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Drawing a circle isn't a new feature, the feature already exists in the program. It is just that the workflow to use the feature is very burdensome, all they ne

Drawing a circle isn't a new feature, the feature already exists in the program. It is just that the workflow to use the feature is very burdensome, all they need is a button that does several of the steps at once. It wouldn't implement any new behaviour, it is just a quick button. Now, it would take some work to implement those quick buttons, sure, but that is purely an UX change it doesn't add any new capabilities to the program, it just makes some actions easier to do. Basically, the feature lacking in the program are those "quick buttons" which would make adding these simple UX fixes easy rather than burdensome engineering work.

zxzax 5y ago
And I'm saying you're mistaken, that feature never really existed. Trying to hack the ellipse tool into "quick buttons" to draw circles would not be what is expected, would not match the capability of other vector drawing tools, and would probably create other UX issues in the process. But of course, if you thought that was a good idea, you could easily make a plugin that does that, and test it out for yourself.
- username90 5y ago
  I think this discussion highlights perfectly why Gimps UX sucks. It is because the people who made it has a view on UX like you do and refuse to put in the work to fix it, with arguments such as "That isn't an UX issue" and so on. Fact is that Gimps UX sucks and people will have to live with it since it is a free product so the developers don't have any reason to do what you want. Anyway, you might be right about this issue, I am not an expert on image editing. However I do understand UX and your view on development will lead to horrible UX like what you have in Gimp. It might work great in enterprise products where you sell features and not UX, but a product intended to be used by normal users needs more work on UX for people to like them.
  - zxzax 5y ago
    I'm saying this as some who's done UX and is familiar with the problems in GIMP, there really is no quick fix that can be done here. If you view everything as a UX issue that can simply be solved by moving things around, then we can't really have a discussion because there is no meaningful distinction we can make. The major issues with GIMP are mostly on the backend. The work is being put in to fix it, but it's slow going because there are not enough people working on it. I agree with you that people would really see it as a UX improvement if there were good shape tools like photoshop has, but my point is you can't just get that by changing around the ellipse select tool. If it were that easy, somebody would have done it by now. The GIMP people I've known have said they would love to fix a lot of things but it's harder than it seems and they don't have infinite time. Just to make it a little clearer what I mean here: if there were actual shape drawing capabilities on the backend then it would be pretty easy to make any kind of circle/ellipse tool that you wanted, or set up the circle tool to do what you want by default, but those don't exist right now.
    - username90 5y ago
      > If you view everything as a UX issue that can simply be solved by moving things around That isn't what UX is about. I am making games, and stuff that isn't simply moving things about is a core part of user experience. For example consider a game where you want to move around armies on a map. You can implement that by moving around the armies using numpad only, or you can calculate a shortest path on a mouse click to a location and show it to the user. Both allows the same kind of movement, but the second offers way better user experience which is why all modern big strategy games uses it over one step at a time movement. > but my point is you can't just get that by changing around the ellipse select tool I never said that a good UX was easy, I just said that the developers of GIMP didn't want to put into the work to make GIMP have good UX, and a lot of that work is redesigning the technical architecture or implementing those features the tedious ugly way. It is possible to make it decently easy to make easy to use tools for gimp, I just don't know all the details of what those tools should do exactly but I know how to build that sort of things. When making games you don't have as patient users as you have in GIMP, so you'd never get away with that kind of UX, so from my perspective when your product has GIMP's level of UX then it isn't complete as a product since it would basically ensure business failure.
- mch82 5y ago
  You’re both right. Zxzax is correct that GIMP is an alternative to Photoshop, so the tool pallet is appropriate for editing photos. The typical workflow is: (1) stack layers, (2) mask layers, (4) composite. It’s rare to draw a circle on top of a photo. Usually it’s most efficient to select an area of a photo with a rectangle to isolate it on a layer, then use masking to refine the non-rectangular edge. If your goal is to draw a 2D illustration & work with gradient meshes, then Inkscape is an alternative to Illustrator. Both those programs are for illustrating in 2D and there are purpose-built features for drawing & editing shapes. That said, GIMP does have real UX issues. For example, the controls and GUI elements don’t scale well to high resolution screens and could be much better on tablets like the Surface. They’re also missing CMYK color space support. But, I always assume they’re waiting for Adobe patents to expire to add those features.
  - zxzax 5y ago
    The DPI scaling issues should be mostly fixed in GIMP 3. CMYK support is not a UX issue, that is another thing that's missing on the backend. I don't think it has anything to do with patents, the problem is more because of lack of manpower.
  - username90 5y ago
    I've used photoshop, its UX wasn't nearly as bad. Me as a user had a pretty good experience with photoshop, but a really bad experience with gimp. Hence gimp has bad UX and photoshop has ok UX, according to me and most people I've seen. People trying to convince me and the other people that our experience wasn't all that bad with Gimp is the problem here, that attitude ensures Gimp will always have bad user experience.
    - zxzax 5y ago
      Just to clarify, GIMP definitely has issues, and I'm not trying to convince you otherwise. But they are not issues that can be solved with more UX research or what you would typically call "UX work." That's what I think the misunderstanding here is, please don't misinterpret what I'm saying. The UX issues that are there are already known, what's left is to do the (hard) work of fixing it.

