At this point it feels like a prank that's been going on for a quarter century.
You're not wrong, I wish you were but you're not. By any measure GIMP is a dog of a program. I wish it weren't so as I stopped upgrading my various Adobe products some years ago, but alas it is. It would take me as long as this 'The Decline of Usability' essay to give an authoritative explanation but I'll attempt to illustrate with a few examples:
1. The way the controls work is awkward, increasing or decreasing say 'saturation' is not as intuitive as it is in Photoshop and the dynamics (increase/decrease etc.) just isn't as smooth as it ought to be. Sliders stick and don't respond immediately which is very distracting when you're trying to watch some attribute in your picture trend one way or other.
2. Most previews are unacceptably slow; they really are a pain to use.
3. The latest versions have the 'Fade' function removed altogether. I use 'Fade' all the time and I don't like being told by some arrogant GIMP programmer that the "function never worked properly in the first place, and anyway you should use the proper/correct XYZ method". You see this type of shitty arrogance from programmers all the time[1].
4. GIMP won't let you set your favourite image format as your default type; you're forced to GIMP's own XCF format and then export your image into say your required .JPG format from there. (I understand the reason for this but there ought to be an option to override it, if the GIMP developers were smart they'd provide options for various times, for instance: 'session only'.)
5. As others have mentioned, there's icon and menu issues, menu items aren't arranged logically or consistently.
Essentially, the GIMP's operational ergonomics are terrible and there's been precious little effort from GIMP's developers to correct it. (GIMP's so tedious to use I still use my ancient copy of Photoshop for most of the work, I only then use the GIMP to do some special function that's not in Photoshop.)
[1] The trouble is most programmers program for themselves—not end users, so they don't see any reason to think like end users do. (I said almost the same thing several days ago in my response to Microsoft's enforcing single spaces between sentences in MS Office https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22858129 .) It doesn't seem to matter whether it's commercial software such as Microsoft's Office, or open software such as the GIMP or LibreOffice, etc., they do things their way, not the way users want or are already familiar with.
Commercial software is often tempered by commercial reality (keeping compatibility etc.) but even then that's not always so (take Windows Metro UI or Windows 10 for instance, any reasonable user would have to agree they're first-class stuff-ups). That said, GIMP is about the worst out there.
"At this point it feels like a prank that's been going on for a quarter century."
Right again! GIMP developers seem not only to be hostile towards ordinary users but there's been along-standing bloody mindedness among them that's persisted for decades; effectively it is to not even consider ordinary users within their schema. Nothing says this better than the lack of information about future versions, milestones, etc. All we ever get are vague comments that don't change much from one decade to the next.
Perhaps it would be best for all concerned if GIMP's developers actually embedded this message in its installation program:
"GIMP is our play toy—it's prototype software for our own use and experimenting—it's NOT for normal user use. You may use it as is but please do not expect it to work like other imaging software and do not bother us with feedback for we'll just ignore you. You have been warned".
>they do things their way, not the way users want or are already familiar with
In my experience, a program that has never had a feature removed (or unintentionally broken) is an exception, not the rule. It takes a lot of effort to keep things working over the years, and if there is no will to maintain that, then those things will disappear.
Users, show precious little allegiance to any app when it balks them or they cannot find an easy way to do what they want to (run a help desk for a week and you'll get that message loud and clear).
As I see it, there are great swathes of poor and substandard software on the market that shouldn't be there except for the fact that there's either no suitable alternative, or if reasonably good alternatives do exist then they're just too expensive for ordinary people to use (i.e.: such software isn't in widespread use). I base this (a) on my own long experience where I encounter serious bugs and limitations in both commercial and open source software as day-to-day occurrences; and (b), data I've gathered from a multitude of other reports of users' similar experiences.
(Note: I cannot possibly cover this huge subject or do it reasonable justice here as just too involved, even if I gave a précised list of headings/topics it wouldn't be very helpful so I can only make a few general points.)
1. The software profession has been in a chronic crisis or decades. This isn't just my opinion, many believe it fact. For starters, I'd suggest you read the report in September 1994 edition of Scientific American titled Software's Chronic Crisis, Wayt Gibbs, pp 86-95: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247573088_Software'... [PDF]. (If this link doesn't work, then a search will find many more references to it.)
