6 ms·

This is a terrible idea. The menu bar works great, integrates with shortcuts, and gives 100% discoverability. Anyone who wants to get rid of it is a bad develo

This is a terrible idea. The menu bar works great, integrates with shortcuts, and gives 100% discoverability. Anyone who wants to get rid of it is a bad developer and a bad person.

kennywinker 3y ago
Meanwhile gimp probably has lower % usage rate than it did 20 years ago. Improvements are needed, and this is just menus in a popup box anyway
- torstenvl 3y ago
  > just menus in a popup box anyway Please don't do this. You know that isn't true. If someone wants menus in a pop up box, you can simply hide the menu bar until the user presses Alt (or F12 depending on your OS's convention). Inventing an entire new weird system for pure novelty while saying "fuck you" to accessibility for disabled people... is just not okay behavior.
  - gaganyaan 3y ago
    How does that inhibit accessibility?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
ohdannyboy 3y ago
It would not shock me to learn that GIMP has been a multi decade study to find out how bad a UX has to be before the FOSS community starts to care.
- rchaud 3y ago
  UX affordances are different when the price is zero. I learned GIMP the hard way, first because of Photoshop's pricing, and second because Photoshop's UX wasn't that much cleaner when it came to doing anything outside of trivial layer operations.
- torstenvl 3y ago
  GIMP has one of the best user interfaces of all community driven open source software. I frankly can't think of any that are better, now that Firefox followed Chrome in hiding all its most important features.
  - EspressoGPT 3y ago
    > GIMP has one of the best user interfaces of all community driven open source software. /s
  - Clamchop 3y ago
    Um... what? That would be terribly unfortunate for FOSS but thankfully it's not true.
  - Euphorbium 3y ago
    Ummm, have you used ANY software ever?
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    The UI to Photoshop is horrific (and unbelievably old and crufty, though not as bad as Illustrator.) I used to be convinced that the reason people think it's reasonable is Stockholm Syndrome. Now I'm convinced it's because most Photoshop users only ever use Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign, and simply aren't familiar with other software. It's bizarre that a search bar that unfolds a vertical menubar when highlighted but unfilled is supposed to be a great advance. It's so unimpressive that I 1) don't mind it at all, and 2) think the menu aspect is useless. It's just a menu command search bar; a good UI library could construct one automatically. Stick it in a corner, or automatically open it when people start typing with no obvious object. It's a triviality. What bugs people about the GIMP is that it's not Photoshop. All of the GIMPs menu options are placed in eminently logical places. although it's a grammar that probably makes sense over time. Photoshop options are mostly placed randomly, and some of them turn out to be ads. That's not a huge dig at Photoshop, because it's pretty amazing that they ever fix or move anything with so much industry adoption, and adding things has to be a nightmare. But the GIMP puts things in places because they make sense there. They don't have the base that would get enraged if they moved things. It's extremely telling that when put to specify improvements that could be made, the suggestions are either trivial, like 1) a search bar, or 2) an extra statusbar above the statusbar (in case they want instructions over their instructions), or 3) to make it single-window (because just not moving things is not enough, they have to be prevented from moving things), or they're just: 4) "Make it more like Photoshop! When I use Photoshop I know where things are, and when I use GIMP, I don't!" The GIMP is wonderful and its problems are technical: it has lacked some of the ability of Photoshop, but that gap slowly but surely continues to close. edit: I can't believe I forgot the worst one: "Why when I click Save does it save my project, but when I want to export a file based on my project, I have to pick Export?"
- kazinator 3y ago
  GIMP has a problem on MS Windows whereby newly opened windows don't activate to the foreground. It's been there for over 20 years. Six-year-old Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/7esx08/even_with_latest_gimp_windows_open_in_background/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/7esx08/even_with_late... I don't think it's fixed yet.
eviks 3y ago
how is discoverability 100% if you - can't search - don't have 100% functionality
- torstenvl 3y ago
  Search is the opposite of discoverability for all the reasons covered in this thread and in the OP.
  - eviks 3y ago
    The OP doesn't make this absurd claim (search is how you discover things, it can't be the opposite)
    - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      Search is how you find things you know are there. Discoverability is the measure of how well an application presents features to you that you didn't necessarily know were there. A menu may be a list of features, when you open the menu you discover those features. A search box is a box. It shows no features. Search results might show features but those features might also not relate at all to the task you're doing, which means they're out of context. That's extremely poor discoverability. You can find all the features, you can't discover them.
    - torstenvl 3y ago
      Forgive me, but you must have only skimmed the OP. It is quite explicit. > [Search] kinda works when you generally know what you need or how a feature you want could be called. But really not when this is your first rodeo.
      - kazinator 3y ago
        Will a web page be discoverable if its server blocks all search-related robots? Now if search were the only means of discovery, that would be bad. Imagine if no two pages linked together: everything had to be found in an index. That's a strawman though. Search complements other modes of discovery. How about REdiscoverability. You remember some feature in the program and some words related to it, but ... where the heck was it? Search can help.

