GIMP – 2016 in review
gimp.org
gimp.org
What really impresses me though is how the GIMP has managed to remain such a constant ever-present factor on the free software desktop. It feels as if it has just always been there. Kudos to all the developers and maintainers!
I've recently tried GIMP after reading about an update on Hacker News (not this one) and it was an absolute disaster - took forever to start, nothing worked, UI was glitchy, and then I accidentally quit it because I didn't know what the empty, floating window was good for.
It's a pity that Gtk apps usually don't really work on macOS, it makes it much more unlikely for us Apple users to contribute on GitHub etc. :( I'd much prefer a native cross-platform toolkit to the web-based stuff that's popular now.
For example every time you open a tool (the small dialogs on the right) all others will collapse. Since you normally jump back and forth between these tools during drawing you have to ask yourself what went on in their heads when they decided to make this change.
Inkscape's UI is a point deserving of attention (the GIMP has a more elegant UI), but I can't say that I've found it to be in decline (on the contrary).
GIMP must have come a long way for those words to form a sentence!
Not that it was ever necessarily inelegant, but GIMP's reputation has always suffered from a big chunk of it's natural audience being experienced Photoshop users who find the transition jarring, and trash the UI for that reason. Hearing someone praise the interface is a bit unusual, still!
If you're looking at GIMP as something to attract Photoshop users, sure, the UI is bad because it's not the same as Photoshop. Sure, there are places you can look at Photoshop and say "wow, that's so much better for productive use" (ignoring feature differences where we know Photoshop is ahead of course). But this thing about GIMP having a UI that's _objectively_ bad is just unsupportable IMO.
I don't mind GIMP's UI being different from Photoshop. I last used Photoshop over a decade ago and that would be plenty of time to adjust to any good UI. The things that annoy me about GIMP's UI are things like the focus always being in the wrong place so I have to use the mouse, or windows being placed over things I need to see, or having to reselect my font styling every time I retype something. The problem isn't that Photoshop does something different, it's that what GIMP does is bad. I happily use Blender's UI even though it's like nothing else on Earth.
Edit: Just so I don't come off entirely as an ungrateful asshole, I use GIMP regularly and I appreciate the work that goes into it. I just get tired of people claiming there's nothing wrong with the UI, when there so clearly is. Single Window Mode was a huge step in the right direction IMO.
Does anyone know of any FOSS project that has a documented UI and UX contribution process?
But both of these are things that are fixed with Single Window Mode (which it's clear you know about). Complaining about a UI issue that has already been fixed does seem a bit ungrateful.
> or having to reselect my font styling every time I retype something
Ok, fair enough. That one is less obvious as there are two places to change the font. If you're in Single Window Mode, you'll see that when you select the Text tool, you'll get the Tool Options underneath. Change the font there and that becomes the new default. You can still choose different fonts in the floating selector for specific Text fields.
They aren't entirely gone though. Eg. if I find my chosen font in the font selector, click it or press enter to select it, and continue typing I'll end up with "Nimbus Sans Lsomerandomtext" in the font selection box.
Another example - the default shortcut for "Show / hide docks" is Tab, which is also the shortcut to cycle between tools. So which of those things happens depends on what part of the screen happens to be focused.
It's true that Single Window Mode made a lot of those sorts of problems go away, and possibly I'm holding on to the years of frustration at Gimp people saying there was no problem before it was finally introduced.
I didn't know the two font boxes did different things, I always used the one in the floating selector. Thanks for clarifying the behaviour. The floating selector is generally a source of annoyance for me. I can move it up or down, but that'll also move my text. So if I want to see what's under it while typing, as far as I know I'm SOL. Maybe there's some way to turn it off or make it behave differently?
Not anymore.
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?id=52ad5bb2a11e39f...
The thing with complaints is... Personally I'm prepared to handle a lot of that, even trash talking. But only if the user ends up providing a useful insight. Otherwise it's just a huge senseless loss of time for both parties.
Under macOS it also has this funny little issue of picking up on the most recently added input method for setting the UI language instead of the system's default/current selected input method. As a result my copy of the GIMP runs in Japanese despite the rest of the system being NA English.
GIMP is a hodgepodge that has at best marginally improved over the years. I'd give the GIMP UI credit for being good-enough but that's about it. I can understand that for someone people, a UI that can be simply understood is the main thing (Photoshop, deriving from pre-computer methods, is opaque in its operations but the now-obscure Corel Photopaint showed how a paint program could have an actual good interface - naturally, similar to CorelDraw and ... Inkscape).
Consider that there are wide variety of tasks that clearly take more time than necessary. The separation of the move, scale, rotate and so-forth operations into distinction tools is an constant annoyance (Inkscape has one tool for all this btw). If you input text over an image and then attempt to move this text, the background image move instead (you can do it with a little UI dancing but why, this should be simple). Setting the font and size of text is a constant pain also as mentioned by other posters.
