On 05/02/2012 10:53 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
I thought of the best reply to all of this, and I think the shortest
way to explain it is to tell you that you are probably not a targeted
GIMP user.
It is certainly important for the authors and developers of an
application to know who their targeted audience is.
I'm curious, though... Do you know what percentage of the people who
actually use GIMP now are part of that target audience?
I mean, let's just say, for the sake of argument, that 50% of your
current users are not part of the target audience you envision and will
find GIMP harder and harder to use as it is further and further
optimized for its target audience, until in the end they go use
something else.
Would the folks working on GIMP be OK with that?
Also, it seems to me from the stuff at the URLs you sent that the
potential size of the user base for the audience you are targeting is
much smaller than the potential user base of more "casual" image editors
like me. Do I understand correctly that you are consciously aiming to
design the application to be attractive primarily to that much smaller
user base?
By the way, you can freely map any shortcut to any menu command. Try it :)
I am already aware of that. As I explained in my first email message in
this thread, it does not solve this particular problem because of the
incomprehensible decision to make "Overwrite" work the first time but
"Export" work after that. What that means is that the key I hit to save
an image the first time while I'm working on it /can't possibly be the
same/ as the key I hit if I need to save the image subsequent times.
If you changed this one single thing... If you just made the Overwrite
command work repeatedly, then yes, people like me could just bind
Overwrite to ctrl-S and (mostly) be happy. But even that is not possible
in the interface as it is currently implemented, for reasons which
escape me.
Other than that, if you don't do complex work and don't care about
accidentally not saving non-destructive changes such as layers and
masks, perhaps you don't really need GIMP. There is a fair amount of
free image editors that will suit simpler workflows just fine.
I use many of GIMP's features. I'm not just removing red-eyes from my
family photos. Yeah, I'm not a professional designer; no one is paying
me for the output of my work, nor am I publishing it as art. But it
feels to me like perhaps the GIMP team's vision of its target audience
is overly limiting and in the end will benefit neither GIMP nor its user
base.
Overall, I love GIMP, and am exceedingly grateful to everyone who has
devoted time and effort to making it better. You are, of course,
entitled to make the program whatever you want it to be and target
whatever audience you want to target. But I am saddened to learn that
perhaps I am not part of that audience, which suggests that over time I
am going to love GIMP less and less.
jik
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