On 07/24/2009 11:48 AM, gg wrote:

Hi,

I added a comment to a png image and pressed Save. I was averted to the fact it failed by the fact it was too quick (a fairly large file).

On repeating the save to see what happened I caught a glimpse of a subliminally fast message at the bottom off the screen. I repeated again to have time to read it.

Basically it told me it was not saving because there were no changes.

As a workaround for now, you can set (trust-dirty-flag no) in your gimprc. GIMP will then always save the image.

/ Martin

Hi,

On Fri, 2009-07-24 at 11:48 +0200, gg wrote:

I added a comment to a png image and pressed Save. I was averted to the fact it failed by the fact it was too quick (a fairly large file).

On repeating the save to see what happened I caught a glimpse of a subliminally fast message at the bottom off the screen. I repeated again to have time to read it.

Basically it told me it was not saving because there were no changes.

That's simply a bug then. Changing an image parasite should mark it as dirty. Please file a bug-report for this.

Sven

Sven Neumann wrote:

Hi,

On Fri, 2009-07-24 at 11:48 +0200, gg wrote:

I added a comment to a png image and pressed Save. I was averted to the fact it failed by the fact it was too quick (a fairly large file).

On repeating the save to see what happened I caught a glimpse of a subliminally fast message at the bottom off the screen. I repeated again to have time to read it.

Basically it told me it was not saving because there were no changes.

That's simply a bug then. Changing an image parasite should mark it as dirty. Please file a bug-report for this.

As gg was trying to point out, I think there is a more fundamental problem here with how GIMP reports feedback. A message that is "subliminally fast" is no message at all. At the very least, a message to the user should be visible for at least long enough for it to be read in its entirety (or the user should be able to go somewhere to read the message in its entirety).

I just discovered that when I import an image from a Nikon raw file, the "Export to" menu item shows up as "Export to 300_1234.NEF". Of course, this is bogus, because GIMP doesn't have a NEF export plugin. Even worse, though, is that when I click the menu item, _there is no feedback_. As gg mentioned, the real problem here is not that GIMP does not do what you tell it to, but rather that it ignores your command and _doesn't tell you that it did_.

More specifically, once I hit Ctrl+E and see the status message not saying anything about exporting, I expect the file to have been saved. If GIMP thinks there were no changes, it should say "no changes to save" in a way that is visible, easy to notice, and easy to read. If GIMP failed to save because there's no actual export plugin for the default export filename, it should say that too. Just playing the silent game is not an option.

--xsdg

Hi,

On Sat, 2009-07-25 at 17:41 +0000, Omari Stephens wrote:

More specifically, once I hit Ctrl+E and see the status message not saying anything about exporting, I expect the file to have been saved. If GIMP thinks there were no changes, it should say "no changes to save" in a way that is visible, easy to notice, and easy to read.

It does exactly that. It will display the text "No changes need to be saved" in the status-bar and this text stays there for five seconds unless it is replaced by a more important status-bar message before this timeout expires. If that doesn't happen for you, then this code broke and there should be a bug report filed.

Sven

On Monday 03 August 2009 22:20:29 Sven Neumann wrote:

On Sat, 2009-07-25 at 17:41 +0000, Omari Stephens wrote:

More specifically, once I hit Ctrl+E and see the status message not saying anything about exporting, I expect the file to have been saved. If GIMP thinks there were no changes, it should say "no changes to save" in a way that is visible, easy to notice, and easy to read.

It does exactly that. It will display the text "No changes need to be saved" in the status-bar and this text stays there for five seconds unless it is replaced by a more important status-bar message before this timeout expires. If that doesn't happen for you, then this code broke and there should be a bug report filed.

Why only 5 seconds? why not until something else happens? IMHO 5 seconds is not enough.

--Alexia

On 08/03/2009 03:28 PM, Alexia Death wrote:

On Monday 03 August 2009 22:20:29 Sven Neumann wrote:

On Sat, 2009-07-25 at 17:41 +0000, Omari Stephens wrote:

More specifically, once I hit Ctrl+E and see the status message not saying anything about exporting, I expect the file to have been saved. If GIMP thinks there were no changes, it should say "no changes to save" in a way that is visible, easy to notice, and easy to read.