Whereas most other programs, including the Adobe suite, are designed for the more underpowered window systems in osx and windows. That's why it is painful to use in those environments and environments like gnome which follow a similar design philosophy.
"In summary, ICCCM is a technological disaster: a toxic waste dump of broken protocols, backward compatibility nightmares, complex nonsolutions to obsolete nonproblems, a twisted mass of scabs and scar tissue intended to cover up the moral and intellectual depravity of the industry's standard naked emperor.
Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes. - Jamie Zawinski"
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disast...
I think I can safely speak for the team here: no, we don't think much about tiling or f-f-m.
Any changes to GIMP that make it more like Photoshop, or acknowledgement that there's anything about Photoshop that GIMP should emulate, are considered anathema.
It's always been a hot-button issue, so you get rationalizations like "The GIMP has lost its User eXperience (UX) maintainer. Jack Wallen thinks this could be good news for one of the most powerful open-source image editing tools," [1], and articles with touchy defensive titles [2] like "GIMP is Not a Photoshop Alternative", sections like "Why It’s Unfair to Compare GIMP to Photoshop", and quotes like "For example, when I’m talking about my Linux OS to a non-Linux user, and if he or she asks about Photoshop, my response is along the lines of “Nope, no Photoshop; I just use GIMP.".
It's like: "No puppet! No puppet! You're the puppet!"
And then there's the stubborn refusal to ever consider changing the name so it's not so offensive. That would be far too "politically correct".
[1] http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-gimps-bad-news-could...
[2] http://designinstruct.com/opinion/photoshop-alternative-gimp...
Further, GIMP suffers (as many mature products do) from a certain baroque-ness of feature. Its menus and features have grown from someplace less mature, to where they are. And it shows in the clumsy menus that make sense if you went along for the ride but for a 1st-timer are just confusing.
I'm not sure the GIMP's UI choices can generally be described as "innovating". I think they're generally just the obvious GTK+ default options, implemented without much testing or tweaking.
Some aspects of Photoshop's user interface are patented, but it's much safer and wiser to LOOK at them and be aware of them and read the patents, so you're consciously aware of what not to do accidentally, and able to work around them.
Note that the above is historical. GNOME selected GTK long ago and has somewhat strong armed GTK development away from GNOME. I don't follow either project closely enough to suggest how much.
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?id=52ad5bb2a11e39f...
The default situation was that the toolbox grabbed the focus when clicked. That meant various actions, eg. "Show/hide docks", didn't work if the last thing you clicked was the toolbox. That's an annoyance created by "accepting the defaults", that's thankfully now been fixed in light of real-world usability issues.
GTK+ is the GIMP ToolKit; the entire toolkit is GIMP's innovation.
Would you mind being a wee bit more specific? :)
My favorite: 'File' has 'Open' above 'Open as Layers', as if you'd more commonly want to destroy all your image layer info when opening an image file. In fact, with 'flatten' there's no need for 'Open' at all?
These things maybe made some sense at some time, who knows. But now, its like a blender went through the menus and scattered features at random.
You mean the script console? Where would you rather see it?
> To undo a brush, that's under 'Windows' inexplicably.
Er... I'm not sure what you mean here. Could you elaborate please?
> Filters like Feather and Distort are under 'Select'.
Well, they are not exactly filters, and they affect the selection rather than actual pixel data.
> Keyboard shortcuts are under 'Edit'.
We don't have a Settings menu :)
> The Plugin Browser tool is under 'Help'
Where would you place it?
> My favorite: 'File' has 'Open' above 'Open as Layers', as if you'd more commonly want to destroy all your image layer info when opening an image file.
I'm not sure I understand your reasoning.
> In fact, with 'flatten' there's no need for 'Open' at all?
Why?
And note I am using Gimp 2. So these things may have changed.
Scripts: I would imagine these would be under Tools.
A quick survey of apps show that options and settings are usually under Tools. Or Files.
And the Plugin Browser is an odd bird. Its details I struggle with when writing scripts. Its reasonable that a database could be under Help. I need it when I'm writing scripts, and no other time. And there's nowhere to go from there - no 'copy example to cut buffer' etc. I'm accustomed to viewing it from a Script console, so I can construct each argument. But not a thing I'm ever going to browse like other Help items.
Admittedly, nested menus is a fairly opaque way to categorize features. Everything is hidden unless you 'open the little door' like an Advent calendar. You can't search for anything without just doing a click-fest down the row. Its a shortcoming of the paradigm. Why others turned to the hated 'ribbon' etc - to make feature-hunting more transparent.