1.1 In short, this article is now nearly 26 years old but it's still essentially the quintessential summary on problems with software and the software industry generally (right, not much has changed in the high-level sense since then, that's the relevant point here). In essence, it says or strongly implies:
(a) 'Software engineering' really isn't yet a true engineering profession such as chemical, civil and electrical engineering are and the reasons for this are:
(b) As a profession,'Software engineering' is immature, it 'equates' [my word] to where the chemical profession was ca 1800 [article's ref.], (unlike most other engineering professions, at best it's only existed about a third to a quarter the time of the others).
(c) As such, it hasn't yet developed mandatory standards and consistent procedures and methodologies for doing things—even basic things, which by now, ought to be procedural. For instance, all qualified civil engineers would be able to calculate/analyze static loadings on trusses and specify the correct grades of steel, etc. for any given job or circumstance. Essentially, such calculations would be consistent across the profession due to a multitude of country and international legally-mandated standards which, to ensure safety, are enforceable at law. Such standards have been in place for many decades. Whilst the 'Software Profession' does have standards, essentially none are legally enforceable. Can you imagine Microsoft being fined for, say, not following the W3C HTML standard in Windows/Internet Explorer to the letter? Right, in this regard, software standards and regulations are an almighty joke!
(d) Unlike other engineering professions, software engineers aren't required by law to be qualified to a certain educational standard [that their employers may require it is irrelevant], nor are they actually licensed to practice as such. When 'Software engineering' eventually becomes a true profession then these requirements will almost certainly be prerequisites for all practitioners.
(e) With no agreed work procedures or mandated work methodologies across the profession 'software engineers' are essentially 'undisciplined'. As such, the SciAm article posits that software programmers work more akin the way of artists than that of professional engineers.
(As a person who has worked in both IT/software and in an engineering profession for years, I have to agree with Wayt Gibbs' assessment. There are practices that are generally acceptable in software engineering, which if I attempted to equate them to an equivalent circumstance with my engineering hat on, then I'd likely end up in court (even if no one was killed or injured by what I'd done. Here, the rules, the structure—the whole ethos is different, and both ethics and law play much stronger roles than they do in software-land).
2. You may well argue that even though Computing Science is not as old as the other engineering professions, it, nevertheless, is based on solid mathematics and engineering foundations. I fully agree with this statement. However, without enforceable standards and licensed/qualified software practitioners, the industry is nothing other than just 'Wild West' engineering—as we've already seen, in software just about anything goes—thus the quality or standard of software at best is only that of the programmer or his/her employer.
3. As a result, the quality of product across the industry is hugely variable. For example take bloatware: compare the biggest bloatware O/S program ever written, MS Windows, with that of tiny, fast and highly efficient Kolibrios OS, built on Assembler https://kolibrios.org/en/ (here I'm referring to methodology rather than functions — we can debate this later).
4. The commercial software industry hides behind the fact that its software is compiled, thus its source code is hidden from public view and external scrutiny. Its argument is that this is necessary to protect its so-called intellectual property. Others would argue that in the past loss of IP was never really the main issue, as manufacturing processes were essentially open—even up until very recent times. Sure, it could be argued that some manufacturing had secrets [such as Coca Cola's formula, which really is only secret from the public, not its competitors], but rather industrial secrets are normally concerned with (and applied to) the actual manufacturing process rather than the content or parts of the finished product. That's why up until the very recent past most manufacturers were only too happy to provide users with detailed handbooks and schematics; for protection from copies they always relied on copyright and patent law as protection (and for many, many decades this protection process worked just fine). It's a farce to say that commercial 'open source' isn't viable if it's open. Tragically, this is one of the biggest con job the software industry has gotten away with—it's conned millions into believing this nonsense. More the true reason is that the industry couldn't believe it's luck when it found that compilers hid code well — a fact that it then used opportunistically to its advantage. (Likely the only real damage that would be done by opening its source is the embarrassment it'd suffer when others saw the terrible standard of its lousy, buggy code.)
4.1 'Software engineering' won't become a true profession until this 'hiding under compilation' nexus is broken. There are too many things that can go wrong with closed software—at one end we've unintentional bugs that cannot be checked by third parties, at the other we've security, spyware and privacy issues that can be and which are regularly abused; and there's also the easy possibility of major corruption—for instance, the Volkswagen scandal.
