I have tried to like the new one. I honestly did.
But there are some things that make life really hard when you have to work
within certain contraints.
First of all the new one doesn't save it's options. That could be remedied but
the amount of changes (I'm a C++ developer and really can't get my head
around doing the way object orientation is done in the tool, the
documentation for all the stuff that has to be done is lacking or isn't easy
located - so I can't do it myself, I tried and failed) seem excessive as the
gimprectangleoptions.c is the odd one out and uses a completely different way
of storing it's properties to all the other tools -> Bug #346683.
If that were not bad enough, the usability is partially much worse than
before. Let me explain: the old rectangle selection tool didn't have the
bells and wistles but it was more straight forward if you wanted to keep the
aspect ratio to say 3:2 when cropping. You simply entered 3 into the
x-dimension, 2 into the y dimension and ticked "fixed aspect". Now you have
to enter 1.5 into the aspect ratio box and tick the check box next to it. But
what if you want 3:2 aspect (for a vertical compositional crop)? Now you have
to enter 0.6666 into the aspect ratio, and you already are suffering a loss
of precision (it's off by a few pixels if your image is sufficiently large,
because it's not 0.6666 it's 0.6666666). Even worse - calculator on standby -
imagine you want to have 16:9 or 9:16 aspect ratio because you want to use
the image in your own DVD production. The old style was simple (took a bit
getting used to but was workable), the new style of setting the aspect ratio
is a pain in the proverbial... -> Feature request/Usability Bug #346684.
Then try to select some rectangular areas because you might want to make them
partially transparent or only sharpen the remainder of the area. Now the new
form of selection with the last selected area still visible is getting
annoying to say the least. I cannot tell how often I find myself cursing at
the new rectangle selection when selecting multiple rectangle areas to join
them into a larger compound area because the last area stays visible and
sometimes - I can't really pinpoint when - keeps me from selecting the next
area. If I could pinpoint the culprit operation then I would file a bug.
Then there are some usability issues with the way the last selected area is
shown as stippled outline when you start resizing the area, there seems to be
a random element to when the selection is supposed to be finished and what is
supposed to be visualized -> Bug #347945.
My humble (well after this rant) request would be to resurrect the old
rectangle selection tool and have the new one reworked so that the next
milestone doesn't have to be postponed because of this (for me the first one
is a true blocker, the other ones are very annoying to say the least).
regards
Karl Günter Wünsch
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