That could be me. I think I might have used it though, on a System 6 Mac with a 1-bit black-and-white screen. (resulting opinion: Photoshop doesn't support color)
Not really, no. Whenever people ask us to do smth like what Photoshop does, all we ask back is to explain why it is better. Perhaps you should answer that question every once in a while?
And also: why throw down the gauntlet about never changing the name from GIMP, unless your point is to offend people for being "politically correct", and marginalize your project so nobody will ever consider using it in a professional context, on purpose?
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/gimp
gimp (ɡɪmp) n
1. offensive slang US and Canadian a physically disabled person, esp one who is lame
2. slang a sexual fetishist who likes to be dominated and who dresses in a leather or rubber body suit with mask, zips, and chains
I've been Photoshop user since 1997.
> why throw down the gauntlet about never changing the name from GIMP, unless your point is to offend people
I'm not trained to deal with people who apparently seek to be offended.
I don't know how much training you have in the meaning of words of the English language, but do you understand this definition or not?
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/gimp
The noun gimp is sometimes used to describe a limp or another physical disability, although it's an outdated and offensive word to use.
If you comment on someone's gimp, call the person a gimp, or say, "Look at that guy trying to gimp across the parking lot without his crutches," you've chosen a very objectionable way to talk about a disability. People will know what you mean if you use the word, but they're likely to be offended by it. Gimp was first used in the 1920's, possibly as a combination of limp and gammy, an old slang word for "bad."
I'm afraid you still don't get it. We have no purpose to offend anyone. All the offense is self-inflicted.
I wish you spent this much time on making the world a better place to live in.
It's not just your use of the word "GIMP" that offends people, it's also the lengths you will go to deny it's offensive and instead lay the blame on your users and supporters themselves, for being narrow minded and easily offended. And also your Machiavellian approach of redefining the meaning of a word to be all about your own project and nothing else, then calling on your users and evangelists to do the Sisyphean task of re-educating the public, commercial and educational institutions that the well known historical dictionary and pop-culture definitions of "gimp" no longer apply. I'm not making this stuff up:
"Basically our approach is to redefine what "Gimp" means. ... If it is a problem in your local area (some areas in the US typically) that is unfortunate, but we need to rely on your powers to explain that we're helping in getting rid of the derogatory interpretation of the term "Gimp"." -Simon Budig, GIMP developer, April 11 2015, http://www.gimpusers.com/forums/gimp-developer/17151-gimp-in...
Year after year, many people give you feedback explaining why it's a problem. Time and again, you deny it, happily marginalize and ignore them, and try to turn it around by accusing those people -- YOUR USERS AND SUPPORTERS -- of being "narrow minded", which insults them and drives them away:
"I seriously doubt that the name is effectively keeping GIMP from being used. And I am all happy to ignore the very few people who are so narrow-minded as to having a problem with the name." -Sven Neumann, GIMP developer, December 12 2004, http://www.mail-archive.com/gimp-developer%40lists.xcf.berke...
I am trying to make the world a better place, by giving you honest feedback like you requested, with numerous citations and quotes of your leaders and users, and asking you to please consider not using such an offensive term, and not accusing your own users of being narrow minded and easily offended, because not only is it sabotaging the potential success of your own project in particular, but it's also an embarrassment to the open source community in general:
"Is there any thought on salvaging the marketing effort and renaming this product so that it can be taken seriously by people and institutions? Also, a big barrier to entry adopting Linux for people is a solid graphic manipulator. The bad branding is causing many people in my art communities around Austin to avoid Linux in general." -Sam Bagot, GIMP user and supporter, April 8 2015, http://www.gimpusers.com/forums/gimp-developer/17151-gimp-in...
1. Press Ctrl+Shift+A on keyboard
2. Select alignment mode with the mouse
3. Press Ctrl+Shift+F on keyboard
4. Change color with the mouse
5. Press Ctrl+Shift+L on keyboard
6. Change current layer with the mouse
1. Select alignment mode
2. Change color
3. Change current layer
I'm interested in learning Krita next. Krita is more explicitly an creation app but it also bleeds into other spaces in its new versions as it accumulates more features. It's gained animation tools, and its interface more closely resembles the classic PS look. Krita has a lot of velocity which makes me think it may surpass Gimp as an all-rounder in time.
At this point for me I am doing Krita for art and photo manipulation, and Inkscape for vector. Krita has really come a long way recently and works well on Windows as well as Linux. So far I have enjoyed working with many files at once in Krita and some of the live edit things (crop/selection sort of stuff) feels a bit nicer.
Granted it's not perfect, but it's usually good enough™
Also I find Photoshop's UI to be a lot prettier and more fun to use, even though I tried learning GIMP first.
