Being a part-time 'normal user' myself, I have a few comments... On Mon, 17 Jan 2000, David Monniaux wrote: > PROS: > * Tear-off menus are useful and intuitive (I think we should perhaps > reinforce the --- line by a scissor logo (such as character 0x21 in the > Zapf Dingbats font). Sometimes (I'm not up-to-the-hour in CVS so I don't know if this is still true) it's not clear what window is going to get affected by an operation in a pull-down menu if you have multiple windows open. Is there some way this could be more obvious, like a little black dot indicating which window is `frontmost' to the GIMP's mind? > CONS: > A few things in the core application: > * Layers and channels are *not* intuitive enough. I *really* think that this is an issue of learning to use the program. Photoshop uses a similiar mechanism and it takes users some time to get used to using it -- that's why there are books on photoshop. Let's not start dumbing down the interface... unless you're talking about something more specific that can be remedied easily, altering layers and channels so they are more intuitive will probably render them less useful. > * Bucket fill and magic select can't be made to select an area of > contiguous emptyness (alpha=0). Good observation ... I've been bothered by that MANY times, although I thought of it as some sort of magical technical limitation. It should be fixed. > More problematic are the plugins: > * Many plug-ins are not intuitive. They use self-made vocabulary, feature > no online help, have numeric parameters whose influence is mysterious... YES. Some of these are fun to play with, but when you're actually trying to accomplish an effect with them, they can be incredibly frustrating. Taking into account my previous rant on 'intuitive', there is a difference between requiring learning and being completely undocumented and unnecessarily cryptic ;-) I think that was a nice summary of issues that confront users on a very regular basis though. Aside from the layers and channels thing, I wholeheartedly agree ... although I think that the *NIX versions should really be given priority over Windows bugs. (XInput *obviously* won't work on Win32, since it's **X**input ^_^ (<sarcasm>hm, I wonder, maybe we could use DirectX-Input or something</sarcasm>)) ---- The Tao is like a glob pattern: It is masked but always present. used but never used up. I don't know who built to it. It is like the extern void: It came before the first kernel. filled with infinite possibilities. [glyph@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
