Comment by nothis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nothis | Hacker News Reader

>If you’re sensing we don’t recommend Gimp very highly, we don’t. Gimp’s downside is difficult to discuss tactfully. Gimp suffers from forever living in the shadow of Photoshop. Gimp’s development is also closely tied to both Richard Stallman’s GNU values and the GTK+ widget toolkit. For the final time, your humble author will quit trying to rewrite this paragraph to explain what’s wrong with Gimp, and just scream “POLITICS!” and then run away. You figure it out.

Heh. Whenever you ask someone who doesn't work with image editors professionally (that doesn't mean "use it quite often", it means, having real-world deadlines depend on productivity), they'll point out how many "features" Gimp shares with Photoshop. But features don't mean shit. The interface is a bulky mess. Tons of "little" things don't quite work as expected. And then, when it comes to the truly heavy-weight features, of course Gimp doesn't compare.

Out of curiosity, I tried installing Gimp to see how much has changed (for the better?) since I last checked it out. The tool interface doesn't quite fit into its window by default so you have a tiny little scrollbar at the bottom that you have to scroll to see the full text. I resized it. After popping out a submenu, it once again didn't fit.

Free/open software projects are so idealistic, I kinda want to support it. But it's so rare that anybody in these communities gets interface design. It's not unheard of (Firefox is a positive example in my book) but it's rare. Photoshop's main advantage is it's clean interface: http://f64academy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/The-Interfa...

>> It's not unheard of (Firefox is a positive example in my book)

Well, I'm not trying to say it's not without it's difficulties, but designing a browser's UI is not even just not in the same court as putting together something like Photoshop, it's not even the same sport.

Photoshop's UI/UX isn't...great, itself, I'd say.

It's far from intuitive. I use the example of Photoshop when explaining software that really learns better when you have someone over your shoulder teaching you.

I find people can't even 'get' photoshop until I sit them down, spend an hour and show them the basics of what's what. Then they can explore.

This is...technically still good UI/UX. If, for such a 'pro' level tool, after an hour or less of slight instruction, a user can find their way around, that's cool - but I think the 'de facto' standard of UI/UX these days is 'pick up and instantly understand how to use'. PS doesn't translate to that, and GIMP could fill that void, and even create a better UI/UX, if they could find some dedicated, passionate people to do it.

Lord knows I wish I had the time.

The issue with Photoshop is that the core abstractions were built in 1990, for 1990 hardware and GUI conventions (based on ideas from software for 1970s graphics workstations). Over the years, additional features (sometimes gimmicky ones designed to demo well in 5 minutes) were piled on top of this core, but nothing was ever removed.

So the end result is sort of like a junk drawer filled with weird kitchen appliances. You have your grandma’s beat-up cast iron skillet and rusty chef’s knife with some chips in the handle; these need some maintenance but are still your most flexible workhorse tools. Then you have a melon baller and potato peeler you picked up at a flea market 2000, a popcorn maker that you bought for your college dorm in 2003, a waffle iron you found abandoned when you moved into a new apartment in 2007 that makes waffles shaped like zoo animals, and just last year you were given a fancy bluetooth sous vide stick as a wedding present but the bluetooth is kind of flaky and sometimes you need to re-enter the settings 4 or 5 times before it works.

After long experience, if you put everything together you can usually make whatever meal you want, but sometimes it takes some creative license with the recipes, and folks observing the process are mystified.

Open source UI design suffers from Benders “I am going to build my own theme park with blackjack and hookers, In fact forget the park..". Everyone tries to force their own way of doing things, mostly contradicting established standards. KiCad is another good bad example.

Car analogy would be really good cheap cars you steer with foot pedals.

Yup, summed up much better than I could.

FWIW Joel's coverage of user design is a great read for things like this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/fog0000000249.html

> Most flame wars you read about user interface issues focus on the wrong thing. Windows is better because it gives you more ways to resize the window. So what? That's missing the point. The point is, does the UI respond to the user in the way in which the user expected it to respond?

Most open source tools tend to be written by developers for developers and very rarely take into account the usage patterns of users in the domain which the tool fits. Want to know why Slack is tearing into all these areas that IRC could never get a foothold? You have the answer right there.

Yeah. Advertising budget and that fallacy where people associate cost with value.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com