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Comment by Andrex | Hacker News Reader

Funny you mention GIMP, that's one OSS program that needs a UI refresh badly.

They've had something going since at least February '07 (going by the refresh wiki edit history), but I don't see any sign that it's produced a tangible product.

Lots of pretty mockups though.

On that note: I thought that Inkscape was really cool until I tried Blender. The UI experience for Blender is hundreds of times easier because many of the things that you have to do regularly (like scrolling back and forth) are shortcuts.

Not to derail the conversation too much, but Inkscape also needs some improvement where UI is concerned, many things that should be easy are not.

I assume you mean the Blender 2.5 beta? The UI experience for Blender 2.4 and earlier was the least easy interface I've ever seen.

Granted it's fantastic once you know how to use it, but good luck with that.

Thanks for resolving that particular cognitive dissonance; I tried Blender once, then gave up in bewilderment after a few hours. I may have to give it another shot.

Sorry for not being clear. Blender is by no means an example of a superb UI. The learning curve is exceedingly high and even after hundreds of hours behind the controls there are many things I do not understand. Much of this is because the UI controls do not make sense. Of course, with the release of 2.5 there were some improvements, but it is still not that great.

That being said, one thing they did EXTREMELY well was put shortcut keys on all of the things that you do frequently. After doing Inkscape for a while I get really frustrated by the lack of easy navigation.

I disagree. I, against popular opinion, like Gimp's UI a lot. It just feels natural to me.

Same, especially on Linux where I can just give it its own workspace, the lack of container window isn't a problem.

I love the right-click interface in GIMP because it makes almost everything I need to do immediately available. But why on earth don't they sort and/or categorize the tool palette icons?

I have not really seen any evidence of GIMP being that poor of a UI. The biggest complaint is the multi-window interface for which single-window mode is currently in alpha and should be out in a few months or so.

There's a lot of duplication (Colors, Tools>Color Tools; Brush in Toolbox & as Dockable window), things that are out of place (View>Show Grid, Image>Configure Grid), common workflows that require more clicks than in other editors (Select-Copy-DeSelect-Paste), odd choice of defaults (When resizing canvas, choose "resize all layers" instead of "None"), and other odd design choices (Toolbox can't be a dockable window, Toolbox needs scrollbar if vertical Resolution<1024) that make GIMP occasionally frustrating to use, despite being an otherwise awesome tool.

Which is strange because any app that can operate on more than one document at the same time opens a separate window for each document on OS X. Even Photoshop. This works well on OS X because of how OS X manages applications. Let's for a moment consider GIMP if it was a native OS X application.

First, to switch between different applications, OS X just uses application switching whereas Windows and GNOME/KDE use window switching. IMO, window switching is a terrible design decision because it clutters the application switcher and the taskbar/dock and breaks operations that should logically apply to entire applications (quit, hide, Exposé etc.) Another desktop OS that uses application switching instead of window switching is Haiku (a BeOS descendant). Anyhow, if GIMP ran on OS X, you wouldn't need to sift through a bunch of separate windows when you wanted to focus on GIMP. You'd just switch to GIMP the application instead of separately bringing each of GIMPs eighty seven windows to the front first.

Second, when a document based application loses focus, OS X will hide all floating toolbars and panels and all you will see are your document windows. In Exposé, too, all floating panels and toolbars are hidden. This would mean GIMP's myriad tool windows would become invisible when you switched from the GIMP to another application, or when you viewed GIMP's windows in Exposé. No more needles visual clutter!

Third, OS X has a top menubar. This means each of GIMP's windows wouldn't need to have a separate menubar. The global menubar would enable and disable menu entries as you focused on different windows.

It's a little clumsy if you're working with two images on one screen (especially when drawing/painting with references). A single-window interface has a menu option that lets you tile them.

I'll be happy when the single-window version is released.

most complaints about gimp's multi-window UI are really complaints about window management.

window management should be handled by the window manager, not by each application.

That may absolve the app of responsibility, doesn't make the UI any better though.

The biggest complaint is that things that should be easy and obvious are buried in counter-intuitive places. The second biggest complaint is that it looks really weird on Windows. The whole mutli-window vs singel-window is a minor argument in comparison.

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