On Mon, May 21, 2001 at 05:47:33PM +0200, Raphael Quinet wrote: > One of the things that has been mentioned several times while > discussing the distribution of plug-ins is the fact that the menus are > too crowded, and new users can easily get lost. The user interface is > indeed a significant problem, but I think that it should be handled > separately from the packaging issues. Yup. How about we provide a user-friendly "Gimp Themes" (don't call it that if you don't want to) feature At install time the user can pick from whatever themes came with Gimp and with any auxiliary plug-in packages or whatever "Potato Shop convert" "Expert pixel hacker" "Web wrangler" "Just the basics" "Ms Finger Paint" Themes define the keyboard shortcuts (possible today) the menu layout (probably not too hard) and the toolbox icons (maybe harder). The "menu-path" built into a plug-in would become only a recommendation. We might like to consider whether themes can be added together (which would make it easier for 3rd parties) or not. Users would be able to edit all the features of the theme they're using, and remove or change (nearly) everything put into the menus by the PDB in Gimp 1.2, plus adding one-click toolbox icons for scripts, filters etc. basically customising Gimp until it's almost unrecognisable. BUT by providing a half dozen or so themes which cover the most common types of user coming to Gimp, all but the most demanding would never need to tweak themes at all. (Except those of us creating themes) e.g. "Ms Finger Paint" could have very little functionality hidden in sub-menus, and a lot of "useless" tools like draw-a-filled-circle which mimic the features available in a similarly package. Nick.
