Re: [Gimp-developer] proposed solution for: protection from protection from data loss

2008-06-12 Thread Sven Neumann
Hi,

On Thu, 2008-06-12 at 02:09 +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 No, i'm thinking of the case where you saved those 25 steps to a jpeg and the 
 next day,
 sitting in the plane to your customer, you discover that this curve should be 
 tweaked a litte bit more.

That is exactly why JPEG should not be offered as a save format. Saving
to a JPEG file is clearly an export. No one will be surprised that an
exported file can't be edited again. The user needs to save the file to
XCF (or whatever the next generation file format will be called).


Sven


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Re: [Gimp-developer] proposed solution for: protection from protection from data loss

2008-06-12 Thread gg
On Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:36:39 +0200, Sven Neumann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Hi,

 On Thu, 2008-06-12 at 02:09 +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 No, i'm thinking of the case where you saved those 25 steps to a jpeg  
 and the next day,
 sitting in the plane to your customer, you discover that this curve  
 should be tweaked a litte bit more.

 That is exactly why JPEG should not be offered as a save format. Saving
 to a JPEG file is clearly an export. No one will be surprised that an
 exported file can't be edited again. The user needs to save the file to
 XCF (or whatever the next generation file format will be called).


 Sven



Hi,

I agree there is a certain logic to that approach but it should not  
involve constant importing and exporting as extra steps if working on a  
foreign file format, png for example.

If open png becomes an import then save will duplicate the file as an xcf  
unless it is explicitly exported again. There's a danger this could all  
cause a lot of duplication of large files and yet more user interactions  
to a simple task of opening, changing and saving an existing image , which  
will almost certainly not be gimp's native format.

Anyone wanting to undo changes made to a lossy format like jpeg clearly  
has no understanding of graphics formats anyway. This request does not  
even apply to gimp's target user base.

If it becomes possible to maintain an undo history across gimp sessions in  
the native format that would be a nice feature.

Beyond that the user had better learn what the characteristics of the  
different formats he is using are, and the value of keeping backups of  
different stages of one's work.

/gg


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Re: [Gimp-developer] proposed solution for: protection from protection from data loss

2008-06-12 Thread gib_mir_mehl
Hi all,

Sven Neumann wrote:
 [..] JPEG should not be offered as a save format. Saving
 to a JPEG file is clearly an export.

this is totally true.

The problem is that this violates widely accepted UI standards.
Usability shows it's ugly side here by demanding conformance to
users' expectations even if those were formed by broken standards.

In fact, the whole concept of 'Save to Harddisk' is fundamentally broken
from a pure UI perspective [1]. Despite of that, the GIMP will have to support
the Open-Edit-Save cycle for quite some years.

This hints at providing different UIs: one that emphasises on technical 
soundness
and a standard one which potentially jumps through hoops to meet users' 
expectations.
While beeing an ugly thought at first, this opens up a lot of possibilies.

Looking from outside, i've gotten the impression that the GIMP project has been
beaten by similar issues before. I feel like too many GUI changes got discussed
to death, because no one managed to come up with solutions which fit all 
user groups (let alone the coding perspective). At times, the project gets
partially paralyzed by the lack of usability input. Sven's unanswered
calls for specs are strewn throughout the archives.

Quite paradoxically, splitting UI development into GIMP-Pro and
GIMP-Standard could be beneficial for the GIMP as a project.
This is not saying that such a split is desirable or unavoidable,
the point is that it may speed up UI development by not hunting
for the one unified GUI anymore. In case of the Export/Save logic such
a solution may even be impossible due to problem roots outside the GIMP.

I see the current state of Export/Save as the result of a not-untangled 
development process. The Pro users, in utter need of Export workflow automation 
features, get thwarted by useless dialogs (from their perspective), while 
Standard users are confused and usability measures are shurely subterraneous.
No one is happy with that.

The corresponding arguments in turn have been ping-ponged for years. Every now
and then, someone new comes by and restarts the whole cycle, like myself.
If all this energy could be freed for speccing  coding less universal UIs,
i guess GIMP would make quick advances towards both an efficient Pro interface 
and a reasonably conforming Standard UI.

The golden way, of course, would be to follow the Firefox path
and allow new UIs to ripen as plug-ins [2]. This requires an omnipotent 
plug-in API, thus putting even more burden on the coders (as far as i can see).
Dreaming of Adam's Pupus Pipeline[3] for nearly a decade now, i doubt
the upcoming GEGL goodness will fill in that role anytime soon.

Is it imaginable to have multiple GUIs for the GIMP?

peter

-- 
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Re: [Gimp-developer] proposed solution for: protection from protection from data loss

2008-06-12 Thread Øyvind Kolås
On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 10:56 PM,  [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Dreaming of Adam's Pupus Pipeline[3] for nearly a decade now, i doubt
 the upcoming GEGL goodness will fill in that role anytime soon.

GEGL is basically Pupus, it doesn't do network transparent buffers
yet, but it has an infrastructure already used for shared disk swap
between processes on the same machine. Almost all of what Adam
outlined in his mail about pupus applies to todays GEGL.

/Øyvind K.
-- 
«The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed»
 -- William Gibson
http://pippin.gimp.org/ http://ffii.org/
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Re: [Gimp-developer] proposed solution for: protection from information loss

2008-06-12 Thread gib_mir_mehl
Hi all,

Carl Karsten wrote:
 proposed spec:
 
 File Open/Save/Save_as_Copy only work on .xcf - all other formats must use
 File Import/Export.[1]

What about using just Import/Export?

The GIMP could take care of saving automatically, e.g. by writing XCFs to a 
private folder.
Import/Export work on all filetypes.
Closing an image writes an XCF to the private folder.
Closed images can be retrieved via File-Recent

This leaves open the problem of when to delete the XCFs.

Throwing out Open/Save/Save_as_Copy as a whole solves a lot of issues.
cheers,
peter

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Re: [Gimp-developer] Specs for Export/Save User Interface

2008-06-12 Thread Akkana Peck
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
 3)  Putting Text on a .png (in-place file editing)
 - Open bla.png
 - Text layer created
 - Export to bla.png exporting to currently opened file is 
 admittedly ugly, but
 consistent. The image stays dirty as 
 the layer data
 has not been saved.
 - confirm overwrite protection
 - check result in web browser
 - Modify Text size
 - Export to bla.png again
 - confirm overwrite protection
 - check result OK
 - last finetuning, e.g. brightness
 - Save  dialog pops up, warning of layer data 
 loss
 - Convert to PNG (dialog button)layers get merged, image gets saved 
 to bla.png
 and flagged clean.
 - Close no warning here

Two problems/questions on this workflow:

1. Every checkpoint of the file (saving in case of disaster),
something which now is just a Ctrl-S, becomes an operation that
requires going through at least one scary dialog (the overwrite
one) and sometimes two (at least the first time, where the user
has to select the same filename that GIMP already knows).

2. Why would a user use Export for every save except the last one,
then suddenly switch to using a completely different command to save?
How would they learn to do this? Because of GIMP warning them when
they try to quit that the file hasn't been properly saved? Won't
most users say But I just saved it!, click Quit Anyway, and then
go complain to someone about how GIMP often, but not always, says
images haven't been saved when they really have?

This model seems much more confusing for users since they have to
understand a lot more about what makes an image compatible with each
format they might save to. (I know it seems patently obvious to
anyone on this list why adding a text layer is different from doing
a crop, but when you talk to users who mostly edit photos, a lot of
them aren't very clear on differences between image formats.)

...Akkana
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