This is a terrible idea. The menu bar works great, integrates with shortcuts, and gives 100% discoverability. Anyone who wants to get rid of it is a bad developer and a bad person.

kennywinker 3y ago

Meanwhile gimp probably has lower % usage rate than it did 20 years ago. Improvements are needed, and this is just menus in a popup box anyway

torstenvl 3y ago
> just menus in a popup box anyway Please don't do this. You know that isn't true. If someone wants menus in a pop up box, you can simply hide the menu bar until the user presses Alt (or F12 depending on your OS's convention). Inventing an entire new weird system for pure novelty while saying "fuck you" to accessibility for disabled people... is just not okay behavior.
- gaganyaan 3y ago
  How does that inhibit accessibility?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

ohdannyboy 3y ago

It would not shock me to learn that GIMP has been a multi decade study to find out how bad a UX has to be before the FOSS community starts to care.

rchaud 3y ago
UX affordances are different when the price is zero. I learned GIMP the hard way, first because of Photoshop's pricing, and second because Photoshop's UX wasn't that much cleaner when it came to doing anything outside of trivial layer operations.
torstenvl 3y ago
GIMP has one of the best user interfaces of all community driven open source software. I frankly can't think of any that are better, now that Firefox followed Chrome in hiding all its most important features.
- EspressoGPT 3y ago
  > GIMP has one of the best user interfaces of all community driven open source software. /s
- Clamchop 3y ago
  Um... what? That would be terribly unfortunate for FOSS but thankfully it's not true.
- Euphorbium 3y ago
  Ummm, have you used ANY software ever?
- pessimizer 3y ago
  The UI to Photoshop is horrific (and unbelievably old and crufty, though not as bad as Illustrator.) I used to be convinced that the reason people think it's reasonable is Stockholm Syndrome. Now I'm convinced it's because most Photoshop users only ever use Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign, and simply aren't familiar with other software. It's bizarre that a search bar that unfolds a vertical menubar when highlighted but unfilled is supposed to be a great advance. It's so unimpressive that I 1) don't mind it at all, and 2) think the menu aspect is useless. It's just a menu command search bar; a good UI library could construct one automatically. Stick it in a corner, or automatically open it when people start typing with no obvious object. It's a triviality. What bugs people about the GIMP is that it's not Photoshop. All of the GIMPs menu options are placed in eminently logical places. although it's a grammar that probably makes sense over time. Photoshop options are mostly placed randomly, and some of them turn out to be ads. That's not a huge dig at Photoshop, because it's pretty amazing that they ever fix or move anything with so much industry adoption, and adding things has to be a nightmare. But the GIMP puts things in places because they make sense there. They don't have the base that would get enraged if they moved things. It's extremely telling that when put to specify improvements that could be made, the suggestions are either trivial, like 1) a search bar, or 2) an extra statusbar above the statusbar (in case they want instructions over their instructions), or 3) to make it single-window (because just not moving things is not enough, they have to be prevented from moving things), or they're just: 4) "Make it more like Photoshop! When I use Photoshop I know where things are, and when I use GIMP, I don't!" The GIMP is wonderful and its problems are technical: it has lacked some of the ability of Photoshop, but that gap slowly but surely continues to close. edit: I can't believe I forgot the worst one: "Why when I click Save does it save my project, but when I want to export a file based on my project, I have to pick Export?"
kazinator 3y ago
GIMP has a problem on MS Windows whereby newly opened windows don't activate to the foreground. It's been there for over 20 years. Six-year-old Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/7esx08/even_with_latest_gimp_windows_open_in_background/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/7esx08/even_with_late... I don't think it's fixed yet.

eviks 3y ago

how is discoverability 100% if you - can't search - don't have 100% functionality

torstenvl 3y ago
Search is the opposite of discoverability for all the reasons covered in this thread and in the OP.
- eviks 3y ago
  The OP doesn't make this absurd claim (search is how you discover things, it can't be the opposite)
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    Search is how you find things you know are there. Discoverability is the measure of how well an application presents features to you that you didn't necessarily know were there. A menu may be a list of features, when you open the menu you discover those features. A search box is a box. It shows no features. Search results might show features but those features might also not relate at all to the task you're doing, which means they're out of context. That's extremely poor discoverability. You can find all the features, you can't discover them.
  - torstenvl 3y ago
    Forgive me, but you must have only skimmed the OP. It is quite explicit. > [Search] kinda works when you generally know what you need or how a feature you want could be called. But really not when this is your first rodeo.
    - kazinator 3y ago
      Will a web page be discoverable if its server blocks all search-related robots? Now if search were the only means of discovery, that would be bad. Imagine if no two pages linked together: everything had to be found in an index. That's a strawman though. Search complements other modes of discovery. How about REdiscoverability. You remember some feature in the program and some words related to it, but ... where the heck was it? Search can help.