I don't post much, just like to watch the Gimp development. I absolutely love the program but since I've seen a few things about UI stuff lately I thought I might pose a few questions. As someone posted earlier it is impossible to make everyone happy, but I think that it would be good at least to find a majority. I few weeks ago I installed Gimp Win32 for my mom, she's a newspaper person who can use some good image editing software. I told her that its every bit as good as photoshop. But when I started it up for the first time she exclaimed "It looks terrible, its can't be as good as Photoshop!". Now she recanted after I showed her a few of the things that it can do, but I'm afraid that Gimp could be losing users because people are not used to things that don't really look bad but look *different*. Its not isolated either. I found this comment on /. a few minutes ago in reply to an article running right now about Gimp on OS X. "I don't think it will make much difference. If the GIMP people want to increase their market share they need to fix the UI, and make it feel like a native app. I've tried the Win32 version of the GIMP, and the UI is dreadful. If I find it bad as a computer guy, you can't bet your bottom dollar that graphic artists are going to hate it. Once the UI has been fixed, then documentation needs to be re-written so that it's not orientated towards computer geeks. To many people, it won't matter whether it's free, or whether it supports the same features of a commercial product from Adobe that is far more polished." Now I don't agree with everything that this guy says but he does make some valid points. People who have used Photoshop see Gimp as being inferior because it *looks* less polished. Rather than just ranting about it I have a few suggestions that might be of some use. First I think that we should ask some graphic artists. I work with some, I don't know if there are any on the list but maybe we could work some good ideas into some of the next versions based on majority opinion from people who can benefit the most from using Gimp. My second suggestion is more technical, finding a way (and forgive me if there already is) to allow Gimp to have skins or something like that so that if someone wants it to *look* like Photoshop, they can. I defenately feel that some customizability is a key to a good UI. With the default being something that people are familiar with. Any thoughts? Chris http://christianfreak.net