It does exactly that. It will display the text "No changes need to be saved" in the status-bar and this text stays there for five seconds unless it is replaced by a more important status-bar message before this timeout expires. If that doesn't happen for you, then this code broke and there should be a bug report filed.

Why only 5 seconds? why not until something else happens? IMHO 5 seconds is not enough.

--Alexia

Alexia,

One of my annoyances with a couple of other programs that I use a lot is that such types of messages stay around too long in those programs. What if you look at the screen 30 seconds or 5 minutes or 2 hours later that message is still there? It is now completely out of context!

While maybe 5 seconds might be a little quick, conceptually I agree that it should not last very long. Maybe 8 or 10 seconds or even 15 seconds. But not longer.

Jay

Hi,

On Mon, 2009-08-03 at 15:51 -0400, Jay Smith wrote:

While maybe 5 seconds might be a little quick, conceptually I agree that it should not last very long. Maybe 8 or 10 seconds or even 15 seconds. But not longer.

Maybe five seconds is indeed somewhat short. Would anyone object if we increased this to ten seconds? If someone wants to try it, the timeout is defined at the top of app/display/gimpstatusbar.c.

Sven

On 08/03/2009 05:04 PM, gg wrote: <<< snip lots >>>

It is NOT an effective way of displaying important error messages that NEED to be seen.

As I said in my original post , this is not a "by the way the image was not saved" it is an error condition what warrants an modal dialogue and a user response.

If the error is irrelevant then the current mechanism is probably OK. I maintain that it is non trivial and requires full visibility.

/gg

I second this motion (or emotion). I would rather have to dismiss a dialog box than to think I have saved something that has not been saved.

Jay

On 08/03/2009 11:04 PM, gg wrote:

As I said in my original post , this is not a "by the way the image was not saved" it is an error condition what warrants an modal dialogue and a user response.

Please let's not bombard the UI with modal dialogs. They are excellent for interrupting workflows and annoying users. The proper solution is to make changing the comment dirty the image, it is not to show a modal dialog when the image is not saved.

/ Martin

On 08/03/2009 05:12 PM, Martin Nordholts wrote:

On 08/03/2009 11:04 PM, gg wrote:

As I said in my original post , this is not a "by the way the image was not saved" it is an error condition what warrants an modal dialogue and a user response.

Please let's not bombard the UI with modal dialogs. They are excellent for interrupting workflows and annoying users. The proper solution is to make changing the comment dirty the image, it is not to show a modal dialog when the image is not saved.

/ Martin

Martin,

I appreciate your thinking on this and what you suggest in this particular situation is a great way to deal with that specific case.

However, I would like to point out that if a user _intends_ to save the file because the _user_ believes a change has been made, then should not the user be notified that either a) the user is incorrect and no change has actually been made [and thus the user probably needs to do something that the user has failed to realize has not been done], thus the file is not going to be saved OR b) the program is incorrect in thinking that no change has been made (as was the case in this situation).

_I_ would want my "workflow interrupted" if the program was not going to do what I had asked it to do. Maybe that's just me.

As long as the focus in the modal dialog is on the dismiss button, then it is easy enough to hit [Enter] and it goes away.

That would be my preference.

Jay

On 08/03/2009 11:19 PM, Jay Smith wrote:

_I_ would want my "workflow interrupted" if the program was not going to do what I had asked it to do. Maybe that's just me.

Hi Jay

When you do a File -> Save you want to make sure that your changes is safely written to disk, right? If you have made no changes, what is then the point in writing the file again? The user should be able to trust that GIMP does the right thing and it is unfortunate whenever GIMP doesn't. But showing a modal dialog whenever the user presses Ctrl+S twice is to me a really bad idea UI-wise.

Regards, Martin

On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 3:51 PM, Jay Smith wrote:

On 08/03/2009 03:28 PM, Alexia Death wrote:

Why only 5 seconds? why not until something else happens? IMHO 5 seconds is not enough.

One of my annoyances with a couple of other programs that I use a lot is that such types of messages stay around too long in those programs. What if you look at the screen 30 seconds or 5 minutes or 2 hours later that message is still there? It is now completely out of context!

