Re: [Gegl-developer] DAGs make users' eyes cross

[Shea McCombs]

I certainly agree with your reservations on using the DAG as *the* user-manipulated UI, but I don't think it's entirely black and white.  There are often two types of artists, those who love DAGs, and those who hate DAGs -- and even the ones who love DAGs can sometimes hate them :-)

From a high-level point of view, I'm personally not happy with hiding the flexibility a DAG-based UI provides in favor of a mostly linear interface.  I think it would be very helpful to figure out the most important reasons artists have for disliking DAGs, and pointing out the reasons DAG-based UIs can be unwieldy (even if completely obvious).  Maybe we can come up with a "middle" ground (though I hate to use the word middle) which really improves on both approaches :-)

I like your spreadsheet idea a lot -- but I have concerns that it would be trading one form of visual complexity for another.  It's really hard to say without some prototyping, of course.

It's something to consider!

-shea

On 10/17/06, Ken Bateman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

I've independently been thinking of a similar imaging core for the last month or
so.  Of course, I think it's a good idea.  Logically, behind the scenes,
everything should be in the form of a DAG.  But I think that a raw DAG does not
make up a part of a good user interface.

Spreadsheets are in essence a DAG for performing numerical calculations, and I
would suggest that the user interface should take the form of a spreadsheet
since this is a model familiar to many users.   Some cells would contain source
rasters, other cells would contain paths, vector graphics, or masks (or even
references to other functions), some cells would contain a function that
referred to other cells for inputs, some cells could contain labels or comments,
and most cells would be empty.



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--
Shea McCombs
http://www.upvector.com/
------
If you're a cowboy, and you're dragging a guy behind your horse, I bet it would really make you mad if you looked back and the guy was reading a magazine.

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