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

2008-06-14 Thread gib_mir_mehl
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 This is definately not a bug.
[..]
 Gimp does all these things correctly. It is aimed at a competant user  
 base, it does not try to be a beginner's guide using different formats.


It is true that GIMP provides correct functionality for export/save.
The corresponding user interface however must allow the user to form habits.

It wouldn't be an urgent problem even if five confirmation steps were required
for writing a simple file format. Users form a habit out of it.

The problem begins when these steps become unpredictable. Suddenly,
the user's habits are considered wrong (this is why users are so upset).
The problem gets serious when this may lead to data loss [1].

This is not talking GIMP into an educational tool for beginners.
Habits are an inevitable part of human nature. In fact, they are the workhorse
of advanced users. If users are not allowed to form secure habits it is
a serious bug in the user interface.

peter


[1] Alexia gave an example:
https://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/lists/gimp-developer/2008-June/020296.html



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

2008-06-13 Thread Martin Nordholts
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 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.

 [...]

 Is it imaginable to have multiple GUIs for the GIMP?

 peter

   

Hi Peter

First of all, thanks for showing enthusiasm in hepling GIMP UI wise.

It seems however that you have not noticed the UI progress that has been
put into GIMP through the work of mailny Peter Sikking. In fact, several
UI related specifications has been written by Peter Sikking and
implemented by the core developers.

I suggest you check out the UI wiki [1] to get a view of the current
GIMP UI state, and then coordinate with the existing UI people.

Regarding multiple UIs, the big problem with that is that it multiplies
the required efforts in several areas: coding, documentation, knowledge
when giving help, and so on.

Best regards,
Martin Nordholts
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Re: [Gimp-developer] proposed solution for: protection from protection from data loss

2008-06-13 Thread Sven Neumann
Hi,

On Thu, 2008-06-12 at 23:56 +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Quite paradoxically, splitting UI development into GIMP-Pro and
 GIMP-Standard could be beneficial for the GIMP as a project.

I don't think so. Such a split would make coding a lot more difficult
and less fun. Since our product vision clearly targets the pro user, I
don't see why we should go through the hassle of adding an extra user
interface for the people who actually don't need a professional image
editor.

 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.

It is up to the user interaction designers to solve this. But I doubt
that the whole user interface needs to be split in order to do that. If
there's really a need for a pro mode when it comes to saving (and I very
much doubt that), then we can add that. But I would like to see a
complete spec first.

 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.

Well, we had these discussions because we didn't have a clear product
vision until recently.

 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.

You are making the wrong assumption here that the same people that write
the specs would also implement them. That is not any longer true and it
has shown to be a good thing to split this. So there is absolutely no
waste of energy if the user interaction architects and user interface
designers talk about the changes that should be done in the next
development cycle while the developers are busy implementing what needs
to be done for the next release.


Sven


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

2008-06-13 Thread gib_mir_mehl
Hi,

thank you all for taking the time to consider and being patient with me.
It seems what's lacking most is the virtue of patience on my side...

I understand now that multiple UIs are too expensive. (As a sidenote, the 
forking
idea doesn't imply to anticipate the UI team's work. More appropriate labels
would have been GIMP and GIMP-dirty-and-feature-ladden).


The issue of Export/Save/data-loss-protection is in my regard more of a bug 
which 
should be fixed as soon as possible than part of UI redesign. As with any fix 
this 
might be superseded by a more general solution later on. 

Now it's not clear to me where to draw the line between useful discussion of 
potential fixes and uselessly anticipating the UI redesign.
Probably by the severity of changes, seen a from user perspective.

Any guidance?

peter


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

2008-06-13 Thread Sven Neumann
Hi,

On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 18:21 +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 The issue of Export/Save/data-loss-protection is in my regard more of a bug 
 which 
 should be fixed as soon as possible than part of UI redesign. As with any fix 
 this 
 might be superseded by a more general solution later on. 

It's definitely too late to introduce larger changes in trunk as we are
closing in on the GIMP 2.6 release and the tree can be considered
tentatively feature-frozen.

On the other hand that should give us enough time to come up with a
proper solution that can be implemented in the next development cycle.
Preferably a complete spec would be ready when 2.6 is released.


Sven



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

2008-06-13 Thread gg
 On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 18:21 +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 The issue of Export/Save/data-loss-protection is in my regard more of a  
 bug which
 should be fixed as soon as possible than part of UI redesign. As with  
 any fix this
 might be superseded by a more general solution later on.


This is definately not a bug.

If you chose to save to a lossy format like jpeg you opt to eliminate some  
information from your image, you reduce the data , it a trade-off choice  
for the compression you get.

If you chose png or another non-layered format you won't get your layers  
saved, etc.

If you save to gif you only get a palette of 256 colours.

Gimp does all these things correctly. It is aimed at a competant user  
base, it does not try to be a beginner's guide using different formats.

I see no sense in dramatising this as data loss.


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

2008-06-11 Thread gib_mir_mehl
Hi,

Alchemie foto\grafiche wrote:
 
  gib_mir_mehl wrote:
  Don't all those export troubles disintegrate once we presume a little
  more confidence in the undo function?
 
 More confidence will require a option to save undo history.
 
 As it is now once the image is closed its Undo History vanish,forever lost,
 so can't be used to correct saving's errors 

This keeps me thinking. Given the case gimp cares for saving 
the undo history, where should it be stored?

Saving inside the image file would create bloat and is not possible for most 
formats.
So it must be saved separately. This is feasible on the local computer.
But what if files are transferred between computers and users suddenly miss 
their undo history?

What would a user interface look like for exporting undo history and
for merging the history with the image again? 

Are there already proposals for this?

peter

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

2008-06-11 Thread Jon Senior
On Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:35:27 +0200
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 What would a user interface look like for exporting undo history and
 for merging the history with the image again? 
 
 Are there already proposals for this?

Just my take... is this not something that GEGL and the non-destructive editing 
will take care of? Given the possibility to adjust a curve applied 25 steps ago 
at any point, the only remaining use for undo will be on drawables.

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

2008-06-11 Thread gib_mir_mehl
Jon Senior wrote:
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

  What would a user interface look like for exporting undo history and
  for merging the history with the image again?
 
  Are there already proposals for this?

 Just my take... is this not something that GEGL and the non-destructive
 editing will take care of? Given the possibility to adjust a curve applied 25
 steps ago at any point, the only remaining use for undo will be on
 drawables.

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.

peter

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

2008-06-10 Thread Alchemie foto\grafiche

 gib_mir_mehl wrote:
 Don't all those export troubles disintegrate once we presume a little
 more confidence in the undo function?

More confidence will require a option to save undo history.

As it is now once the image is closed its Undo History vanish,forever lost ,
so can't be used to correct saving's errors 





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