I disagree. If the last thing I did that generates such a message was try to save, then even 2 hours from now it still has THAT context (that is, the last thing you did). Keeping the message in the status bar until it is replaced is, imho, the minimum possible solution to this problem. I, like some others in this thread, would prefer a modal dialog.

On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 5:27 PM, Martin Nordholts wrote:

When you do a File -> Save you want to make sure that your changes is safely written to disk, right? If you have made no changes, what is then the point in writing the file again? The user should be able to trust that GIMP does the right thing and it is unfortunate whenever GIMP doesn't. But showing a modal dialog whenever the user presses Ctrl+S twice is to me a really bad idea UI-wise.

Maybe I just want to 'touch' the file and saving is the fastest possible way to do that.

Perhaps I modified or deleted the file on disk, and want to save the copy that exists in GIMP over whatever is on the disk. I am not sure if GIMP is already aware of this situation

In some situations, the Save operation produces dialogs from the export plugin, which do not affect the image in GIMP but do affect the saved image. What if I just want to change the decisions that I made there? (again, this may already be handled well).

gg wrote:

... much erudition elided...
10s may help but IMHO this method of notification is far too unobtrusive.

The STATUS bar should be for relaying status information. Information that relates to the state of the program. It is used effectively to prompt awareness of hot key combinations etc. This is accessory information that the user may check for or that my just be helpful.

The text is small and on the periphery of vision when the focus of attention is on the centre of the screen.

It is NOT an effective way of displaying important error messages that NEED to be seen.

It's right in line with good UI practice. This message is not status, it's an error report and should be displayed in a way such that the user HAS to deal with it before moving on. What they asked for didn't happen and they must know. A modal dialog is an example of how to deal with this, a disappearing status message is not.

Patrick

On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 5:12 PM, Martin Nordholts wrote:

Please let's not bombard the UI with modal dialogs. They are excellent for interrupting workflows and annoying users. The proper solution is to make changing the comment dirty the image, it is not to show a modal

While I agree, what about the idea of an 'elevated status' message appearing in a toaster?

If you think of how some IM clients notify, this 'elevated status' message could pop up from the status bar. It would stay open for 10-15 seconds and then disappear back into the status bar.

There could be a small red 'X' in the upper right to dismiss the message immediately, otherwise it remains non-modal. Clicking the message itself could pull up the appropriate section of the GIMP help manual (or something else useful).

Chris

On Mon, 2009-08-03 at 22:06 -0400, Christopher Curtis wrote: [...]

If you think of how some IM clients notify, this 'elevated status' message could pop up from the status bar. It would stay open for 10-15 seconds and then disappear back into the status bar.

So I press save, and go for a coffee, and come back confident my file was saved, knowing that I'd get huge alarm bells ringing if the operation failed. And your "elevated status" message would be as long gone as Sven's much less irritating but basically invisible status bar message.

Please, if I go to overwrite another file, I get a big warning, and I want that.

If I try to save and it doesn't work, I want a warning too.

A clear warning not just that one of the gargoyles on the gate-posts fluttered one eyelid in the dark when no-one was watching. Make me press OK :-)

Even if I had previously saved to the same location, GIMP is surely not checking things like the USB device ID on a remote network drive, and has no idea I changed the thumb drive.

Thanks ;)

While maybe 5 seconds might be a little quick, conceptually I agree that

it should not last very long.

Please consider then, in particolar on Windows OS messages are often hidden behind the image windows. So a 5, 10, 0r even 15 second message will likely never be seen, and user will simply freak out later when he will see his work went lost

If something go wrong when saving i pretend to know, this is a absolute priority, and i prefer be forced lose few second to close manually a unnecessary warning that lost beyond hope hours of work...

May be only very few relevant warning...something as "SAVE FAIL" can't afford the risk to be ignored, because in that 10 second i was distracted by a phone call or because warning was hidden by another windows.

And here as no relevance if the message was hidden for a Bug of Windows OS or for a Gimp bug...if there is the minimum risk that the message (a SIMILAR MESSAGE not in general )could be unnoticed then better be forced to manually close it before proceed.

