Hi,
here are some commented notes I took on the GIMP BOF session which
took place last saturday in Sevilla at the GNOME Users and Developers
European Conference. This is a loose collection of random ideas and
thoughts. We didn't decide on anything, we just took the opportunity
to collect some ideas and discuss them...
Plug-in Previews
----------------
- Most, if not all, plug-ins should have a preview and they should
share a common look and feel.
- The preview should be zoomable with the plug-in specifying the
initial zoom setup (1:1 in most cases).
- The preview area should scale with the dialog.
- The zoom GUI might be copied from PS:
---------------
| |
| |
| Preview |
| |
---------------
+ 100% -
+/- are buttons for adjusting the zoom located around a label that
displays the zoom value. The value is clickable to select 100%.
The click-to-100% feature is not very intuitive, but since it's an
expert feature, it might be OK to hide it this way. Someone wanted
a way to a enter zoom value numerically, so we might want to use an
entry/spinbutton instead.
- A split mode would be handy:
-------------------
| | |
| Before | |
| | After |
| | |
-------------------
Alternative setups like top/bottom, diagonal split have been
suggested. Difficult to get this integrated into the GUI w/o
cluttering it with buttons. Could be in a right-click menu, but
it would probably not be found there.
- Alternative preview in image window would be nice to have.
- Provide an API that allows the plug-in developer to use the same
function for manipulating the image as well as the preview. The
preview would have to provide a drawable API and pixel-regions
etc. in order to achieve this goal.
General GUI ideas
-----------------
- Four direction menus to reduce mouse movements necessary to
reach a certain menu entry. I'm not sure if I understood this
correctly. Someone should draw some Ascii art to illustrate
this. I don't like the idea.
- Make docks scrollable. You could then stuff almost everything in
there and it might even still be useable if you have a wheel
mouse. Might be tricky since it would mean having scrollable
widgets inside a scrollable widget. Again I don't like the idea.
- Make layers resizable/scalable in by adding handlers to the layer
boundaries.
- Effect layers. Hasn't been discussed much, probably not for 1.4.
- Replace canvas XOR drawing by something nicer. We looked at some
commercial apps and found they all get problems if the background
color matches the color used to preview lines/beziers etc. GIMP has
this problem with gray backgrounds. Should be discussed further.
Tigert keeps asking for antialiased bezier previews.
- Allow to rotate the canvas just as one rotates a sheet of paper
when drawing to ease the use of graphic tablets.
- Find a better heuristic to place pasted selections/layers. Right
now they appear in the center of the image which is often far
away from the spot where one needs them. Using the center of the
display could be a better choice.
Text Tool
---------
- Should allow multi-line text with configurable line spacing.
- Should allow to modify character-spacing for selected parts
of text.
- Clicking somewhere into the image and starting to type should
create a new text layer the size of the text's bounding box.
Clicking and dragging should create a new text layer the size
of the dragged rectangle.
Salut, Sven