zxzax 5y ago

And I'm saying you're mistaken, that feature never really existed. Trying to hack the ellipse tool into "quick buttons" to draw circles would not be what is expected, would not match the capability of other vector drawing tools, and would probably create other UX issues in the process. But of course, if you thought that was a good idea, you could easily make a plugin that does that, and test it out for yourself.

username90 5y ago
I think this discussion highlights perfectly why Gimps UX sucks. It is because the people who made it has a view on UX like you do and refuse to put in the work to fix it, with arguments such as "That isn't an UX issue" and so on. Fact is that Gimps UX sucks and people will have to live with it since it is a free product so the developers don't have any reason to do what you want. Anyway, you might be right about this issue, I am not an expert on image editing. However I do understand UX and your view on development will lead to horrible UX like what you have in Gimp. It might work great in enterprise products where you sell features and not UX, but a product intended to be used by normal users needs more work on UX for people to like them.
- zxzax 5y ago
  I'm saying this as some who's done UX and is familiar with the problems in GIMP, there really is no quick fix that can be done here. If you view everything as a UX issue that can simply be solved by moving things around, then we can't really have a discussion because there is no meaningful distinction we can make. The major issues with GIMP are mostly on the backend. The work is being put in to fix it, but it's slow going because there are not enough people working on it. I agree with you that people would really see it as a UX improvement if there were good shape tools like photoshop has, but my point is you can't just get that by changing around the ellipse select tool. If it were that easy, somebody would have done it by now. The GIMP people I've known have said they would love to fix a lot of things but it's harder than it seems and they don't have infinite time. Just to make it a little clearer what I mean here: if there were actual shape drawing capabilities on the backend then it would be pretty easy to make any kind of circle/ellipse tool that you wanted, or set up the circle tool to do what you want by default, but those don't exist right now.
  - username90 5y ago
    > If you view everything as a UX issue that can simply be solved by moving things around That isn't what UX is about. I am making games, and stuff that isn't simply moving things about is a core part of user experience. For example consider a game where you want to move around armies on a map. You can implement that by moving around the armies using numpad only, or you can calculate a shortest path on a mouse click to a location and show it to the user. Both allows the same kind of movement, but the second offers way better user experience which is why all modern big strategy games uses it over one step at a time movement. > but my point is you can't just get that by changing around the ellipse select tool I never said that a good UX was easy, I just said that the developers of GIMP didn't want to put into the work to make GIMP have good UX, and a lot of that work is redesigning the technical architecture or implementing those features the tedious ugly way. It is possible to make it decently easy to make easy to use tools for gimp, I just don't know all the details of what those tools should do exactly but I know how to build that sort of things. When making games you don't have as patient users as you have in GIMP, so you'd never get away with that kind of UX, so from my perspective when your product has GIMP's level of UX then it isn't complete as a product since it would basically ensure business failure.
mch82 5y ago
You’re both right. Zxzax is correct that GIMP is an alternative to Photoshop, so the tool pallet is appropriate for editing photos. The typical workflow is: (1) stack layers, (2) mask layers, (4) composite. It’s rare to draw a circle on top of a photo. Usually it’s most efficient to select an area of a photo with a rectangle to isolate it on a layer, then use masking to refine the non-rectangular edge. If your goal is to draw a 2D illustration & work with gradient meshes, then Inkscape is an alternative to Illustrator. Both those programs are for illustrating in 2D and there are purpose-built features for drawing & editing shapes. That said, GIMP does have real UX issues. For example, the controls and GUI elements don’t scale well to high resolution screens and could be much better on tablets like the Surface. They’re also missing CMYK color space support. But, I always assume they’re waiting for Adobe patents to expire to add those features.
- zxzax 5y ago
  The DPI scaling issues should be mostly fixed in GIMP 3. CMYK support is not a UX issue, that is another thing that's missing on the backend. I don't think it has anything to do with patents, the problem is more because of lack of manpower.
- username90 5y ago
  I've used photoshop, its UX wasn't nearly as bad. Me as a user had a pretty good experience with photoshop, but a really bad experience with gimp. Hence gimp has bad UX and photoshop has ok UX, according to me and most people I've seen. People trying to convince me and the other people that our experience wasn't all that bad with Gimp is the problem here, that attitude ensures Gimp will always have bad user experience.
  - zxzax 5y ago
    Just to clarify, GIMP definitely has issues, and I'm not trying to convince you otherwise. But they are not issues that can be solved with more UX research or what you would typically call "UX work." That's what I think the misunderstanding here is, please don't misinterpret what I'm saying. The UX issues that are there are already known, what's left is to do the (hard) work of fixing it.