5. Back to your comment about 'good design not being free'. I'm very cognizant of the major resource problems that free and open source software developers face. That said, we shouldn't pretend that they don't exist, nor should we deliberately hide them. I accept that what we do about it is an extremely difficult problem to solve. My own suggestion to up the standard of open software is a sort of halfway house where cooperatives of programmers would be paid reasonably acceptable remuneration for their contribution to these major open projects. In turn, there would be a small nominal free (say $5 to $20) levied on large scale open software programs such as GIMP, LibreOffice, ReactOS etc. to ensure that development could go ahead at a reasonable pace (the projects otherwise would be revenue neutral—there would be no profits given to third parties).
Let me finish by saying that whilst commercial software has the edge over much free/open software (for example MS Office still has the Edge over LibreOffice), that edge is small and I believe the latter can catch up if the 'funding/resource' paradigm is changed just marginally. Much commercial software such as MS Office is really in a horrible bloated spaghetti-code-like mess and with better funding it wouldn't take a huge effort for dedicated open software programmers to beat their sloppy secretive counterparts at their own game. After all, for many commercial programmers, programming is just a job, on the other hand open software aficionados are usually doing it for the love of it—and that's a true strategic advantage.
I firmly believe that for open software to really take off it has to be as good as and preferably better than its commercial equivalent. Moreover, I believe this is both possible and necessary. We never want a repeat of what happened in Munich where Microsoft was able to oust Linux and LibreOffice. With Munich, had it been possible to actually demonstrate that the open code was substantially and technically superior to that of Microsoft's products, then in any ensuing legal battle Microsoft would have had to lose. Unfortunately that was not possible, so the political decision held.
One thing is for certain, we urgently need to raise the standard of software generally and it seems highly unlikely that we can do so with the way the industry is currently structured.
This wouldn't work. Most software isn't life-and-death. That's a big difference from bridge engineering, nuclear engineering, and aeronautical engineering.
If you're hiring someone to do Python scripting, there's little point insisting they have a grounding in formal methods and critical-systems software development. You could hire a formal methods PhD for the job, but what's the point? The barrier-to-entry is low for software work. Overall this is probably a good thing. Perhaps more software should be regulated the way avionics software is, but this approach certainly can't be applied to all software work.
If your country insisted you become a chartered software engineer before you could even build a blog, your country would simply be removing itself from the global software-development marketplace.
> compare the biggest bloatware O/S program ever written, MS Windows, with that of tiny, fast and highly efficient Kolibrios OS
I broadly agree, but in defence of Windows, Kolibri is doing only a fraction of what Windows does. Does Kolibri even implement ASLR? One can build a bare-bones web-server in a few lines, but that doesn't put Apache out of a job.
> My own suggestion to up the standard of open software is a sort of halfway house where cooperatives of programmers would be paid reasonably acceptable remuneration for their contribution to these major open projects. In turn, there would be a small nominal free (say $5 to $20) levied on large scale open software programs such as GIMP
This doesn't work. It means a company can't adopt the software at scale without implementing licence-tracking, which is just the kind of hassle Free and Open Source software avoids. If I can't fork the software without payment or uncertainty, it's not Free even in the loosest possible sense.
The way things are currently is far from ideal, but we still have excellent Free and Open Source software like the Linux kernel and PostgreSQL.
> open software aficionados are usually doing it for the love of it—and that's a true strategic advantage.
Agree that this can be an advantage. Some FOSS projects are known for their focus on technical excellence. That said, the same can be said of some commercial software companies, like iD Software.
> One thing is for certain, we urgently need to raise the standard of software generally and it seems highly unlikely that we can do so with the way the industry is currently structured.
Software firms today are doing a good job of making money. If the market rewards regressions in UI design, and using 50x the memory you really need (thanks Electron), what good would it do to regulate things?
Apparently most people don't care about bloat, and they prefer a pretty UI over a good one. That doesn't strike me as the sort of thing you can tackle with regulation.
UI is hard. It got replaced by "UX", but nobody agrees what that really is. So it boils down to whatever impracticality designers dream up. When UI was easy, there were real research, data backing up claims of improvements and laid down rules to enforce some consistency. This became "unfashionable" and was removed.
It was like during the VCR wars of the 80s when consumers wanted the most features but yet the fewest buttons. Then they complained how you had to basically play rachmaninoff on their sleek minimal interface to set the clock.
