Let me also try to keep this (relatively) short. I'm not good at this. :-)
On Thu, 12 Jul 2007 13:29:49 +0200, peter sikking <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I take the vision as broad as it can be explained (it was phrased not so > specific for a reason), but not broader. That's certainly fine. But if you only check the comments that you have made in the last two days in this thread, you will see that you have emphasized several times the term "high-end". Specifically: 'High-end' is the word I want us to focus on. This means focusing only on a minority of GIMP users. And as I wrote earlier, I am convinced that it's the best thing to do as this is the best way to have real progress. However, we should still be careful about what these improvements (or changes, in general) mean to the majority of our users (those who do not fit in the "high-end" definition). > > This > > is at best a small percentage of the current GIMP users. [...] But > > we have to acknowledge that the vision (or the way we use it) is > > targeted mainly at a minority of users. This minority is almost > > certainly the most interesting subset o > > I do not believe that. You do not believe that "this minority is the most interesting subset" or that it is a minority? Assuming the latter, I am sorry but I believe that the vast majority of GIMP users are not high-end users. Most users do not use GIMP every day, probably not even every week. But the cumulative time that all those users spend using GIMP is probably much larger than the time that the few experienced users who need and use the high-end features spend with GIMP. So I would like GIMP to focus on high-end features as much as possible according to our vision. But if some of the required changes imply a significant regression for the majority of the users, then we should think twice about them. The changes can still be applied even if they add a cost for some users because it is impossible to please everybody, but we should keep some balance and not always focus exclusively on the experienced users. > >> And I thought that we all understand that there is a > >> choice of several free software programs out there for > >> users who want to do simple red-eye removal from their > >> holiday jpegs. > > > > Unfortunately, until that choice really exists this is a moot point. > > we agreed at the vision meeting that the choice is there. This was mentioned, but there was some disagreement (well, at least during the part of the meeting that I attended - I missed the discussions on the second day). There was certainly an agreement on the fact that GIMP cannot do everything for everybody and that some other programs should fill the niches that we do not cover. But I don't think that there was ever an agreement on the fact that the choice is there (last year during the meeting, or even today). I could not agree with that because there is no real choice among free software for browsing and doing simple adjustments on holiday pictures. There is currently nothing that comes close to Photoshop Elements or even to the various simpler programs that come bundled with most cameras. As I wrote, F-Spot is coming close for some features (and some of the important ones have only been added in the recent months), but it is still necessary to complement it with GIMP or Krita for some operations such as correcting some errors with the clone tool, doing finer color adjustments or just rotating the image a bit. Nothing very fancy nor high-end, but this is still something that people use GIMP for. This may change in the future if F-Spot or others get better, but I doubt that it is part of F-Spot's vision to include things such as our paint tools or transform tools. Yet this is something that some users expect to find in Free Software because they can do that with the "free" but proprietary stuff that they got with their cheap point-and-shoot digital cameras. I just don't want to forget about these users too early, even if they are not the ones we try to please first. -Raphaël _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
