On Wed, 13 Apr 2005, David Marrs wrote: > It once again occured to me after recently discovering the stroke/fill > option that there are many commonly used operations associated with > tools that are difficult for users to find. Drawing shapes is a good > example of this. GIMP - it has to be said - is not the most intuitive > application in the world. >
It may not be the most intuitive application in the world (something very very hard for a professional graphics program), but I think it is easily intuitable and that is the most importand property of a program for me. Other than that, I agree there are many ways the interface could be improved and we should try to improve it. > So, why not associate a toolbox with each tool that can be opened by > right clicking in the image window. Currently, right clicking simply > opens the menubar, which can be accessed twice already from the image > window: it seems like a waste of a mouse button to me. Much better to be > able to perform common tasks, such as "path to selection" or "stroke > path" instead. > > *Precisely what should go in these toolboxes I'm not sure.* > Having something like that in the right click I wouldn't think is very practical. A previous reply to your post made that very clear. Although, as I understand it, you propose that some actions, relevant to the current tool, should be put somewhere where people can find them quickly. You have my vote on that. I propose a small horizontal toolbar (same size with the menubar) which has some actions depending on the currently selected tool. For example, when you use any of the selection tools, that bar could have the following actions: stroke selection, save to channell, shrink and grow. For the paint tools, that bar could have the brush selection widget. That way, the user will have shortcuts to the actions he frequently needs and he will find out the most frequent actions for each tool very quickly. So, gimp will be both more usable and more intuitive. Maybe that bar could even auto hide... > You could also make it flexible and do what you do already with > dialogues, providing a number of presets while allowing users the option > to customise the toolkit themselves (a system that works excellently imo). > Perhaps this could be done, but we should first try really hard and provide default shortcuts that will please most of the people. PS. the more I think about this the more I miss it in gimp... _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