We need to be like other industries; "that's too bad". Seatbelts are inconvenient? "that's too bad". You don't want to stay home during a pandemic because the weather's nice? "that's too bad" ... you want a bunch of incompatible UX goals that leads to trash? "That's too bad".
Sometimes the opinion of an uninformed public shouldn't matter. We don't go to a doctor and pass around ballots to the other people in the waiting room to democratically decide on a diagnosis. Knowing what to not listen to is important.
The UX propellerheads come back with statistics from user telemetry that always agree with them.
UX is the problem — designing “experiences” geared around an 80/20 approach is substituted for the harder task of building tools that work.
Fred Rogers, 1984: "I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the 'Neighborhood' off-the-air ... they then become much more active in the programming of their family’s television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been ‘You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions’ ... I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important."
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
There's definitely non-crazy ways of doing this ... but it requires what at first blush, would appear to be a complicated interface.
Ha, reading that link now one feels a delicious sense of irony. Imagine how Sony would react today seeing that it has become one of the biggest purveyors of video/movie content. ;-)
Honestly I don’t know why VCRs are so hard to program but all of the buttons can’t help. I might be getting old but the Roku remote seems about right as far as complexity in the device goes and I can see how a nice interface with relative timekeeping could do what you need without a clock per se. Inertial guidance for timekeeping? A self winding DVR?
Two things off the top of my head that I can think of: 1) knowing that a blinking number is indicating some kind of selection and more generally 2) seeing the UI as a glimpse into a larger abstract space that can be navigated. Or in other words, having used computers for many years, what my parents sawzl as just a blinking word, I would see as a menu where up/down/left/right had meaning.
There's also some more abstract thinking involved there - for me it's very spatial so I think of it as being able to keep track of your place in this 'abstract map'. You had to learn some non-obvious things like "if the down button stops working, it probably means I'm at the 'bottom' of my available choices" or "if I start seeing the same choices again, it means I have 'wrapped around' and in a logical sense I'm back to where I've been before".
I actually remember thinking something like this as a child when we got a VCR. I think I remember that realization that "this is a menu I can explore". The exploratory skills you pick up when you have to figure out how to use something technical generalize really well to other technical things.
TL;DR: I think VCRs were hard to program because the limited UI of buttons and a tiny screen meant that you actually needed a fairly built-up mental model of the process to keep track of what you were doing.
The biggest “what were they thinking” part for me is why they cram a whole GUI with config options and menus into a clock when almost every use case for a VCR is already connected to a perfectly workable display which is much better suited to a GUI in the form of the TV. Later VCRs had onscreen rather than on-device GUIs but by then institutional momentum was too far along to redesign the remote when they moved the GUI out of the device and onscreen. Truly a missed opportunity.
I don’t know anyone involved in any VCR product. If I did I’d be asking them a lot of questions. But I have a hard time thinking they meant to make it so hard. They probably were clapping each other on the back and congratulating each other. They were inventing future ways of using content and for that they deserve praise. They just sucked at understanding how hard it is for non experts to put themselves in the mind of experts, someone whose inner mental world has jarringly different contours and whose mental model of reality may have little to no correspondence whatsoever with their own.
Many people would keep the manuals near the TV, so they could remind themselves how to use the rarely used features.
The Panasonic VCR we had included a barcode reader in the remote. The printed TV guide has barcodes for each program. This interface was very easy to use -- scan, and press "transmit".
Edit to add a link to an advert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSGUbE1v5RA -- the sheet of timecodes was necessary if you didn't have a TV guide with them printed, as shown here: http://www.champagnecomedy.com/panasonic-barcodes-saving-you...
That's the outrageous point. You shouldn't need manuals for operation of ordinary domestic appliances! If you do then you automatically know its design is substandard!
(The only reason you should need a manual is for some info or maintenance function that's not normally associated with its user-operated functions.)
So now my wristwatch is sitting on the desk.
*The hard part of programming the Beta(and early VHS) for me was getting the family to leave the tuner on the channel I/we wanted to record.
I hate that ovens and microwaves have clocks on them. I don't need two devices in my kitchen to tell time. It's ridiculous since they usually next to each other, and most of the time have different displays. Just because there is an LCD/whatever, doesn't mean it always has to display something!
