On Fri, 13 Oct 2006 12:15:51 +0200, Øyvind Kolås <pippin@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 10/12/06, Philip Ganchev <phil.ganchev@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi.
I have a suggestion for a new and simple way to interact with GIMP.
A major difficulty in using GIMP, in my experience, is that the menus
are too many and too deep. To invoke an action on an image, or to
open a dialog box, the user spends a lot of time and concentration
navigating the menus, usually with the mouse. And, despite best
efforts to organize the menus, finding the right item for the
operation you want can be difficult.
A more efficient alternative would be to let the user try to express
his intention more freely, and show him a menu of options that might
be what he wants. This is in effect search for the right command, and
the user sees the list of options *as he types*. A command is any
conventional menu item or folder in the current menu hierarchy.
I guess you should have a menu or a similar interface in addition/tandem
with
a query interface. I have implemented a similar solution in my
prototypes of more advanced layer interfaces and added one more thing,
items can exist in multiple locations in the menu system with the aim
to make it easier finding what you are looking for when only browsing
the menu as well.
http://pippin.gimp.org/tmp/search-menu.gif contains a recorded
animation of the UI elements I've been using.
/Øyvind K.
I also find as a user that menus often go too deep.
One sub-menu is acceptable , two starts to get unwieldy. Eg. I ofter copy
a selection and Paste As New , this is three levels deep. I'd like to see
this at the same level as Cut: Cut | Paste | Paste as New. I crated a
hot-key as a work around but as others have said , I would rather keep my
eyes on the screen except for typing numbers etc.
Another improvement would to clean up some menus. The Blur menu seems to
contain several, largely equivalent filters. Two would suffice and could
be incorporated into Enhance.
I also created a bug about making sure sub-menus did not jump from one
side to the other. This is appalling from a usability point of view but
the comment did not get a very positive response.
Sometimes "logical grouping" of functions takes precedence over usability.
Some real basics like flip and rotating an image to straighten it up
should be on the image menu.
Some anomolies could be looked at, I can free-rotate a layer but not an
image.
Colors | Retinex ?? What's that supposed to tell the user? It seems to be
an enhancment filter to me.
Making the menus a bit more usable may reduce the calls for a replacement.
my-2c
/gg
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