Hi,

On Sun, 2009-03-15 at 02:22 +0000, Jarlath Reidy wrote:

When closing an individual document in Gimp, the dialog presents these buttons; (modifiers in parenthesis)

Do[n]'t Save, [C]ancel, [S]ave

The Gnome HIG states that this should be:

Close [w]ithout Saving, [C]ancel, Save [A]s (Save As may also be [S]ave if the document is not new)

Last time I checked our dialog was exactly as the HIG specifies it. So it looks like they changed this in the HIG with version 2.2. Feel free to send us a patch and we will consider it for inclusion in GIMP 2.8.

There is also still some work needed on the dialog that is shown when multiple images are open and GIMP is quit. There should be the possibility to save the image from this dialog. Well, actually, there is this possibility. You can drag the images from this dialog to your XDS-capable file-browser or desktop to have them saved there. But this is something that only few users will ever discover.

Sven

Jarlath wrote:

When closing an individual document in Gimp, the dialog presents these buttons; (modifiers in parenthesis)

Do[n]'t Save, [C]ancel, [S]ave

The Gnome HIG states that this should be:

Close [w]ithout Saving, [C]ancel, Save [A]s (Save As may also be [S]ave if the document is not new)

to give a professionals perspective:

the only thing that really has an impact on usability in this case is the [n] keyboard shortcut vs the [w] one GIMP uses.

the rest is the same (enough) to sail through a usability test.

this is really small fry. the stuff you find in the appendix of a usability test or expert evaluation report. for instance 2 orders of magnitude more serious is gtk's (?) insistence to show gnome file dialogs on non-gnome UI platforms.

now that is a tragedy...

--ps

founder + principal interaction architect man + machine interface works

http://mmiworks.net/blog : on interaction architecture

Hi,

On Sun, 2009-03-15 at 13:03 +0100, peter sikking wrote:

this is really small fry. the stuff you find in the appendix of a usability test or expert evaluation report. for instance 2 orders of magnitude more serious is gtk's (?) insistence to show gnome file dialogs on non-gnome UI platforms.

If GTK+ wouldn't do that, then we would have to drop support for other platforms and concentrate on just GNOME. We definitely don't have enough resources to support native dialogs on all platforms. That would be a maintenance nightmare.

Look at the Print dialog as an example of why wrapping native dialogs in a cross-platform toolkit doesn't work well. GTK+ provides an abstraction for the platform native Print dialog. From an application developer point of view, this is a complete mess. We have tons of problems with this dialog that we can't solve as they are platform specific. Now you are asking for the same mess for the file-chooser, no thanks.

If we had lots of active developers on all platforms, that would change things. But that is not the case, so we will have to make the best out of the cross-platform solution that GTK+ provides.

I also know that many GIMP users use GIMP on several platforms (for example Linux at home and Windows at work). These users appreciate that the behavior is pretty much independent from the platform. Of course for other users this makes it more difficult.

The GTK+ people are trying hard to integrate their file-chooser better with the underlying platform. GTK+ 2.16 improves this situation again. Also GIMP tries to integrate well with the native file-browser. This means that users can often avoid using the GTK+ file-chooser dialog if they dislike its behavior.

Sven

Sven Neumann (sven@gimp.org) wrote (in part) (on 2009-03-15 at 10:09):

Also GIMP tries to integrate well with the native file-browser. This means that users can often avoid using the GTK+ file-chooser dialog if they dislike its behavior.

Can you explain what you mean here - especially wrt Windows platform? Just Open-with and drag-drop from explorer, desktop or IE-browser? Or something more? I've not seen any mechanism to save aside from using the GTK+ dialog.

Also, drag-to-desktop from Tools-[x] - "you will lose changes dialog" mentioned earlier in this or a related thread doesn't work in Windows, though I guess you weren't asserting that it would (just "some" *-nix desktops?)

The image or layer "tile" drags but won't drop

Hi,

On Mon, 2009-03-16 at 00:13 -0400, Alec Burgess wrote:

Also, drag-to-desktop from Tools-[x] - "you will lose changes dialog" mentioned earlier in this or a related thread doesn't work in Windows, though I guess you weren't asserting that it would (just "some" *-nix desktops?)

As I said, you can drag from there (and from the image preview in the toolbox) to your XDS-aware file-browser or desktop. XDS is the "X Direct Save" protocol and it is of course not supported on Windows. If there is a similar mechanism on Windows, then someone should add support for it. But given the fact that we have a much larger Windows user base but still only very few contributions from Windows users, I don't have much hope that this will happen.

Sven