At least offer this as User option, please

Liam R E Quin wrote:

So I press save, and go for a coffee, and come back confident my file was saved, knowing that I'd get huge alarm bells ringing if the operation failed. And your "elevated status" message would be as long gone as Sven's much less irritating but basically invisible status bar message.

How about only starting the timer after the user proceeds to work on the image (drawing, selecting, running a filter, etc.)?

(I really like the browser info bars Firefox utilizes for quick find or for asking whether to remember a password - I believe the latter actually stays around until you navigate away from the current page, which would be similar to my "until the user works on the image"...)

Hi,

On Mon, 2009-08-03 at 22:25 -0400, Liam R E Quin wrote:

So I press save, and go for a coffee, and come back confident my file was saved, knowing that I'd get huge alarm bells ringing if the operation failed. And your "elevated status" message would be as long gone as Sven's much less irritating but basically invisible status bar message.

Please, if I go to overwrite another file, I get a big warning, and I want that.

If I try to save and it doesn't work, I want a warning too.

We are not talking about a save failure here. An image w/o changes does not need to be saved. So there is no failure here.

We could make the Save action insensitive for an image that is not dirty, then it would be more obvious that it won't do anything.

A clear warning not just that one of the gargoyles on the gate-posts fluttered one eyelid in the dark when no-one was watching. Make me press OK :-)

Even if I had previously saved to the same location, GIMP is surely not checking things like the USB device ID on a remote network drive, and has no idea I changed the thumb drive.

It doesn't even look at the file on disk. It just checks the image's dirty flag. If you dislike that behavior, there's the 'trust-dirty-flag' option that you can turn off.

Sven

Hi,

On Mon, 2009-08-03 at 23:04 +0200, gg wrote:

I stress, the reason I knew something was wrong was that the save was too quick , not that the message caught my eye.

10s may help but IMHO this method of notification is far too unobtrusive.

The STATUS bar should be for relaying status information. Information that relates to the state of the program. It is used effectively to prompt awareness of hot key combinations etc. This is accessory information that the user may check for or that my just be helpful.

The text is small and on the periphery of vision when the focus of attention is on the centre of the screen.

It is NOT an effective way of displaying important error messages that NEED to be seen.

Important error messages are not displayed in the status-bar. Only messages of level INFO will be displayed in the status-bar.

For more important messages we are using dialogs currently. It would be nice if we could instead have an area displayed at the top of the canvas, similar to what firefox is doing. Fortunately a widget for this has recently been added to GTK+. So it should be easier to get this done in the next development cycle when we can depend on GTK+ 2.18.

Sven

On Tuesday 04 August 2009 21:12:27 Sven Neumann wrote:

Hi,

On Mon, 2009-08-03 at 22:25 -0400, Liam R E Quin wrote:

So I press save, and go for a coffee, and come back confident my file was saved, knowing that I'd get huge alarm bells ringing if the operation failed. And your "elevated status" message would be as long gone as Sven's much less irritating but basically invisible status bar message.

Please, if I go to overwrite another file, I get a big warning, and I want that.

If I try to save and it doesn't work, I want a warning too.

We are not talking about a save failure here. An image w/o changes does not need to be saved. So there is no failure here.

We could make the Save action insensitive for an image that is not dirty, then it would be more obvious that it won't do anything.

Actually that would be most sensible imho, if 'trust-dirty-flag' is set.

--Alexia

Hi,

On Tue, 2009-08-04 at 21:18 +0300, Alexia Death wrote:

We are not talking about a save failure here. An image w/o changes does not need to be saved. So there is no failure here.

We could make the Save action insensitive for an image that is not dirty, then it would be more obvious that it won't do anything.

Actually that would be most sensible imho, if 'trust-dirty-flag' is set.

Well, there have been some good arguments brought up in this thread why saving a clean image may make sense. So perhaps we should change the default for 'trust-dirty-flag' back to 'no' and always save the image?

Sven

On 08/04/2009 08:27 PM, Sven Neumann wrote:

Well, there have been some good arguments brought up in this thread why saving a clean image may make sense. So perhaps we should change the default for 'trust-dirty-flag' back to 'no' and always save the image?

I was about to propose changing the default back to "no" too

/ Martin

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 2:12 PM, Sven Neumann wrote:

We are not talking about a save failure here. An image w/o changes does not need to be saved. So there is no failure here.

