Re:Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before
by frozenport on Sunday September 29, 2013 @04:34AM
(#6464544)
I don't like the ideas of floating control panels everywhere. They tend to distract, I find myself constantly needing to open and close them and they also occupy a lot of space. The issue has existed for dozens of years, finally the folks at GIMP appear to have sobered up and are working on a single-window mode http://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.8.html
Re:Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before
by clarry on Sunday September 29, 2013 @04:55AM
(#6464582)
Yes, the SDI vs. MDI debate has been a popular and flamy one. It's also a rather subjective issue, and preference depends on what you're used to, what window manager you run (and how you're using it's features), etc. GIMP used to get bashed a lot for this UI choice, but the haters often forget that Photoshop (originally Mac software) defaults (or at least used to, and I believe it still does?) to SDI in the Apple land.
I'm glad that those who want MDI have finally stepped up and implemented it. Recently I've been using a tiling window manager that doesn't deal particularly well with floating windows. Now I have the choice.
Re:Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before
by dllthomas on Sunday September 29, 2013 @09:56AM
(#6465185)
"what window manager you run (and how you're using it's features)"
Right, exactly. I've found that starting GIMP in ratpoison is a little glitchy - two windows spend time competing for a single frame until I pull one of them into another frame - but once I've done that I quite like the experience of using GIMP in ratpoison.
Re:Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before
by hrjet on Monday September 30, 2013 @10:42AM
(#6469858)
In the context of this discussion, GIMP wins. You (or a group of users) are "free" to create an alternative interface for GIMP. The rest of the features of GIMP are readily available to be integrated.
The GP on the other hand is forced to use the exact same interface that Adobe prescribes for Photoshop. Moreover, if Adobe shuts down tomorrow, it is the end of the road for Photoshop development.
Re:Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before
by johnsonman on Sunday September 29, 2013 @09:20PM
(#6467301)
One that I've hit recently is that an open colour picker window prevents quit from doing anything. It also doesn't show the colour picker window, so I don't know why GIMP isn't quitting, just that pressing a common key combination (cmd+q) doesn't work for no good reason (colour picking is not an operation that needs to block quitting).
Whenever I've asked people to provide concrete examples of this, their issue has been that they expect the UI to be a 1:1 clone of whatever application they're used to (usually Photoshop) and so they don't know how to do some things, or can't operate smoothly enough as they haven't taken the time to grow muscle memory comparable to what they have with Photoshop.
I'm not a big fan of GIMP, but I want to scream of frustration on the occassion that I have to work with Photoshop (which I don't know well at all).