Since I don't do any paper printing pre-processing that requires CMYK support, the duo above completely replaces Photoshop for my tasks.
Are there any other FOSS developers on patreon?
"OctoPrint is the snappy web interface for your 3D printer that allows you to control and monitor all aspects of your printer and print jobs, right from within any browser on your network."[0]
https://www.patreon.com/foosel
Disclaimer: I work closely with Gina on (open source) plugins for OctoPrint.
I assume even after patreon takes it cut (?) and German taxes she has enough money to live a comfortable life.
If you have a community printer without OctoPrint, you need to somehow move your G-code file to the shitty single-purpose laptop connected to the 3D printer, open it with the printer controller program, start printing, and hope the laptop keeps working throughout the print. Or you can replace the laptop with a Raspberry Pi and OctoPrint, and now you just need to open the printer page, upload the G-code file, press Print and watch it go.
This is a realistic recount of the 3D printing experience at Turku Hacklab, before and after OctoPrint was installed.
"Jehan is a developer of Free Software and the scenarist of ZeMarmot, but he is not the initial funding target. Right now, we want to fund the animation and the music. "
I'm just an hobbyist, but I like having FOSS alternatives to Photoshop.
That said, from reading the forums, the dev team seems chronically understaffed to the point that some of them are less than polite to users. This worries me a bit. If anyone has been looking of an open-source project in this space to get involved in, here's a very successful one that could use a hand!
Are referring to threads on BlenderArtists where users regularly give hell to Krita developers? :)
We try to keep up on tumblr, reddit, twitter, facebook, the forums, email, irc, phone calls even! We love our users, we love what our users are doing (see https://krita.org/en/item/made-with-krita-2016-the-krita-art...), but it sometimes gets very hard to deal with some people :-( I want to help them, but I cannot fix Ugee's drivers, and I want to help, but I also need to find time to code...
There are just too few people helping out; too few people who remember that Krita is an open source project, that it's really easy to start hacking on it, and that it's really easy to start helping out with helping others and doing bug triaging.
We might have done too good a job already: there are a lot of people who think that there's a big company with scores of employees and a professional help desk behind Krita. While it's me, Dmitry and a few others carrying the load.
Now that you mention it, I think your successful kickstarters left me with the impression you had funding and therefore workforce to a much greater degree than is actually the case. Is another fundraiser coming up? I didn't participate before, as I only found out about them after the fact...
Then sales of dvd's and so on, donations, and sometimes special, bigger donations, also bring in money, and I'm currently living from that income, together with my wife, since it turns that trying to combine a paying freelance gig for four days a week and doing krita for five, six days a week isn't sustainable.
So I'm looking to make supporting me working full-time on Krita sustainable as well; fortunately our three daughters have left the house, so it's just me and my wife who need to live on the income.
That makes for two people working full-time on Krita (one of them the project lead, which eats into coding time): then there are two volunteers who help with kickstarter and communication, a volunteer webmaster/UX designer, a volunteer bug triager, three or so summer of code students doing a 3-month project, and now and then a flurry of volunteers who want to hack on the codebase.
But developer-wise, it's about one and a half person shouldering most of the burden at the moment, as a quick look at the github mirror stats shows: https://github.com/KDE/krita/graphs/contributors
For this year's fund raiser (not sure if it'll be a kickstarter again), the theme is going to be "Stability, stability, stability!" -- we've added so much stuff in the past years, while still fixing about 1200 bugs a year, that it's time to take a breath and clear out the bugzilla backlog, and do some serious polishing.
But first, svg/vector tools, text tool and python scripting need to be done!
Time.
It's not that they're unaware of the importance of non-destructive editing. But adding it to GIMP required a pretty complete overhaul of the underlying architecture, which ended up taking much more time than initially anticipated. Basically the developers had to choose between completely stopping the development of GIMP and focus all their time re-implementing and re-writing the underlying architecture, or to keep working on GIMP as it was, and to slowly changing the underlying architecture bit by bit as and when they found the time. They chose the latter option.
Non-destructive editing has been in development, on and off, for about 15 years now.
Even though I hear this quote ringing in my ear, and I can't seem to shake it, mainly because of who said it:
"Yet I think that a few programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, will always be superior to competitors like the Gimp—for some reason, I really don’t know why! I’m quite willing to pay good money for really good software, if I believe that it has been produced by the best programmers." [1]
If I were to give them one additional project member it wouldn't be a developer. It would be a product owner who uses Photoshop daily.
But no-one sings praise to the Photoshop UI either, I've heard numerous complaints about it getting worse and worse all the time. It's a matter of people being used to PS and not willing to change.
There was a project earlier which had a Photoshop-clone UI for GIMP (called GimpShop or something), but it didn't magically solve all the issues. These days core GIMP has a single window interface available.
