On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 06:11:59PM -0500, Paul Bloch wrote:

Hello,
I'm an occasional Gimp user and prefessional graphic designer. I was wondering where and how do I get involved with user-interface development. I have several ideas that I think would better the experience. I'm planning on writing a longer article about usability for osnews.com and part of that is talking about Gimp. However I didn't want any criticism I make to suggest I have any hostility torwards the community or the project. And considering people's sentiment's torwards Gimpshop, I think it'd be best if I go about this "the right way", by speaking to the development team and community first.

The best advice is to do your homework. Don't just complain about the current UI, but actually propose something to make it better. That proposal should be well researched, and it shouldn't be something that has been discussed to death and shot down already, which means reading past discussion on the web, mailing lists, and the bug tracker, unless you have well thought out rebuttals for all the reasons it was rejected to begin with. You need to show that you've actually thought through the issues seriously. Expecting developers to spend hours or days or weeks implementing an idea you've only thought about for 5 minutes isn't a realistic attitude.

Basically, designing good UI is *hard*. Just because you use computers doesn't make you an expert on it, though lots of people like to think they are. Often times people don't even know what they want themselves. It all boils down to actually spending time to think about the problem.

-Yosh

On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 06:11:59PM -0500, Paul Bloch wrote:

I'm an occasional Gimp user and prefessional graphic designer. I was wondering where and how do I get involved with user-interface development.

Have you seen the GIMP project on OpenUsability.org? That might be a good place to start. The URL is:

http://openusability.org/projects/gimp

Von: Matt Gushee

On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 06:11:59PM -0500, Paul Bloch wrote:

I'm an occasional Gimp user and prefessional graphic designer. I was wondering where and how do I get involved with user-interface

development.

Have you seen the GIMP project on OpenUsability.org? That might be a good place to start. The URL is:

http://openusability.org/projects/gimp

Make sure that your read the past discussion there - some are good examples of how not to start a discussion there.

The current thread about the tabbed interface is taking a nice and IMO correct direction, though.

HTH, Michael

Paul Bloch wrote:

Hello,
I'm an occasional Gimp user and prefessional graphic designer. I was wondering where and how do I get involved with user-interface development. I have several ideas that I think would better the experience. I'm planning on writing a longer article about usability for osnews.com and part of that is talking about Gimp. However I didn't want any criticism I make to suggest I have any hostility torwards the community or the project. And considering people's sentiment's torwards Gimpshop, I think it'd be best if I go about this "the right way", by speaking to the development team and community first.

Thanks,
Paul
openartist.net

Well, I think a good start could be to try 1.0, 1.2, 2.2 and 2.3 in order to see the evolution of the interface. Some things have clearly improved and many critics are usually based on a bad experience 4-5 years ago with 1.0 and 1.2 versions.

As an example, the introduction of the editable docks and the option for "transient" windows have removed most of the validity of the most repeated critic about the gimp interface: absence of WiW mode (à la Windows Photoshop/PaintShopPro). What was already possible 5 years ago with good window managers (Enlightenement supported grouping windows) is now possible with common window managers (e.g. Metacity/KWin) and WiW becomes absolutely pointless.

Also, previewing fr plugins was quite a good interface improvement. As the fact that some windows do not pop up where you do not want them to.

On the other hand, the new GTK open/save dialogue has been subject to many critics, in Gnome and in Gimp. Gimp developers have tried to implement fixes for most of the annoyances. But the dialogue is still quite bothering. However, the blame is to be put on the gnome HIG, not on Gimp developers.

Just my 0.02 euro cents, as a user.

Regards,

Olivier