Jimmac,
Thanks for your detailed, thoughtful, and very helpful critique.
>I see the hard work you've put into this. I'm happy to see you learn
>your way around GIMP codebase. I like the cooperation effort involved.
>But expect some harsh reactions from existing userbase.
Well, my experience has always been that changing *anything* in the
UI of an application, no matter how broken, leads to harsh reactions
from users who have learned to exploit the breakage -- so it won't
come as a surprise. This is not intended to be dismissive of
complaints -- the whole effort was largely driven by complaints --
but just to point out that it is never possible to make everybody
copletely happy.
>The bezier selection is now very similar in behavior with the new
>selection tools. You tweak a shape first and then apply it to form a
>regular marching ants selection. In bezier selections tool you use the
>modifiers to add to or substract from existing selection when _applying_
>the selection (pressing Alt+Enter or Alt+Click Inside to subtract, Shift
>+Enter or Shift+Click inside to add...). You don't press the modifiers
>before you start defining the shape. Using this for these selection
>tools as well would from my point of view avoid the shortcut clash
>problem.
First: the new tools actually used to work the way you describe, and
the behavior was changed in response to complaints from users
(including you, iirc!) who wanted to be able to do things like sweep
out a rectangle and then hit Ctrl-C to copy the contents without
remembering to click inside the rectangle first; etc. It would be
easy to change it back, but the current behavior seems to be more
appealing to most people.
Second: for me personally, I am generally opposed to overloading modifiers.
It allows speedups for experienced users, but really messes with the
minds of new users. I think there is a better solution to this problem:
to allow GIMP to make use of a new modifier key (call it TOOL), and
dedicate TOOL-modified keystrokes exclusively to controlling tool
behavior. Then you could, for example, toggle the aspect constraint
by hitting 'TOOL-s' or something. But this is a topic best discussed in
depth elsewhere.
>On the other hand, rectangular and elliptical selections in cvs HEAD are
>active even before they are applied. Maybe that's a good thing. Although
>I found it a little distracting when I had an existing selection and
>tweaking the new one "blinked through" the old one. Kinda similarly
>confusing as the dual-use modifiers ;) But perhaps it's just a bug.
It is intentional. I think after you get used to it, it is actually
helpful in many cases, but if too many people find it confusing, it
can be changed.
>
>If you go for shift+drag for adding new selection behavior as it is now
>in cvs HEAD, allow me to start the drag over an existing selection "in
>progress". Currently that starts editing it as if I didn't hold shift.
Good point. I will change this.
>There's also something I think would make the tool more usable. The
>cursor changing bounds are image-resolution-bound, not
>view-resolution-bound. I work with 22x22px canvases. Even when I'm
>zoomed in, no selection I make shows the "apply selection" cursor in the
>center as the selection border takes all the space every time. The
>feedback I'm given is that I cannot apply the selection in progress by
>clicking inside.
Ah, that's a bug. I'll fix it.
>It's too early to tell if I can get used to this new behavior. Even
>though the immidiate reaction was "dang give me my tools back!" I see
>the benefit for a lot of casual GIMP users. It probably was a
>serious-enough problem to require routine users and Photoshop converts
>to forget and learn something new.
I guess the question, in the long run, is how often you find yourself
happy to be able to modify an existing selection, versus how often you
find yourself thinking that what you are doing would have been easier the
old way. Every change is a tradeoff: I hope this one is a good
tradeoff overall, but only time will tell.
>P.S.: I also noticed the selections are broken when modified with a
>keyboard. The marching ants nor the final selection reflect to the
>keyboard-set position.
I will investigate, and fix any problems I can find.
Thanks again for your feedback,
-- Bill
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