I've personally never had an issue with GIMP's UI after I grokked some of the basic concepts (e.g. "make selection and flood fill" - not "draw rectangle"). I see the lack of non-destructive editing and (historically) bad color management as a bigger issue.
I'm sure GIMP would accept UI-related contributions but the list of volunteers is short.
Average Joes (nor non-contributing professional artists/photographers) are typically not beneficial to these projects, at worst they are a hindrance: tons of help requests (in the bug tracker), low effort bug reports, requests for Windows/OSX binaries (without offering to help in maintenance), etc. You can find some ugly examples if you look into bug trackers / mailing lists of some of these projects.
We can only hope that a benevolent philanthropist comes by and drops a few million dollars in to getting full time, paid developers into GIMP, Blender, Inkscape and all the other open source productivity tools but until that happens it's a mostly volunteer effort and the contributors can choose what to focus on.
If Photoshop suits you, great. I've managed to do all my image editing in GIMP for the past 20 years and I'm very glad the project exists.
I am not trying to tell the volunteers what to work on, but if we can't give honest product feedback to FOSS projects on the basis that they are volunteer efforts, then those projects will never succeed broadly. If you don't care about succeeding broadly that's fine, but I get the impression from gimp.org that they would like to.
This disregard for "normal users" that often exists in the FOSS community is so completely and utterly self-defeating. If you want FOSS to succeed you need projects to be successful in the marketplace. You need "normal users" to reach that scale.
Yes, this is unfortunate but I don't see how it could change. I'm afraid that maintaining a scale big enough to include "normal users" and competing with commercial options would require more resources (read: money for full time development) than there are volunteers available. It's not just a matter of changing attitude.
The GIMP project has already exceeded the threshold of immortality and it's an invaluable tool, so I consider it a "success" regardless whether it's user friendly or competitive with commercial options.
Why can't you give feedback to the GIMP team?
The purpose of GIMP is to edit images, not fight political correctness or offend disabled people or reclaim offensive words.
Do you understand this definition or not?
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/gimp
The noun gimp is sometimes used to describe a limp or another physical disability, although it's an outdated and offensive word to use.
If you comment on someone's gimp, call the person a gimp, or say, "Look at that guy trying to gimp across the parking lot without his crutches," you've chosen a very objectionable way to talk about a disability. People will know what you mean if you use the word, but they're likely to be offended by it. Gimp was first used in the 1920's, possibly as a combination of limp and gammy, an old slang word for "bad."
Secondly, we don't brush off feedback. We listen to it and extract as much useful information as we can. If you personally can't provide any useful feedback, then there's little we can do.
Telling somebody you don't do something that they just saw you do with their own eyes is called "gaslighting", which is what you are now doing.
And now you have another chance to do it again, and you've asked me for feedback, so let's see how that works out.
If you really sincerely don't brush off feedback, then please answer my questions about your understanding of the word "gimp", and address other people's feedback that I will quote with linked citations, instead of brushing off our honest feedback yet again.
Since you're asking me to provide feedback, then here it is:
Here are some specific question for you to either answer (which I would sincerely appreciate) or brush off again (which will yet again prove my point that you're guilty of glibly brushing off feedback and gaslighting):
1) Do you agree or disagree with the dictionary's definition of the word "gimp", or can you cite a legitimate dictionary that says that the primary definition of the word "gimp" is the name of an image editor?
2) Do you agree or disagree with the dictionary I cited that "gimp" is "an outdated and offensive word to use"? Provide citations that support your point, without making unsupported claims about what other people think.
3) What is the purpose of naming an image editor "GIMP", and stubbornly refusing to change it after many people over many years give you lots of feedback that it's offensive?
4) Is GIMP's primary mission to "reclaim" the word "gimp", or strike a blow against "political correctness", or is it merely intended to edit images? Is it the primary mission of GIMP users to re-educate the world about the meaning of the word "gimp", or are they mainly expected to use GIMP for editing images, instead of redefining words?
Here is a typical example of honest feedback met with a glib response that shows how GIMP team members and evangelists make audacious claims like "our approach is to redefine what "Gimp" means," while making false unsubstantiated claims about how the majority of the world understands the meaning of the word "gimp":
http://www.gimpusers.com/forums/gimp-developer/17151-gimp-in...
Sam Bagot, 2015-04-08 17:58:53 UTC (almost 2 years ago)
Gimp in private schools and educational institutions
Hi, my name is Sam and I have been involved in several projects ranging from art classes in public schools to local art communities around Austin. I am a Linux person and use Gimp for everything. I keep running across the same problem though. The name Gimp is offensive to people and suggests inferiority to Photoshop. In my experience, institutions would much rather pay for a professional product than teach a class to children involving gimps. Which is also inappropriately associated with BDSM sex. Either way it's looked at. A product called Gimp can't be used by a public or private school.
