Paul Bloch wrote: > To take an example that would also apply to Gimp, when showing us > different methods she came across a tool that didn't allow you to > "preview" the effect and she simply said,"This is pretty useless, you > can't see what you're doing." So there is a functional and productive > criticism. Designing is a visual process obviously, if I can't see > the effect, be it transforming or using a filter, it makes my job a > whole lot harder and consumes more of my time via guessing, undoing, > and reapplying the filter. It's like drawing with a blindfold. > Anyway to make a long story slightly longer I think part of moving > forward for Gimp would be to start to beta test with real professional > designers, the ones who's work you admire. I think this is a great idea. Ideally, the pro designers would be able to focus on the usability of Gimp *outside* of the context of PhotoShop. That way, we could minimize bias based on familiarity. With all of the talk of wanting Gimp to look/feel like PhotoShop, there hasn't been much discussion of PhotoShop's UI being considered "good". I had this kind of discussion with someone else who slammed the Gimp UI and much to my surprise he slammed the PhotoShop UI as being about as bad. :)
I think the intent should be to strive for a solid UI that is intuitive, not necessarily to mimic one that is basically familiar and that's about it. > I think that Gimp's market potential isn't as an adobe REPLACEMENT, > not at this point anyway, it is more of a SUBSTITUTE (there is a > difference). I think it would serve better as filling the niche for > those people who don't actually own a legit copy of photoshop. If > people discover they don't have to break the law because there is an > adequate substitute that performs similarly to photoshop people will > use Gimp in droves. And to add to that what Gimp can allow for is a > program that can fully cater to the experience of a user. The thing is, Gimp serves that purpose today. I can't comment on the "droves" part. :) People don't have to break the law if they use Gimp. People don't use PhotoShop primarily because they like the UI, they use it for what it can do with digital images. People learn the PhotoShop UI so they can do interesting things with those images. People can do interesting things with digital images using Gimp, but they do those things in a different way. I don't see anything wrong with that. > I think the main thing is to think creatively about who Gimp's > audience actually is. This is a good point and one issue I see is those who are screaming for a PhotoShop interface feel THEY are Gimp's actual audience when I'm not even sure what Gimp's audience actually is. Peace... Tom _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
