I've been tempted more than once to get the GIMP source and try to convert it's layout to MDI. I imagine it wouldn't be an easy task or someone else would have already done it by now.

lol its been done

There is also an open forum for GIMP GUI redesign. nice.

Quote: Original post by Dmytry
One thing I'm always running into is that people always confuse usability and familiarity.
One of examples here:

Quote:
Eg, lets say you want to switch all reds to green, which makes more sense:
Image -> Adjustments -> Replace Color,
or
Colors -> Map -> Color Exchange?
I'd definitely say the former (I found it easily both ways...

how exactly is having "replace color" in 'Image->Adjustments' any more intuitive than in 'Colors->Map' ?
Former does not use descriptive naming at all. Former only could feel natural after you've been using it for a while.

I agree in the general sense that people confuse usability and familiarity, but I do not think this is one of those cases. I'm not sure how your train of thoughts would work, but mine is along the lines of: "I need to make an adjustment to colors on the image. That would be, replacing or exchanging the colors". The concept of a "Map" never entered my mind, and I seriously doubt it would enter an average users. Colors -> Adjustments -> Exchange, would be perfectly reasonable, though (imo).

Of course this is all a moot point once you've done it once, as you will remember it for next time. But still, if it was more intuitive then maybe the user wouldn't have to spend that first 5 minutes googling for "Replace color gimp" :).

I personally love GIMP for how much you get at no price. Under Windows, I agree on the argument that the former GIMPs were clumsy to use, but this is not a problem on most Gnome/KDE/xfce/... (or collaboratively say unix-based) Desktop installations, where you have multiple workspaces by default. I even see that behaviour as an advantage, e.g. I may edit one image on this workspace, and the other one on another workspace, and both in real fullscreen.

(I am a heavy workspace user, and together with hibernation (and hence uptimes of several weeks (in calendar time several months)), I often have all my 10 workspaces full of, work (I have around 10 gigabytes of swap-space to allow for this efficiently :D))

Quote: Original post by Kobalt64

Quote: Original post by Dmytry
One thing I'm always running into is that people always confuse usability and familiarity.
One of examples here:

Quote:
Eg, lets say you want to switch all reds to green, which makes more sense:
Image -> Adjustments -> Replace Color,
or
Colors -> Map -> Color Exchange?
I'd definitely say the former (I found it easily both ways...

how exactly is having "replace color" in 'Image->Adjustments' any more intuitive than in 'Colors->Map' ?
Former does not use descriptive naming at all. Former only could feel natural after you've been using it for a while.

I agree in the general sense that people confuse usability and familiarity, but I do not think this is one of those cases. I'm not sure how your train of thoughts would work, but mine is along the lines of: "I need to make an adjustment to colors on the image. That would be, replacing or exchanging the colors".

I know for sure though that there's hundreds ways how you can word "i need to make adjustments to colors in image", and certainly when you think of it, the chances that you'll think in same words that dialog uses are extremely tiny.

Quote:
The concept of a "Map" never entered my mind, and I seriously doubt it would enter an average users. Colors -> Adjustments -> Exchange, would be perfectly reasonable, though (imo).

What is the word "adjustments" doing as a category anyway? Wont almost all colour operations end up in "adjustments" ?

My train of thought would have been: I scan the menu bar looking for something relevant to what I want to do. Whoo, I see "Colours" right here! I right away narrow down the search quite a lot. Then I open it and read through looking for something related to exchanging, and I see "Map" which is obvious as relevant even for me (non-native English speaker).
What else do you have in "adjustments" ? Rotations, reflections, and so on? Doesn't it make a lot of sense to separate colour adjustments from other adjustments?
How does "Image" narrow down the search? Or what's about "Filters" menu, do you think regular people know difference from filter (operation that processes multiple pixels together) and things like swapping colours (operation that processes each pixel on its own)? Is that distinction reflected in "Image" and "Filters" choices, or is it better reflected in "Colours" and "Filters" choices? How is it obvious to user that sharpen is in filters menu, whereas doing red photographic filter is, I suppose, in Image-->Adjustments menu?

If you don't like word "Map", think up please a better generic word for that whole category which is all about mapping colours. I'm not native English speaker, and I were studying British English, not American English, and I've no clue whatsoever about Australian English. I just know what word "map" means when used as verb.
In my opinion, "Map" is a great category, while "Adjustments" is a bad category, because almost everything you want to do is "Adjustments" and it is too broad, thus not serving the purpose of categorizing. Same goes for "Image" category (it is an image editor after all).