At least on the latest power outage, my microwave stopped showing the time. The oven still flashed, so I set that time and only have one clock in my kitchen now.
Even my vehicle has two clocks in it, one on the instrument cluster and one on the infotainment system. So stupid!!!
What's even more crazy, increasingly often I've started to encounter ovens that don't work until you set the clock. I.e. if the clock was reset and is blinking, the heater won't turn on. Took me a while to figure it out the first time I saw it.
It's too bad time sync over power lines didn't catch on widely (or broadcast over the radio). It would still be saving everyone from changing their digital clocks during DST.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_recorder_scheduling_code
They're common in Europe, on a midrange bedside clock for example, and typical office/school clocks.
I remember we were foiled by one at school, when someone set the clock 15 minutes forward when the teacher wasn't looking. The hands could only move forward, so a few minutes later they started spinning 11½ hours further forward to set the correct time.
In the 1990s I encountered a hotel TV with that feature. It had a built-in clock with hands (not on screen), which was also the alarm clock for the room. No one had set it up, and I spent about ten minutes with the remote getting it to find a station with time info and set the clock. Then the "alarm set" function on the remote would work and I could set my wake-up time.
Given that nobody did it, it would appear that even though legally people like Mr. Rogers were making the case for time-shift programming, the industry must have assumed it was a minor use case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Data_Services (NTSC) looks like a 2008 standard and most PBS stations provide "autoclock" time data
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Data_System (FM radio) I figured this had an implementation considering text has been around for years. Amazingly, I don't think I've ever seen a car stereo use it to set the time!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_over_power_lines I know this has been around but has had a lot of hurdles. I figured the current time might be a simpler thing.
The only reliably time-setting tech I've seen integrated is GPS--I'm not 100% sure how time zones work with it, but it does know your location.
Autoclock setting was done for VCRs. It just happened much later than the case in question.
You mean the same industry that was trying to make time-shifting (and VCRs in general) illegal?
If they'd included a backup battery to retain the clock, I suspect it'd been less of a thing.
On the contrary, the clock needs to be super obvious precisely because it's a pain to set. Otherwise you wouldn't notice until your recordings were messed up.
Correct, that's the 2000+ year old axiom of ignoring the lowest common denominator and seeking the best advice available.
That said, if you're designing software for use by users who are 'lowest common denominator' then, a priori, you have to make it to their measure. If they cannot understand what you've done then you've wasted your time.
(I just now cleaned it up, although there are some icons you can't get rid of.)
It's not at all anymore about presenting consistent mental models, it's solely about the ease or difficulty with which particular isolated tasks can be performed.
It's also not automatically the goal to make all tasks as easy as possible. Instead, discoverability and "friction" are often deliberately tuned to optimize some higher-level goals, such as retention or conversion rates.
This is why we have dialogs where the highlighted default choice is neither the safe one nor the one expected by the user, but instead the one the company would like the user to take. (E.g. "select all" buttons in GDPR prompts or "go back" buttons if I want to cancel a subscription.
You can see that quite often in browsers as well, often even with good intentions: Chrome, for a time, still used to allow installing unsigned extensions but made the process deliberately obscure and in both Chrome and Firefox , options are often deliberately placed into easy or hard to discover locations. (E.g. a toggle on the browser chrome, vs the "settings" screen, vs "about:config", vs group policies)
I will readily admit in collective number of clicks and screentime, 37 year old men with advanced degrees in computer science are a super small minority.
But who is the majority then? Who spends the most time on say Reddit and YouTube? Children! Yes, people who we know are dramatically cognitively different than adults.
Why does YouTube keep recommending videos I've watched? That's what a child wants! Why does reddits redesign look like Nickelodeon?
There isn't one user and one interface that's right for everyone when we're talking about 5 year olds, 50 year olds, and 95 year olds.
We can make them adaptable to the screen, we should also do work to make them adaptable, at fundamental interaction levels, to the person using the screen.
And not in a clever way, but in a dumb one.
For instance, here's how you could ask YouTube: "We have a few interfaces. Please tell us what you like to watch:
* Cartoons and video games
* Lectures and tutorials
* Other "
And that's it. No more "learning", that's all you need to set the interface and algorithms.
Let's take Wikipedia, it could be broken up into children, public, and scholar. Some articles I'm sure are correct but are way too wonky and academic for me to understand and that's ok. There's nothing to fix, I'm sure it's a great tool for professionals. However, there should be a general public version.
