On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 2:08 AM, Arwa Hamid wrote:

Hello, I would like to report this enhancement request:

To enhance the usability, when the user starts the software, I suggest the following, a box can be popped up asking if he wants to create a new image or open an existing image and response directly instead of the user pressing on file, then press on create or open.

Or simply pressing Ctrl+O/N? :)

Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org

On Tue, 2013-04-16 at 18:08 -0400, Arwa Hamid wrote:

To enhance the usability, when the user starts the software, I suggest the following, a box can be popped up asking if he wants to create a new image or open an existing image and response directly instead of the user pressing on file, then press on create or open.

Krita does this, iirc.

MyPaint I think gives you a blank canvas.

It might be that when the gegl integration is a little further along GIMP will support unbounded canvases, and could reasonably just start with a blank canvas ready to draw. The out-of-the-box experience with GIMP is a little intimidating (although nowhere near as bad as Blender or gcc), but, GIMP isn't really a tool for the proverbial Aunt Tillie either...

Liam

Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

On Wednesday 17 April 2013 Apr 01:14:39 Liam R E Quin wrote:

On Tue, 2013-04-16 at 18:08 -0400, Arwa Hamid wrote:

To enhance the usability, when the user starts the software, I suggest the following, a box can be popped up asking if he wants to create a new image or open an existing image and response directly instead of the user pressing on file, then press on create or open.

Krita does this, iirc.

Yeah... And it gives us no end of complaints, too. It seems that about half of the people I talk to love it, the other half hates it. We have had one usability study done at a Finnish university that concluded that it's no big problem, but also no advantage at all.

MyPaint I think gives you a blank canvas.

It might be that when the gegl integration is a little further along GIMP will support unbounded canvases, and could reasonably just start with a blank canvas ready to draw. The out-of-the-box experience with GIMP is a little intimidating (although nowhere near as bad as Blender or gcc), but, GIMP isn't really a tool for the proverbial Aunt Tillie either...

Boudewijn Rempt
http://www.valdyas.org, http://www.krita.org, http://www.boudewijnrempt.nl

On 17 April 2013 03:55, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:

On Wednesday 17 April 2013 Apr 01:14:39 Liam R E Quin wrote:

On Tue, 2013-04-16 at 18:08 -0400, Arwa Hamid wrote:

To enhance the usability, when the user starts the software, I suggest the following, a box can be popped up asking if he wants to create a new image or open an existing image and response directly instead of the user pressing on file, then press on create or open.

Krita does this, iirc.

Yeah... And it gives us no end of complaints, too. It seems that about half of the people I talk to love it, the other half hates it. We have had one usability study done at a Finnish university that concluded that it's no big problem, but also no advantage at all.

I, for one, should be counted on the half who hate it.

js ->

On Wed, 2013-04-17 at 08:55 +0200, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:

On Wednesday 17 April 2013 Apr 01:14:39 Liam R E Quin wrote:

Krita does this, iirc.

Yeah... And it gives us no end of complaints, too. It seems that about half of the people I talk to love it, the other half hates it. We have had one usability study done at a Finnish university that concluded that it's no big problem, but also no advantage at all.

For what it's worth I was trying to stay neutral - after all, the Krita people I met at LGM a few years ago were really friendly :-) - but I don't like this feature either, especially as the start-up dialogue was larger than my laptop screen.

There might be ways, though, to improve GIMP's oob experience and I do agree it's worth some thought. Starting with a blank image, like a Word processor or Inkscape, would help, but that only works if switching to a different image precision is easy and lossless, for example.

So I think the time is not quite yet for this line of thought.

Liam

Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml