Frédéric van der Essen wrote:

-Fred
-----------

Which versions of GIMP does this persona use?

Michael

On Mon, Apr 03, 2006 at 12:17:45AM +0200, Fr?d?ric van der Essen wrote:

[ ---snipped a nice bio and other good to read things---- ]

- Gimp's worst popups:

i can talk about these....

* if i must save a .png over an existing one there is no less than 5 popups... with the most useless "warning .png can't export layers, are you sure .?" The content of these 5 popups can fit in the first one, or better, in the save file dialog.

ah, the export dialog. using gimp-1.0 made me avoid these!

if you are working with a non-transparent png, then simply flatten and save. then edit-->undo to get back to the layered (possible mess) you were working on. "Save as copy" can avoid changing the name of the image window, which is really nice for saving the xcf.

what i would like to see is an additional option in the Merge Visible Layers dialog, which would allow to merge the visible layers and dispose of the non-visible layers so that saving a transparent png can be just as simple.

the complicated export dialog is there because (perhaps) there have been so many new and inexperienced users to gimp complaining about accidentally exporting an image that they really really wanted to keep (had they understood things better). perhaps the export dialog is one of the things that could be changed in an "expert" and "beginner" Preference.

* when using the crop tool, a giant popup pops right where fred is cropping, ???
all the asked options of this popup can be placed in a panel with the tool options.

dude, you need to install the last gimp-2.3 tarball! this is fixed already and in need of expert testing!

* Filters popups : They are - Huge (against #4) with a very small preview (yes i know about the settings) they should be very small, with a huge preview in the main window. (like the crop tool)

the same gimp-2.3 has zoomable previews. both gimp-2.2 and gimp-2.3 have a modifiable preview size via your gtkrc, i put a howto online for this:
http://carol.gimp.org/gimp2/basics/gui/gtk/gtkrc.html it will make the filter (plug-in) window larger. David Odin has recently made some more improvements to the previews. like the new croptool, they are in need of testing from users less happy with things than me.

about the rest of the suggestions, there are other people involved who are far more qualified to answer those. these felt like productive suggestions to me, thank you!

one thing i did see was something about firefox tabs. i often wish that firefox tabs worked more like gimps. gimps tabs can be moved around and managed sanely. i only recently discovered firefox dnd tabs -- not as good in my opinion.

carol

Hi,

Frédéric van der Essen writes:

- Gimp's worst popups:
* if i must save a .png over an existing one there is no less than 5 popups... with the most useless "warning .png can't export layers, are you sure .?" The content of these 5 popups can fit in the first one, or better, in the save file dialog.

We know this and we would like to see it improved. But so far noone has come up with a decent proposal for an overhaul of the Save/Export functionality.

* when using the crop tool, a giant popup pops right where fred is cropping, ???

This has been addressed in the meantime.

* Filters popups : They are - Huge (against #4) with a very small preview (yes i know about the settings) they should be very small, with a huge preview in the main window. (like the crop tool)

Plugins are out-of-process. It is not exactly trivial to have them display their preview in the image window. But patches are welcome.

* firefox has a "do not show this popup ever again" option for every warning and informative popup.

And how do you reenable a popup that you have asked to suppress? I think that we should try to avoid popups but simply not showing them is not an option. If we can get away without showing the dialog, why do we show it at all then?

#4 : if you maximize your artwork, the panels are over it, it makes the extreme areas of your work inaccessible without moving your panels, or going fullscreen.

Hit Tab and the "panels" are out of your way.

So as a resume, the most problematic things in gimp's interface for fred are
- too much popups.
- not enough priority for the artwork (window expands below panels, unable to pan out of the artwork, small previews, etc...) - menu layout and navigation not workflow friendly. - not enough support for tablet devices.

You only summed up what we already know. You would have helped us a lot more by going into a specific subject, writing down use cases and doing a full-fledged proposal that actually helps interested developers to implement something better.

Sven

One pop-up from the list can be (in theory) made as a warning or replaced as a check-box in the save dialog - the query to flatten layers before saving to format like jpg.

Is it possible to show several dialogs (not modal) at once, closing one of which (final) - save or cancel - will close all others? Maybe it worth to foresee user's actions: if user has saved previous image say as jpg, maybe the next picture he saves will be jpeg too, at least at the same session. So the next save dialog can have all jpeg options "docked". If user chooses a name with jpg extension (or type), all actual (seen) jpeg settings are taken when clicking "Save". If user changes image type, additional dialog is shown as it is done now.

Sven Neumann wrote:

- Gimp's worst popups:
* if i must save a .png over an existing one there is no less than 5 popups... with the most useless "warning .png can't export layers, are you sure .?" The content of these 5 popups can fit in the first one, or better, in the save file dialog.

We know this and we would like to see it improved. But so far noone has come up with a decent proposal for an overhaul of the Save/Export functionality.

On Mon, Apr 03, 2006 at 12:17:45AM +0200, Fr?d?ric van der Essen wrote:

#5 How do i pan with a graphical tablet ? (no RMB/MMB ?)

If you don't waste one of the buttons for double-click, you can have them all. Double-clicking with the pen only needs a little getting used to it, but after a short while it feels natural and is efficient.

#5 RMB / MMB should be emulable with keyboard shortcuts like alt-lmb = mmb, space-lmb = rmb, or something like that.

Try the rectangular selection with various modifier keys pressed and held before or after clicking ...

--- Thorsten Wilms

On 4/3/06, Thorsten Wilms wrote:

#5 How do i pan with a graphical tablet ? (no RMB/MMB ?)

If you don't waste one of the buttons for double-click, you can have them all. Double-clicking with the pen only needs a little getting used to it, but after a short while it feels natural and is efficient.

I might have lost track. One of my tablet's pen buttons (I own Graphire3) does exactly panning in GIMP/Inkscape/etc. If one has a tablet without buttons on a pen, he can press Space on his keyboard and go panning. So, what is exactly wrong with panning via tablet?

Alexandre

On Mon, Apr 03, 2006 at 01:14:07PM +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

I might have lost track. One of my tablet's pen buttons (I own Graphire3) does exactly panning in GIMP/Inkscape/etc. If one has a tablet without buttons on a pen, he can press Space on his keyboard and go panning. So, what is exactly wrong with panning via tablet?

With GIMP and Inkscape, panning is on MMB.

There's the option to put double-left-click on one of the buttons. If you do that, you can't have both MMB and RMB also available. If you don't, all is fine with panning.

Space switches to the move tool here.

--- Thorsten Wilms

On 4/3/06, Thorsten Wilms wrote:

With GIMP and Inkscape, panning is on MMB.

There's the option to put double-left-click on one of the buttons. If you do that, you can't have both MMB and RMB also available. If you don't, all is fine with panning.

So it this considered GIMP's fault or tablet's fault?

Space switches to the move tool here.

Err, true. Sorry.

Alexandre

On Mon, Apr 03, 2006 at 01:48:18PM +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

There's the option to put double-left-click on one of the buttons. If you do that, you can't have both MMB and RMB also available. If you don't, all is fine with panning.

So it this considered GIMP's fault or tablet's fault?

Either the fault of who ever set such defaults (where I don't remember the linuxwacom defaults, but i think on windows double-click on the lower button was default), or the user who keeps or makes it that way.

One could say apps shouldn't rely on MMB. But there are so many features and options to have especialy in media applications, that working around this is too hard, when everyone can easily have 3 "buttons".

Now one could argue space should be for panning like in Photoshop, not move tool. I prefer middle-click drag for panning, anyway.

Cheers, Thorsten Wilms

Sven Neumann writes:

And how do you reenable a popup that you have asked to suppress? I think that we should try to avoid popups but simply not showing them is not an option. If we can get away without showing the dialog, why do we show it at all then?

In the case of the warning popups when saving, why show them at all? Of course it needs to flatten layers when saving to JPEG; why not just do it without asking me every time? It's not like I have an option to save without flattening; all I can do is press OK.

In the case of converting to indexed to save as gif, there's some point to it because the user might not realize there's such a severe loss of quality about to happen; but it's still not important enough to warrant a whole extra dialog to which the only options are OK/Cancel. Just put it in the normal GIF save dialog, as a label that says "Image will be converted to Indexed mode before saving" if the image isn't already indexed.

A similar case was the warning I saw sometimes when a layer mask was selected. I never quite figured out the point of that warning since it seemed to save the image correctly anyway. But that dialog seems to be gone now in CVS HEAD.

#4 : if you maximize your artwork, the panels are over it, it makes the extreme areas of your work inaccessible without moving your panels, or going fullscreen.

Hit Tab and the "panels" are out of your way.

Is there a way to disable this? It gets in my way, because I hit it fairly often by accident (probably when I'm trying to hit 1 to make the image full-size), and it's several steps to undo it: in gimp 2.3 a single tab brings all the windows back (much better than gimp 2.2 where it took several tabs) but in the windowmanagers I use, the focus now moves to one of the restored windows so it's no longer in the image window where it was, and I have to move the mouse out of the window and back in. I've looked for places to disable it, but I don't see anything about the tab key in the Keyboard Shortcuts window or in menurc where other key bindings are controlled.

...Akkana

Hi,
akkana@shallowsky.com (2006-04-03 at 1609.19 -0700):

Sven Neumann writes:

And how do you reenable a popup that you have asked to suppress? I think that we should try to avoid popups but simply not showing them is not an option. If we can get away without showing the dialog, why do we show it at all then?

In the case of the warning popups when saving, why show them at all? Of course it needs to flatten layers when saving to JPEG; why not just do it without asking me every time? It's not like I have an option to save without flattening; all I can do is press OK.

Or maybe you want to save as anim or without applying layer masks or the layer mask alone. I think the better solution is combining export and format options into one dialog. There is a bug about this http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119545
GSR

I wrote:

In the case of the warning popups when saving, why show them at all? Of course it needs to flatten layers when saving to JPEG; why not just do it without asking me every time? It's not like I have an option to save without flattening; all I can do is press OK.

I posted hastily: this dialog does have more than one option. And the other dialog, that I said no longer existed in CVS HEAD, is still there (I don't know why it didn't come up for me earlier). Here's the sequence if a layer mask is selected:

First, a dialog that says "You are about to save a layer mask as JPEG. This will not save the visible layers." So what WILL it save? There's no way of telling from the text in the dialog. Options are: [Cancel] [Confirm], so Confirming is really the only choice.

If you Confirm this, then at least for jpeg, you get the flatten dialog: JPEG can't handle transparency, Flatten? The choices here are: [Ignore] [Cancel] [Export] Export is almost always the right answer, since that saves the image as you're looking at it in the image window -- even if you just dismissed that scary layer mask dialog that said it wouldn't save the visible layers.

It turns out that what [Ignore] means here is "Save the current layer instead of the whole flattened image". And in that case, if you went through the layer mask dialog earlier, what will be saved is the layer mask, otherwise you'll get the layer (with no layer mask applied).

If you wanted to save a layer or layer mask in a format that doesn't call up the Flatten dialog (say, as XCF), you're out of luck. The only option is to paste it as a new image and save that.

This would all be so much clearer if Save As just saved the current image (the whole thing, flattening as necessary without pestering the user about it). For people who want to save just one layer (or mask), offer a separate menu item for that, perhaps in the context menu of the layers dialog, as well as in either the File or Layers main menubar.

Right now Save As is overloaded to do two fairly different operations -- but only if you're saving to a format that doesn't allow layers. Why not separate those two operations as separate menu items, and have it work the same regardless of format?

Bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=75328 seems to be the best discussion of these export dialogs, but it doesn't really address the issues I mentioned (I should probably add a comment).

As long as we're talking about Save issues, bug 75459 is another one worth looking at (both referenced from the bug 119545 that GSR mentioned).

...Akkana

Hi,

Akkana Peck wrote:

First, a dialog that says "You are about to save a layer mask as JPEG. This will not save the visible layers." So what WILL it save? There's no way of telling from the text in the dialog. Options are: [Cancel] [Confirm], so Confirming is really the only choice.

Or Cancelling, and moving the focus to a real layer rather than a mask, then returning to File->Save As...

I must admit I have to do this quite frequently.

Export is almost always the right answer, since that saves the image as you're looking at it in the image window -- even if you just dismissed that scary layer mask dialog that said it wouldn't save the visible layers.

Is this intended behaviour, or a bug?

This would all be so much clearer if Save As just saved the current image (the whole thing, flattening as necessary without pestering the user about it). For people who want to save just one layer (or mask), offer a separate menu item for that, perhaps in the context menu of the layers dialog, as well as in either the File or Layers main menubar.

