Hacker News Reader

Comment by WhitneyLand | Hacker News Reader

Sorry to say I don't think GIMP is the best example of a great FLOSS project.

Many other projects are very competitive (or better) than commercial options but GIMP is not even close.

They just released support for 16bit/32bit/c color last year which is needed for so many scenarios.

The unified transform tool mentioned as a highlight is really a pretty simple thing to code.

They are 5-10 years behind what you get in PS for $10/month. It's a killer for any professional have tools that far behind their peers.

The UX has always been poor and unnecessarily complicated. I resent the implication it's the user's fault for not taking time to learn. There are many examples of complex professional systems that prove a decent UX is still possible.

View on HN

> There are many examples of complex professional systems that prove a decent UX is still possible

...and Adobe PS is not one of them!

People tolerate its UX/I because the functionality is unequaled and, after you commit to visual and muscle-memory all the shortcuts and locations of commands and options, you can be extremely productive despite the UX/I.

Also, people coming from the "physical arts" category are kind of used to horrible UX/I... I mean, the "UX/I" of a paint brush is pure horror story, even if you use acrylic paint... so the "suffering leads to great art" mantra when applied to tools too, carried into the digital world, makes artists pretty "masochistic" which pairs well with Adobe products' UI "sadism" :)

Totally agree PS has its own UX issues. My personal favorite: different key combinations for the first time you undo and the second time you undo.

…That's actually one of the things I like about Photoshop—you can just press Ctrl-Z repeatedly to look at before/after a change. Sure it's odd, but there's a reason it's the way it is.

>different key combinations for the first time you undo and the second time you undo.

That's not what's going on. Ctrl+Z is an undo/redo toggle, Ctrl+Shift+Z steps back in the document history. You shouldn't do Ctrl+Z followed by a series of Ctrl+Shift+Zs. Just do Ctrl+Shift+Z.

You're just undoing the undo.

That makes a good point. A lot of software being pushed out is targeted to beginner users and is broken in terms of encouraging users to to continue using it. We've gotten rid of "Advanced" settings and giving a deeper way of using the tool.

I'm not suggesting that we should leave all tools and products completely unusable unless you're a level 20 night elf. However, reward your frequent users.

I would argue that while the photoshop user interface is unintuitive and inconsistent, it does have the saving grace that once you learn it, you can actually do things very quickly. It definitely caters to its entrenched, professional userbase rather than neophytes.

The same is mostly true of Gimp as well. In fact I find Gimp has more intuitive ways to do a good number of tasks than Photoshop, but if you already know Photoshop the Gimp way will seem foreign.

As someone who figured out Gimp and was then asked to work on Photoshop some, I found Photoshop's methods to be awkward and needlessly complicated in places.

I am still an amateur however. I might break out the Gimp once a month or so.

"people coming from the "physical arts" category are kind of used to horrible UX/I... I mean, the "UX/I" of a paint brush is pure horror story"

How would you improve on the UI of a physical paint brush?

A self-washing brush with a paint-injection system coupled to a digital paints mixer? Add a system to only harden the paint when a special wavelength UV light is shined on it (maybe include the "hardening lamp" in brush's head?). Add away to switch between jet-mode (spray can paint) and brush mode, and you get a graffitty artist's wet dream.

Joke aside, with paint and anything physical you got constraints of physics and chemistry. And anything too sophisticated will be expensive and prone to breaking so nobody will use it. Try to make it reliable and it will have the cost of a piece from an F-35.

None of these constraints exist for software, so you don't really have any excuse to not do UX/I right.

Unsuccessfully, I'd wager.

GIMP, Inkscape, Blender and other open source art production tools have a big chicken and egg problem. To really improve, they need more professionals using them and a part of them should be developers or willing to chip in by other means. But because there are issues (education included) that are deal breakers for pros, you can't expect it to get better quickly. The situation is much worse for art production tools (than e.g. programmers' tools), because a smaller portion of professionals in the field are also capable programmers.

This is a pretty sad situation and I can't how it would change, apart from giant (in open source terms) donations that would allow a developer-year or few full-time.

Not all open source art production tools, though - Krita seems to have carved out a niche community of happy artistic users, probably because there's room for tools that take a different approach to Photoshop.

I've long wondered how to address this "different itch" problem. People in a position to contribute code don't have the same itches or desires as those who don't, vs a DBMS, IDE, wiki, http server, etc.

I would think that you could find a well-known artist who would be willing to consult on improving a product, especially if they got to have someone implement their pet features the way they want them to be implemented. But the question is - are the tools good enough to even get there or are there so many missing or poorly implemented features that it would be a full rewrite (at least of the UI) to even start?

> The UX has always been poor and unnecessarily complicated.

I'm afraid a lot of photoshop ease-of-use boils down to :