Is there any thought on salvaging the marketing effort and renaming this product so that it can be taken seriously by people and institutions? Also, a big barrier to entry adopting Linux for people is a solid graphic manipulator. The bad branding is causing many people in my art communities around Austin to avoid Linux in general.
What are the plans on renaming and success?
Simon Budig, 2015-04-11 10:54:13 UTC (almost 2 years ago)
Gimp in private schools and educational institutions
Hi Sam.
Sam Bagot (dsmurl@gmail.com) wrote:
Basically our approach is to redefine what "Gimp" means. In the vast majority of the world "Gimp" refers to the Gnu Image Manipulation Program, the alternate interpretation is unknown to most people in the world.
Renaming Gimp would hurt our brand badly and is not an option.
If it is a problem in your local area (some areas in the US typically) that is unfortunate, but we need to rely on your powers to explain that we're helping in getting rid of the derogatory interpretation of the term "Gimp".
Bye, Simon
5) How do you respond to this typical honest longstanding feedback (I can cite many other instances of this type of feedback, but let's focus on the previous recent one and this older one):
http://www.gimpusers.com/forums/gimp-user/2965-please-change...
Roland Hordos, 2006-09-29 14:54:48 UTC (over 10 years ago)
Please Change the Derogatory Name
Hi,
While all other credible opensource projects are gaining ground in a professional IT setting, the GIMP is being held back because of the instant derogatory impact of the name. If someone who can champion this task reads this, please humble yourself for the sake of this amazing software that some of us are embarrassed to promote, or simply won't until the name is changed.
Thank you.
Roland Hordos IT Manager
6) Do you stand by this glib brush-off of that feedback from GIMP team members: "On the techincal side Sven Neumann has explained he does not wish to see the project renamed and will not accept patches to make it easier for third parties to change the name." http://www.advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/diary.html?start=1...
7) Do you agree with Sven Neumann's unsupported claim that there are "very few people" who have problems with the name, and his accusation that those people are "so narrow minded"? Do you accuse me personally of being narrow minded for having a problem with the name? http://www.mail-archive.com/gimp-developer%40lists.xcf.berke...
8) Do you have any proof or scientific surveys you can cite that support Sven Neumann's extraordinary claim that "For most people on this planet, GIMP doesn't have any special meaning." Because he makes unsupported claims that contradict all the dictionary definitions I can find, which all say "gimp" is offensive, and none of which make any mention of the GIMP image editor. http://www.gimpusers.com/forums/gimp-user/2965-please-change...
9) Who funded this worldwide survey of most people on the planet about the meaning of the word "gimp", where can I read it, and why didn't you put all that money into developing GIMP, listening to feedback from its users, fixing its bugs, improving its user interface, supporting its developers, and changing its name instead?
You asked for this feedback, and now you have it. I am really looking forward to seeing you take my honest feedback that you requested seriously, and addressing my questions this time around, instead of glibly brushing them off and gaslighting me yet again.
That's not feedback. That's repeating tired arguments ad nauseam to drive people mad.
> Here are some specific question for you to either answer (which I would sincerely appreciate) or brush off again
I'm not playing your little game, Don. I'm glad you have this much spare time, but I'm sorry to see that you make the worst possible use of it.
GIMP is GNU Image Manipulation Program. It's an acronym. That is all.
Do something useful with your time. Play with your kids. Make love to your wife. Read a good book. And when you have actual feedback about things that are important, like usability or features, do come back.
I know personally, as an developer and an open source contributor, I'm going to work on something which either scratches my own itch or something which interests me. I certainly wouldn't be spending my own time working on the roadmap of a product owner if it doesn't fall into one of the two categories anyways.
Sorry but I think it's more likely the opposite and the user base is more developer centered than artist centered. How are devs supposed to understand how to move this app forward if no one even uses it to it's full potential.
Getting tired of technies pointing fingers at the artists when they fail to understand how to make great creative tools.
The pool of programming-capable professional artists isn't very large in the first place and I can't blame them for focusing on their jobs and deadlines instead of developing the software they use.
That said, I have no sympathy for people who complain about the issues but do not contribute in any way. Being rude and mean to the developers doesn't help anyone, go ahead and use the commercial alternatives and shut up.
— a huge momentum that Photoshop has accumulated over the decades;
— huge R&D and marketing budget at Adobe;
— whole businesses built around educating Adobe tools (think Envato et al.).
And the list goes on.
Which is why it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to "surpass other options". But it makes a hell of a sense to create a sensible sophisticated tool for a certain user base. Which is kinda what we do with GIMP, as much as time permits.