I believe this has been thoroughly contradicted in this thread already.

On 08/04/2009 11:12 AM, Sven Neumann wrote:

Hi,

On Mon, 2009-08-03 at 22:25 -0400, Liam R E Quin wrote:

So I press save, and go for a coffee, and come back confident my file was saved, knowing that I'd get huge alarm bells ringing if the operation failed. And your "elevated status" message would be as long gone as Sven's much less irritating but basically invisible status bar message.

Please, if I go to overwrite another file, I get a big warning, and I want that.

If I try to save and it doesn't work, I want a warning too.

We are not talking about a save failure here. An image w/o changes does not need to be saved. So there is no failure here.

This thread is confusing me a bit. I have an xcf that I use to generate png images for
a website. If I open the xcf, modify it, then save as png, and then quit, the change to
the xcf is lost with no warning or, as far as I can see, any status message. I'm using
2.6.6-6.fc11.x86-64. Is this not a failure because I saved the png?

We could make the Save action insensitive for an image that is not dirty, then it would be more obvious that it won't do anything.

A clear warning not just that one of the gargoyles on the gate-posts fluttered one eyelid in the dark when no-one was watching. Make me press OK :-)

Even if I had previously saved to the same location, GIMP is surely not checking things like the USB device ID on a remote network drive, and has no idea I changed the thumb drive.

It doesn't even look at the file on disk. It just checks the image's dirty flag. If you dislike that behavior, there's the 'trust-dirty-flag' option that you can turn off.

Sven

Hi,

On Tue, 2009-08-04 at 12:17 -0700, bgw wrote:

This thread is confusing me a bit. I have an xcf that I use to generate png images for
a website. If I open the xcf, modify it, then save as png, and then quit, the change to
the xcf is lost with no warning or, as far as I can see, any status message. I'm using
2.6.6-6.fc11.x86-64. Is this not a failure because I saved the png?

That's another thing. And we believe that we fixed this long-standing confusion in the development branch by making Save always save to XCF. You now need to explicitly export your image to PNG and this operation does not clear the 'dirty' state.

But yeah, this thread is confusing. Instead of filing a bug report about the fact that changing a comment does not mark the image as dirty, people have started to accuse GIMP (and its developers) of hiding important messages from the user. The real problem here is a bug and it still doesn't have a bug report even though lots of people found the time to contribute to this thread.

Another problem is that the default for the 'trust-dirty-flag' property is perhaps not that well chosen. On the other hand, we changed this before GIMP 2.6 and it took like a year before the first complaint came in. So it appears to have worked quite well for most people... I am still convinced that it would be better to change the default back to 'no'.

Sven

On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 00:06 +0200, gg wrote:

Martin Nordholts wrote:

[...]

I think not saving has merit for large files (especially long png compression) on condition this is clearly put to the user.

As Sven said, there are separate issues - (1) gimp doesn't always know the user's intention. Better to save asked to do so.
(2) changing the comment should mark the image as dirty, of course (3) if for some reason the user presses save and nothing happens, a clear message is needed. Making "save" insensitive is OK too I think, and is what most other programs do in this case. But, if GIMP is primarily catering to the "power user", it should go ahead and save, and not try to out-guess anyone.

The changes to file save/export help in some ways, and not in others: it's now necessary for the user to keep track of three separate images and their state -- the "precious original", the image in gimp, and the file to which you're exporting the result of your work so you can use it. I'd really like to see an indication in the undo history (even though it's not an undoable step) of when you saved or exported, and where. Making the status easier to see would reduce the chance a "power user" accidentally tries to save an unchanged image and has to wait.

Liam

PS: in case it wasn't clear, I'm not accusing anyone of trying to hide anything :-)

Liam R E Quin wrote:

(3) if for some reason the user presses save and nothing happens, a clear message is needed. Making "save" insensitive is OK too I think, and is what most other programs do in this case. But, if GIMP is primarily catering to the "power user", it should go ahead and save, and not try to out-guess anyone.

But what happens if "save" is insensitive and the user hits whatever key combination she has assigned to "save"?

I would at least expect GIMP to beep at me in that case, since the menu option's insensitive state isn't readily visible with them menu closed...