Quote:
I know for sure though that there's hundreds ways how you can word "i need to make adjustments to colors in image", and certainly when you think of it, the chances that you'll think in same words that dialog uses are extremely tiny.

Good point.

Quote:
What is the word "adjustments" doing as a category anyway? Wont almost all colour operations end up in "adjustments" ?

Another good point :).

Quote:
...and I see "Map" which is obvious as relevant even for me (non-native English speaker).

To be honest, a non-programmer native English speaker would think of 'Map' as in Google Maps, Road Maps, etc. I think the fact that you aren't a native speaker is an advantage in this case. The definition of map as meaning "a function that assigns a value to some other value" (Which I assume is the one you're meaning?) would be unknown/obscure to a large percentage of the population here (Quick poll of some friends: none knew ^^).

To be honest, I think having an Image category is kinda like how you have 'this' in C++/C#/etc. I.e., just to further categorize things and keep the top level menu's uncluttered...

Also, I'm not saying it's a big issue. Just a minor one. I still gave Gimp 8/10 didn't I :)? Do you think the menu's are perfect as is, or is there anything you'd change, since you seem to have used to gimp longer than I have?

Quote: Original post by Kobalt64
To be honest, a non-programmer native English speaker would think of 'Map' as in Google Maps, Road Maps, etc. I think the fact that you aren't a native speaker is an advantage in this case. The definition of map as meaning "a function that assigns a value to some other value" (Which I assume is the one you're meaning?) would be unknown/obscure to a large percentage of the population here (Quick poll of some friends: none knew ^^).

Isn't "to map" (verb) naturally related to cartography? You're mapping from the real landscape to paper. You're mapping from a sphere to a plane. Heck, you may be mapping low altitudes to blue and high altitudes to red.
Sure if you poll friends asking about "mathematical functions", nobody will know....

(Of course, being non-native English speaker, I learnt English quite differently. I were making sense of it as adult rather than as child)

Quote:

To be honest, I think having an Image category is kinda like how you have 'this' in C++/C#/etc. I.e., just to further categorize things and keep the top level menu's uncluttered...

But what is distinction between what is put in "Filter" and what is put in "Image" ? And are all Image operations in photoshop applied to whole image rather than just current layer?

Quote:

Also, I'm not saying it's a big issue. Just a minor one. I still gave Gimp 8/10 didn't I :)? Do you think the menu's are perfect as is, or is there anything you'd change, since you seem to have used to gimp longer than I have?

Maybe rename "map" to something else. Dunno what would be a better category word. There may very well be none in popular usage.
Though, I think menus are kind of better worded than PS even the way it is, even for those whom don't get word "map". "Colours" menu narrows down search a lot right away. Someone could be looking for typical colour related functions in filter menu, because of colour filters which you attach to the lens of camera. I don't think PS has colour operations in Filter menu? (I don't remember)

PS is very old software, it has been massively extended while retaining menu categories, which is I suppose the reason why categories are not very good for today's set of operations.

[Edited by - Dmytry on March 16, 2009 4:34:24 PM]

Am I the only person who loves The GIMP's user interface? Or who was upset when they removed some features in 2.6 (menu on toolbox for starters) no doubt at the behest of the "it's not Photoshop" people?

This mess (linked earlier) would be disastrous for someone like me - with multiple monitors, who often edits multiple large images at once, referencing other programs at the same time.


(And I know, because that's what Inkscape does. It's most annoying for many non-trivial usage scenarios.)

Quote: Original post by Andrew Russell
Am I the only person who loves The GIMP's user interface? Or who was upset when they removed some features in 2.6 (menu on toolbox for starters) no doubt at the behest of the "it's not Photoshop" people?

This mess (linked earlier) would be disastrous for someone like me - with multiple monitors, who often edits multiple large images at once.

Dockable toolbars are nifty. I like their introduction in Inkscape and their use in Adobe's creative suite. It's nice to have them by default being anchored to the page, but also have the option to pull them off to make separate windows. Their main downfall is when the window manager has an aneurism and resizes a toolbar to be unusable (and in Mac OS X, you need to have access to the bottom right hand corner to resize things for some reason, so you can lose the functionality of a toolbar this way).

But to be honest, I once was a big complainer about GIMPs usability, and I'm not so complainy anymore. I still think it needs some work, but I certainly don't think it needs to be like Photoshop. Frankly Adobe's tools seem even less intuitive to me.

Quote: Original post by Andrew Russell
Am I the only person who loves The GIMP's user interface?

No, see my first post, when I said it's a feature :D (your multiple monitor argument is similar to my multiple workspaces argument)