BTW, love your photos :)
1) Photoshop had a 10+ year head start and tons of patents.
2) Adobe can pay programmers to work on it as their main and sole focus. GIMP is stuffed by volunteers.
3) Adobe can pay programmers to work on boring parts. OSS programmers tend to navigate to the "glorious" and "fun" parts.
4) Adobe has extensive testing equipment and top notch relations with top designers using its products for feedback.
5) At some point GTK, the toolkit GIMP (and Gnome and tons of other stuff) is based on, had just one developer working actively on it. I know because he blogged about it, and was fed up. That's not really what you want for your core infrastructure.
6) Adobe actively maintains Windows and OS X releases. GTK has mostly given up on other platforms and had historically had lots of problems.
Aka CADT...
>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.
This is plain unacceptable. Yes, this is 99% there, it's a minor thing, it's probably thousands of man-hours to avoid a gazillion other bugs and issues and even get to this point. But it's not enough. A UI for such a tool, where you actually fiddle with it a lot, has to be perfect. Perfect on a technical level, perfect in a Apple-y "let's ensure that the empirically determined most-used features are shown first and less-used stuff doesn't clutter precious screen-space" sense that takes long and frustrating trial-and-error involving real-world feedback. You can't have a button that's 15 pixel larger than it has to be. You can't have a layout arrangement that wastes half a window because it's poorly aligned. You can't have spacing that's inconsistent enough to make you hesitate clicking an icon because you're not sure if it's connected to some other element of the interface.
Open source/free software needs a user interface push, but apparently that's not a sexy field to work on.
You really should prepare for a ton of bricks about to crush you down as people discover that you think adjustment layers, layer effects, or CMYK support is "5% of Photoshop's deep ocean of features" :)
Xamarin Studio is built using Gtk and actually looks nice on macOS, or at least I have seldom heard people complain about it:
https://blog.xamarin.com/the-making-of-xamarin-studio/
I think the problem is that Gimp is understaffed to produce a Photoshop killer with any toolkit.
I'm not a professional user but it does more than enough for my needs.
[Oh yes. The interface is awful, too]
It's really a shame. As an example, it's been more than a decade and they still haven't fixed the utterly absurd "layer boundaries" system that it has. There's a reason no other image editor does that, and it's because it makes no sense.
(To elaborate, every layer in GIMP has a defined "boundary rectangle" which cannot be drawn outside of.)
There are UIs that are easy to learn, but less efficient in daily use.
There are UIs that are difficult to learn, but efficient in daily use by experienced users.
Good UIs steer an appropriate course between those options, according to the needs of their users.
GIMP's "boundary rectangle" system provides a learning barrier for new users, and a regular annoyance for experienced users. If people don't like it, the problem isn't that they're Adobe shills, the problem is that it's indefensibly bad.
OK I guess it saves some ram if you need to run GIMP on a Raspberry Pi, but this is not a sensible thing for GIMP to be optimizing for.
I fully accept that it's run by volunteers and it's OSS and I could patch it myself etc. I don't blame the volunteer devs for not making a perfect program in their spare time. But I wish people would lay off blaming discontent with GIMP's UI on the unsuitability of its users or the existence of Photoshop.
Yes, it's is kinda absurd. And no, it doesn't magically happen. Someone should sit down and actually write the code. It could be you. Or maybe not.
Most of the time, if I'm trying to draw outside the boundary, then it's because I've got the wrong layer selected. So it saves me from drawing on the wrong layer and then having to deal with trying to get the changes moved to the correct layer.
In cases where the above doesn't hold (i.e., I actually want to draw inside the smaller layer), then it's easy enough to expand the layer's size.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
My assumption is that there is at least an image boundary, and just GIMP allows layers to have a different boundary to the image. But if I didn't allow this, then every time I moved a layer, it would get cropped to the image boundary.
How does not having a layer boundary work?
Then, you'd have to keep all those multiple copies in case you ever needed to make adjustments to that image in the future. With non-destructive editing, you have one file which contains everything. It's not just a gimmick!
I would add to that list the following activities not requiring programming knowledge:
- triage incoming bug reports and close obsolete ones
- learn the build process and recruit new developers
- form a design team
1. when you start it up from launcher, it doesn't show up in the foreground, so you have to click the icon again
2. if you have multiple monitors and you plug out the monitor with the gimp window it sometimes crashes. It doesn't happen every time, but as I precaution I first move the Gimp window to the other monitor before disconnecting.
2X displays might seem frivolous to non-Mac developers but they've been the norm on OS X for several years now.
Free = not enough, paid = expensive and bloated
Getting tired of this rule when macOS has apps on the sweet spot at affordable prices.
