code is difficult to test.

2. The sliders for RGB. I can do HSV adjustments in the big color rectangle, but if I want to adjust RGB values (for instance, to ensure that I'm getting pure red) I have to use the HTML field or click the R, G and B buttons in sequence. I can't just glance at the three sliders like with the old dialog.

But you can do that in the Slider color selector, can't you?

Sven

On Wed, 06 Dec 2006 18:36:53 -0500, Adrian Likins wrote:

8. Maybe some more examples of pixmap/hose brushes. I kind of hate that green pepper and vine brush (and I made them...). Not sure what exactly yet, but I have some ideas:

some more :
1) Mouse cursors (nice for screenshots :-) 2) Sea shells
3) Sand
4) Small stones
5) Greeting card edge vines (line drawing like) [My next project :-) ] 6) Random cubes, 3d letters (anyone good at blender?) 7) Planets

Akkana Peck wrote:

I'm not Kevin, but I had the same reaction he did. In my defense (and maybe Kevin's), when the toolbox selectors disappeared, the new dialogs didn't automatically make themselves visible, so it just looked like a bug that they were suddenly gone, and getting back my color selector was my first priority.

That is what happened to me. The selectors disappeared from below the display of tool icons and there was no colour selector tab in the bottom portion of the Layers/Channels/Paths dialog. I turned on the toolbox selectors again so I could have the items back again.

I will start trying out the new system. The main downside I see at the moment is that of increased mouse mileage from needing to move between the top of the toolbox dialog to the bottom of the Layer/Channels/Paths dialog to alter colours or do the simple operation of switching foreground and background colours. I know there is a keyboard shortcut for the operation but I don't remember what it is. As an occasional user of GIMP I don't tend to remember the dozens of keyboard shortcuts in the program. I tend to rely on the use of icons, buttons, and menus.

Hi,

On Fri, 2006-12-15 at 01:54 -0500, Kevin Cozens wrote:

I will start trying out the new system. The main downside I see at the moment is that of increased mouse mileage from needing to move between the top of the toolbox dialog to the bottom of the Layer/Channels/Paths dialog to alter colours or do the simple operation of switching foreground and background colours.

Put the Colors tab closer to the toolbox then?

Sven

Sven Neumann wrote:

Unless we change something, users upgrading from 2.2 will have exactly this experience though. Currently we migrate the sessionrc, so the docks setup is kept when upgrading to GIMP 2.4. The gimprc is also migrated, but since we have changed the default value, the fg/bg color indicator is going to disappear when upgrading.

>

I see several ways to fix this:

(1) we decide that the fg/bg color indicator is kept by default (2) we don't migrate the user's sessionrc and force her to start with the default dock layout
(3) we do major hacks during the migration process

I don't see why the default settings for new installs should have any affect on the migration of an existing installation. A new install will wind up with rc files with all the default settings.

When migrating settings from an older version of GIMP, the state of the old settings should be preserved. The user may have customized the layout to their liking. GIMP shouldn't "arbitrarily" change those settings

If you want to turn off some of the indicators below the toolbox during migration then the equivalent tabs in the Layers/Channels/Paths dialog should be turned on or there will likely be complaints from users when some things "go missing". However, this would be a bit of a hack. It would be simpler to leave the settings alone while migrating them.

Sven Neumann wrote:

On Fri, 2006-12-15 at 01:54 -0500, Kevin Cozens wrote:

I will start trying out the new system. The main downside I see at the moment is that of increased mouse mileage from needing to move between the top of the toolbox dialog to the bottom of the Layer/Channels/Paths dialog to alter

Put the Colors tab closer to the toolbox then?

I may do that evenutally but you suggested trying out the new layout first rather than immediately settings things back the way I was used to them in previous versions of GIMP.

I'm going to be paying more attention to how I use GIMP in future to see if there is a better way to organized the two main dialog boxes (at least for me).

Hi,

On Wed, 2006-12-20 at 15:37 -0500, Kevin Cozens wrote:

I don't see why the default settings for new installs should have any affect on the migration of an existing installation. A new install will wind up with rc files with all the default settings.

No, it won't, for purely technical reasons. The personal gimprc file only stores settings that differ from the defaults. So if a user didn't disable the color area in the toolbox, then there won't be an entry that explicitely enables it. Now that we changed the default value, the color area will disappear for this user.

Sven