27 Mar 2000 Gimptek   » (Journeyer)

Hmm, my first diary post. Well, a little about myself. I'm a graphic design and computer science double major... (Using the gimp and coding it... Coding it eventually but, not right now).

I am currently working, going to school, having a sort of social life, reading slashdot and advogato everyday and somewhere in there learning C++, perl and Python. Not much luck on getting the languages down or school that much but, my social life is probably the brightest it's ever been. I don't miss slashdot except maybe on the weekends when I go out. Hmm, if life was just slashdot, advogato, and socializing, I would be very sucessful.

But, I'm not. Anyways, I'm at my job right now. I'm making a website. Using the boss's windows machine and I'm using the Gimp. The windows port by Tor is just sweet. It crashes every now and then but, that's understandable. It's EXTREMELY usable. That's all I use anymore.

After 1.2 is done and out the door, I have some great ideas for the gimp as far as UI. I want to a UI guy after I get out with both of my degrees (5 years from now UHHH!!). Most of them have deal with making the Gimp more attractive to Graphic Designers who ultimately will use the program anyways. You want to get people away from Photoshop and Corel Draw/Paint.

Paint looks like it's going to be on linux desktops soon (as in 6-12 months) and I'm sure that Photoshop isn't more than two years away. In this time, Gimp needs to become easier for the ex-Photoshop Graphic Designer. Someone needs to make a Glade plug-in for the Gimp so one can easily make scripts without haveing to go through so much code. A kinda mix and match type thing. Using the new actions/steps dialog that I saw in the slides from GUADEC.

You should be able to experiment with-in Gimp and all of a sudden when you make this Super-Cool effect that shows just how sweet of a designer (or how lucky of a bastard) you are, you can just say take the last 15 steps and make that into a script. Then this script maker should take all the steps and automatically make them with the settings that you did as default but, build a dialog with sliders, options and the rest.

Now you have a dialog a mile long with 15 stages. You should be easily be able to cut that down. It should take me a person that knows Gimp pretty well and knows a bit about programming about 15-30 min. to make a script from scratch. It should take someone that isn't so adept no more than an hour.

Think of the power that something like this would have! Having designers in-house just making scripts and then soon all of the designers have this power. Scriptablity is so powerful but, it never has been leveraged as much it should in Gimp. Make it easier to make a script, more scripts are made. A script is the easiest way to get a wow out of a photoshop person.

Another problem I have with Gimp is the dialogs. They are HUGE. There has to be some way of condesing them. I'm working at 1024x768 and it seems cramped. This is rediculous. Coming back to Photoshop, they found that smaller dialogs are better. Multiple sets of info in the same space. It should come up in context when needed.

When working in multiple images, I switch images and the layer dialog switches to the layers of that images when I press ctrl or something. That should be automatic or at least an option to be automatic. More things like that. Like how the tools dialog switches. The tools dialog however needs to remain a constant size. This is very annoying if I have to move it or something to see some of the information on there because before it was just a little thing and now it's double it's size.

Dialogs should snap to corners and each other. I don't know if this is already true but, image windows should auto- size intelligently and be aware of the dialog boxes, where and how big they are. Obviously, like Photoshop. PS has been around for at least 12 years of solid heavy development. Gimp should use some of this UI wisdom to it's advantage.

There are plenty of other ideas that I'm playing with in my head so, keep tuned to this diary if you want to hear them or you can always e-mail me at gimptek@yahoo.com. Yeah, it's yahoo but, it works.

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