"Simple English" does a pretty good job. Obviously it's a mix of children/public but for science/mathematical topics where I'm looking just to verify my basic understanding of something, swapping over to Simple English usually gives me what I was looking for if the main article is immediately going down into technical rabbit holes.
This proposal quickly falls apart because your categories are ill-defined based on your preconceptions. I watch a ton of lectures about video games on Youtube (e.g. speed run breakdowns or game lore theories). Do I choose the "Cartoons and video games" bucket or the "Lectures and tutorials" bucket?
"We've found adults and teens like different parts of youtube and use it differently. We want to make it the best for you. You can switch at any time, but tell us what best describes you:
* I'm an adult
* I'm not an adult.
"
youtube has this "for kids" app which came out after I first started pointing this difference in earnest around 2013, (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...) but it's not right and they clearly still cater their main interface to the habits of children who watch the same video hundreds of times - the insane repetition is a part of learning nuance and subtly in the context of content they don't have to actually pay attention to. It's all about learning the meta, super important. They know what happens, it's the silence in between they're excited about - that's the nature of play.
This app instead silos the kids into a playskool interface, great for people under 7 or so, but like our playground reform, we've made it completely unappealing for the 8-22 or so demographic (when I was a kid and there were ziplines into a bank of tires, you bet there were 20 year olds lining up to have a good time on those, we all have a need for play; freedom to err wrapped in relative safety).
Instead, it's data-driven UX for adults and data-driven UX for children - it's about separating the data, not a PTA-acceptable UX for overprotective parents.
The easiest thing to do is just allow them on youtube no filter.
The middle ground is the play app. Weird stuff sometimes get through but usually it's more someone dressed as a pretend princess. The good thing it's never really a murder scene or something equally as horrible (which could popup on youtube.com).
What would you do as a parent?
I would avoid youtube unless you setup the video until 7 or 11. After that it depends on the child.
It kinda has this for specific subjects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_quantum_mechan...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Introductory_articles
It already exists.
Yes, and Mozilla has become much worse about this. Turning off "Pocket Integration", or "Shared Bookmarks", or "Mozilla Telemetry", or "Auto update" becomes harder in each release.
Native macOS apps get to be a bit clever for this, in that there are two kind of button-highlight-state per dialog (the "default action" button, which is filled with the OS accent color; and, separately, the button the tab-selection starts off highlighting, which has an outline ring around it.) This means that there are two keys you can mash, for different results: mashing Enter results in pressing the default action (i.e. colored) button–which Apple HIG suggests be the "Confirm" option for dangerous cases; while mashing Space results in selecting the initially-selected (i.e. outlined) button—which Apple HIG suggests be the "Cancel" option for dangerous cases. I believe that, in cases where the action isn't irrevocable, Apple HIG suggests that the default-action and initially-selected attributes be placed on the same button, so that either mash sequence will activate the button.
I really wish that kind of thinking was put into other systems.
What is different in Win32, however, is that if any button is focused, it is also made the default for as long as focus is on it (or, alternatively - Enter always activates the focused button). Thus, there's no visual state for "focused, not default", because there's no such thing.
The distinction still matters, though, because if you tab away from a button to some other widget that's not a button, the "default" button marker returns back to where it originally was - focus only overrides it temporarily.
This can be conveniently explored in the standard Win32 print dialog (opened e.g. from Notepad), since it has plenty of buttons and other things on it. Just tab through the whole thing once.
There were computer keyboards which had a distinction between the button to enter the field and the button to, for example, do the desired action behind the whole dialog. Just like today it is common to expect that Esc is going to cancel the dialog (or the entry form) there was a key that one knew would do the "proceed" (GO) independently of the position in which field your cursor is at the moment (or was). In these operating systems Enter always did just the non-surprising "end of the entering of the current input field, skip to the next" and the "GO" signaled the end of that process and the wish to use everything that has been entered up to any point. It's particularly convenient when entering a lot of numerical data on the numeric keypad, where Enter also just moves to the next field.
I think that concept was right, and better than what we have today. Entering what are basically "forms" in any order (filling the dialogs) and proceed from any point is a basic task and could have remained less surprising.
IOW following metrics optimising for local maxima instead of looking at the big picture in a non-zero sum game. Each task is made easier by itself but in doing so creates a model in conflict with everything else, making everyone miserable. Nash would be sad.