Is there any guide or resource where I can learn GIMP for doing just the MS-Paint level stuff (all of it, MS-Paint feature list is fairly small, the XP version). I will use that as a way of getting comfortable with GIMP, and then move on to exploring other features.
(Note: I don't know photoshop either).
It's much more powerful than the old paint program, but much simpler than Gimp. It only works on Windows though, so it may not work for you.
Now it's 1. Load PNG 2. Edit PNG 3. Export as PNG (retyping the extension) 4. Quit 5. Say that yes, you do want to quit even though there are unsaved changes (because there are not). 6. Worry about whether there really WERE unsaved changes after all.
I fully understand why graphics professionals prefer the XCF-only approach; what I can't understand is why the GIMP people flatly refused to let the rest of us use the software the way that suits us.
(or File menu + "Overwrite {filename}". I complain a lot about GIMP's UI but I don't really see a problem here.
I wonder if it came from LibreGraphics collaborations as Inkscape did something very similar.
What's weird is that The GIMP used to win plaudits for allowing user-set defaults (particularly it's shortcut system). Why this change, "save only allows native format", wasn't introduced as an option I don't know.
It's like what you do with `fc-cache`, but on Windows you get per-application caches for apps that uses fontconfig (they carry their own copies of fc). Every time you install a new font or update your system, you have to do a recache for each of these apps.
And rewriting in a still-developing language du jour, even less so.
Because it works and is a full-featured mature product. Nothing stops anyone from starting a new project based on modern insights and try to become the next GIMP, but such an endeavour does not imply that this project should simply stop its development. The GIMP is used by a lot of people in their daily work or for personal projects. It's free, it works, and most crucially, it's here today. Why abandon it?
I'm sure the GIMP developers will adopt new technologies as they come along when and where they make sense (they are migrating to GTK3, and who knows, perhaps some parts will be replaced by Rust code).
With the current state of documentation, learning GTK+ is impossible unless you are willing to dive into dozens of other people's projects in multiple programming languages to figure out how all the pieces come together. The lack of literature also makes it hard to know the difference between good, idiomatic constructs (within the context of Gobject/GTK+), and hacks which work by coincidence.
I get the feeling many GTK+ based projects suffer from lack of manpower, and I'm pretty sure this is why.
It took me weeks to figure this out when I learned GObject/GTK+ back in the early 2000s. I ended up writing my own tutorial on the subject due to the existing documentation being so utterly lacking (https://gitlab.com/rleigh/ogcalc is its current home). I later ported all of my GObject-C code to C++; GObject has few redeeming qualities. It's a good example of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should". Yes, you can do OO in C; no, it's not a good idea. It's the wrong tool for the job, and you should use a more appropriate tools.
Manually constructing vtables, manually casting all type information away, manually propagating exceptions and creating closures etc. It doesn't take long to realise that this is all pointless make-work. Just use C++. It has classes, inheritance, exceptions and proper type safety, all built in. What takes several hours with GObject-C takes just a few minutes with C++, and... there are zero bugs. With GObject-C, all that hand-crafting of vtables and other fiddly details are a source of subtle bugs; the compiler won't pick up on a lot of stuff you can get wrong while the C++ compiler does it all for you. This is something which becomes increasingly bad when you try to refactor--it may have been correct and then be subtly incorrect, and you won't realise. When I ported all this to C++, it uncovered a few nasty and obscure bugs which had been hidden for years.
All this adds up to why many GTK+ projects lack manpower. Writing, maintaining and extending these codebases are a Sisyphean task. Unfortunately, the "C at all costs for all situations" mentality driving much of this (and I was guilty of such an attitude before I discovered that C was not the be-all and end-all of languages) prevents them being moved to more maintainable languages despite it being pretty straightforward to do so (I've done it for several codebases).
Back in the mid-2000s I was employed to write a commercial application using GTK+; I used GTKmm and the other C++ bindings. Even then, it was an exercise in pain; bugs galore at all levels and poor or nonexistent documentation; there's a reason lots of developers were and are abandoning it for Qt, and the documentation and quality of implementation are key factors in that. It's unfortunate because it didn't have to be that way. But in reality, using GTK+ doesn't make economic sense--it takes longer to produce something which is of inferior quality and harder to maintain, so it's both more expensive in developer time, and it's a poorer product for the end user.
While it's now years since I used it seriously, I look at the current dropping of piles of functionality and APIs which have been around for two decades, and I wonder if they have even the slightest concern for the two decades of third-party code using this stuff. It's rhetorical; they clearly don't. Sad that hacking on the toolkit for its own sake has a much higher priority than using it to develop actual applications, but that's what it is.
Believe me, the stuff The Gimpnhave been doing for over a decade and a half now is not easy, and I can assure you full rewrites never quite go as expected.
Still, I suspect it would be fun for someone to try!