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GIMP should take a lesson from Blender. Blender used to be the most clunky, unintuitive pieces of open source software. But after a decade and a half of UI deve
by jdlyga 5mo ago
GIMP should take a lesson from Blender. Blender used to be the most clunky, unintuitive pieces of open source software. But after a decade and a half of UI development, it's one of the smoothest interfaces you'll ever use.
- 3form 5mo agoBlender also had a comparatively large amount of money backing these changes, if I remember correctly, which I expect GIMP does not. I suppose a lesson in that area would be required first. However, the others like Krita might be better positioned for this.
- elevation 5mo ago> GIMP should take a lesson from Blender. Blender used to be the most clunky, unintuitive pieces of open source software. But after a decade and a half of UI development, it's one of the smoothest interfaces you'll ever use Agreed. I'm already willing to use GIMP in its current state. But though I've used it since I was a child, I have to re-google for things I know it can do. I had a photo of a barn. I was going to construct it in miniature, so to get scale measurements I wanted an isometric perspective from a photo that had been taken at an angle. I had done this in GIMP before so I was hesitant to start googling for answers but in 25 minutes of playing with it, no combination of inputs would do what I wanted. I had to find some youtube tutorials. Even simple tasks aren't simple. Annotating a photograph with a couple red arrows is a multi step challenge involving paths, stroking, selections, layers, and maybe some other stuff I'm forgetting. These UI concepts were impenetrable without tutorials -- I never would have figured this out on my own. GIMP has helped me but it's never been pleasant to use.
- mixmastamyk 5mo agoYou can draw arrows with the pencil or paintbrush.
- argee 5mo agoNot if you're a professional in a big boy company, where the MacOS users can literally draw a perfect arrow in 2 seconds on any image, without installing a thing. You're just going to look completely incompetent.
- mixmastamyk 5mo agoThis is not a significant concern of anyone I've met, and if it was I'd look at them as incompetent.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- cmyk_student 5mo agoFor what it's worth, there is a built-in arrow brush in GIMP 3.2 (we updated the MyPaint brushes engine and got it for free as a result).
- elevation 5mo agoAnother lesson GIMP could take from Blender is the importance of a python REPL that updates with the analog commands to the menu items you're clicking. GIMP allows scripting from some kind of lisp, but in many hours of attempt I've never gotten it to do what I know it can do. But I was effective in blender within seconds because it allowed me to directly translate my actions to code.
- cmyk_student 5mo agoGIMP has a Python console, and several built-in plug-ins are written in Python: https://docs.gimp.org/3.2/en/gimp-filters-python-fu.html https://docs.gimp.org/3.2/en/gimp-filters-python-fu.html We want to make macros simpler (some of the work I helped out with for GIMP 3.0 was to lay the groundwork for automated/recordable operations), but as with all the things on our roadmap it takes time and developers.
- stuaxo 5mo agoI used the python API in GIMP headless early on in my career, was pretty handy.
- Palomides 5mo agothe only possible lesson from blender I see is "receive millions of dollars a year from corporations"