Now all you have to do is stick a bone through your beard and pronounce yourself a "UX Guru" and off you go.
And it still hasn't been fixed.
I'm not a big believer in conspiracies, but if there's one I'd not dismiss out of hand, it's that Adobe or some other company has been ensuring that GIMP has never been improved or become a viable replacement for some PS users.
There is obviously a large potential market for a lower cost option for light users of Photoshop who don't want a monthly subscription to Creative Cloud.
Maybe they secretly paid off open source devs to obfuscate the code so much that any potential volunteers would have too much trouble finding a way to re-architect the UI without years of unpaid work.
When I see so many great improvements to complex software released to the community on GitHub, along with the potential for some startup to fork GIMP, fix its UI, and charge some sort of support fee like a lot of companies do with OSS, I just find it very strange that GIMP's UI is still in such bad shape, after two decades oconatant complaining by users.
It wouldn't surprise if Microsoft did or does something similar with the OpenOffice code base. So many compatibility and usability problems that just seem to langusish for decades, while you'd think some company could find a way to make money fixing some of the biggest issues keeping light users of Office 365 who don't want to pay subscriptions.
I read an interview with the maintainer[1] and it sounds like he's put in a lot of work but as he says it's a "labour of love". I wish someone was paying him, even surreptitiously!
[1] https://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/meet-seashore-free...
A designer that can't code will never start a software project so I guess that it's uncommon for them to get involved in one for free.
Then there are developers and designers involved in open source because their companies pay them for that. Gnome's designers are listed at https://wiki.gnome.org/Design#Team_Members
Two of them work at Red Hat, one at Purism, I didn't find any immediate affiliation for the other two.
Is there any company employing them ? Because i find the user interfaces from the 80-90 even 00 much more usable that the today's crap. Remember help buton ? Remember buttons ? Why does windows 10 looks the same and behaves worse than windows 1.0 ?
Yes, I had to explicitly set the way I want the icons to look in settings. It wasn't hard, and one of the bundled sets worked for me.
Maybe it's because I'm a long-time user and I know my way around, and where in the settings to look.
One of the problems of shipping UIs is setting good defaults. Maybe Gimp does not do a great job here; I should try a Clea installation.
What happened? search for images: "gimp 1.0" vs "gimp 2020". Wow.
> I've been using GIMP for years
I think usability to users experienced in the software and to new users are two different things. I believe an important part of usability is discoverability which is probably better judged by new users than by experienced users.
Holy cow! There's even the "classic" theme right there. Wish I knew this a year ago.
I've used it a number of times and do not find it any harder than any other piece of software — doing complex operations where you are not sure what you want to do (or especially, how is that called) is hard, but that's hard in an IDE as well.
I do not do much, but I do not do little with it either — I am perfectly happy with layers, selection tools, simple painting tools and the rudimentary colour correction I may want to do. And one can claim that the hamburger-menu-like approach started with Gimp, fwiw (right click on your image to get to a full menu, though you still had that menu at the top of your image window).
Two things have always been a requirement for proper Gimp use: "virtual desktops" — a dedicated one for Gimp — and IMO, "sloppy focus" (window under the pointer gets the focus right away), but I've been using those since at least 2001 or something when I first saw them on Sun workstations, so I probably never had trouble with extra clicks required to focus between toolbars and other dialogs.
For creating original artwork, I find any graphical approach too limiting — I _do_ want an easy approach of UIs, but I frequently think in terms of proportions and spatial relationships when drawing ("I want this to be roughly twice the size of this other thing and to the left") — I always try to imagine this combined tool that would fit my workflow, but then I remember that I am probably an outlier: I may have been spoiled having done mathematical drawings as a primary schooler in Metafont and later Metapost (for colour, or rather, grayscale :)), and being a developer since 7th grade, where it's hard for you to come to grips with how suboptimal doing precise drawings in any software is (I've done some minor uni work in AutoCAD too).
"Hey wow, that looks pretty great! I know where the buttons are, I can quickly scan them and it's clear what they do! It isn't a grey on grey tiny soup, they are distinct and clear, this is great. When is this version shipping? It fixes everything!"
Apparently almost everyone agrees but somehow we're still going the wrong way, what's going on here? Why aren't we in control of this?