Some short notes about my talk on GIMP 2.2+ and the feedback that I got during and after the presentation: - Several people liked the improved drag-and-drop support and it looks like some of them were not aware of the option to drag images as new layers inside an existing image. - They also seemed to like the generated brushes and the fact that they can be resized easily with some keyboard shortcuts. - Amusingly, the most visible features (previews in tools and plug-ins, for example) caused less reactions than the useful tricks (drag-and-drop, keyboard shortcuts) that are not visible until someone shows them to you or you take the time to read all help pages. - I got some expected questions about the user interface and these turned into a 10 minutes debate between some who would like to see some kind of MDI support (like Photoshop and other programs) and others who prefer the current interface. The expected conclusion is that having MDI as an option would be useful for many users but this will only materialize if someone takes the time to write the code. - One guy asked about better support for typesetting and said that the GIMP was unusable for any serious work if it did not support text orientation and letter spacing. He insisted very much on that. Thanks to Pippin for telling him that most of the infrastructure is ready for that in Pango, but it takes time to implement the GIMP part (UI and logic). I doubt that the guy will submit a patch, though... - I got some questions about how to make sure that one can take a picture in raw format from a digicam (e.g., with gtkam) and have all the metadata correctly handled and preserved until the final image is saved. This is too difficult today, especially if dcraw messes up the metadata for raw images. - One guy asked if a plug-in could be notified of any changes to an image so that it could propagate those changes to another image or a preview. This could be an interesting idea that needs more discussion and would require some changes to the plug-in API and wire protocol. - Surprisingly, I did not get too many questions about support for CMYK or more than 8 bits per channel. Other tidbits about FOSDEM: - Judging by the attendance, the talk by Alan Cox on Sunday about how to manage a stable kernel seemed to be the most popular. The room had 1400+ seats and 3/4 were occupied. - The KDE people were visible and well organized: they printed small posters for each KDE talk with a nice Konqui image, the title of the presentation, its location and time. They were everywhere. In comparison, the advertisements for GNOME talks were invisible. Even GNUstep and Plan 9 had more posters. - There were many interesting presentations. Among those that I enjoyed: Wikipedia by Jimbo Wales, Kernel by Alan Cox, GPL Enforcement by Harald Welte and the desktop track with KDE by Matthias Ettrich, XFCE by Olivier Fourdan and Nautilus by Alex Larsson. - I hope that I will see more GIMP developers next year! -Raphaël