Perhaps a menu item: Layers -> Mask -> Export... would be the most logical solution - and then remove the dual-function on File -> Save / Save As?

All the best,
--
Alastair M. Robinson

Hi,

Thorsten Wilms writes:

There's the option to put double-left-click on one of the buttons. If you do that, you can't have both MMB and RMB also available. If you don't, all is fine with panning.

Space switches to the move tool here.

I have suggested multiple times that we change this so that Space can be used for panning. So far we haven't reached a consensus here and we also don't have a patch so it is still unchanged.

Sven

Hi,

Akkana Peck writes:

In the case of the warning popups when saving, why show them at all? Of course it needs to flatten layers when saving to JPEG; why not just do it without asking me every time? It's not like I have an option to save without flattening; all I can do is press OK.

You can choose to ignore the Export step and save the active drawable.

Sven

Akkana Peck wrote:

Hit Tab and the "panels" are out of your way.

Is there a way to disable this? It gets in my way, because I hit it fairly often by accident (probably when I'm trying to hit 1 to make the image full-size), and it's several steps to undo it: in gimp 2.3 a single tab brings all the windows back (much better than gimp 2.2 where it took several tabs) but in the windowmanagers I use, the focus now moves to one of the restored windows so it's no longer in the image window where it was, and I have to move the mouse out of the window and back in. I've looked for places to disable it, but I don't see anything about the tab key in the Keyboard Shortcuts window or in menurc where other key bindings are controlled.

Have you posted a bug report to bugzilla about the wrong focus behaviour? Otherwise I'll do it.

Hi,

actually the idea is that "Save" saves as XFC because that's the only format that keeps all the information. Everything else is "Export". If you want to propose how the Export functionality should be implemented, feel free to discuss it here. But please make sure that the results are put on the GIMP Wiki and please inform us and the GIMP group at OpenUsability.org about your efforts.

It would be nice if the proposal could keep in mind that the file plug-ins are out-of-process. Thus it will be very difficult to implement anything that tries to combine user interface elements of the core (the file-chooser) and the plug-in.

Sven

Pär Forsling writes:

Akkana Peck wrote:

(about problems Tab causes because the focus ends up in the wrong window, and wanting a way to disable Tab).

Have you posted a bug report to bugzilla about the wrong focus behaviour? Otherwise I'll do it.

I haven't, because the focus behavior is mostly normal window manager behavior. It would be nice if GIMP could set focus back to the image window after Tab brings back other windows, but that seems fairly difficult to do in gtk. I wasn't confident such a bug would be accepted.

And since I never actually want the Tab behavior anyway, and Tab is so easy to hit by accident, I'd still like a way to disable it. Grabbing the focus back would help in that correcting an accidental Tab would only take one keystroke instead of a keystroke-plus-mouse- out-plus-mouse-in; but I'd rather not have to correct it at all.

...Akkana

Hi,

"Christopher Curtis" writes:

It would be nice if the proposal could keep in mind that the file plug-ins are out-of-process. Thus it will be very difficult to implement anything that tries to combine user interface elements of the core (the file-chooser) and the plug-in.

Actually, I did forget to mention that. I was thinking that the GIMP could query the plugin for interface elements, say, in an XML format supported by glade. I'm not a GTK programmer, but is there some sort of generic container that can be placed in the window, dynamically resized, and populated, eg, via libglade?

Almost everything can be done, but as long as such a framework doesn't exist and noone volunteered for implementing it, it would be extremely useful to come up with a proposal that respects this limitation.

Basically, GIMP calls "plugin --get-widgets=file-save --depth=8 --colorspace=rgba --layers=1", which returns some glade-compatible XML to populate the empty container on the save dialog. ... or something like that.

That would work to populate the dialog, but none of the widgets would be functional. With glade you can only describe the widgets and how to pack them. You cannot define how they should react to user input.

Making "Save" only handle .xcf is interesting. Does Photoshop behave this way (I've never used it)?

Why should we care much if Photoshop behaves this way? The question is whether it is a reasonable behaviour and whether it corresponds to the user model.

I think the current behaviour is unacceptable. Currently, if you save a multi-layered image with masks, guides, ... in the JPEG file format, the image is marked as being saved. You can close the image and your work is basically gone since all you end up with it that lousy JPEG file. The user doesn't expect this behaviour.

Sven