Raphaël Quinet wrote:
> On Wed, 06 Dec 2006 18:36:53 -0500, Adrian Likins <adrian@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Sven mention on irc the issue of choosing what the default setup for 2.4
>> should be. So here are some of my thoughts:
>>
>>
>> 1. In the toolbox, the fg/bg color, and brush/patter/gradient boxes
>> should be on.
>>
>
> Maybe. But another option (mentioned in your point 2) would be to make
> sure that the color selector tab is always included in the default
> session (even when upgrading from a previous gimp version!) and that it
> is visible by default (first tab). In this case, I am not sure that we
> need the separate indicator. We can save some precious desktop space
> by not having it on by default
>
Not sure how concerned we are about desktop space. Those seem pretty
small to
me, and are useful. If we really wanted to save real estate, we could
show those widget, and
hide the bottom dialog in the main dialog doc entry by default (brush,
color, patter, gradient would
be redundant, and that would save much more screen space).
>> 3. Change the default image size (any particular reason it is 377x233?)
>> I'd suggest 1024x768
>>
>
> I'd suggest VGA (640x480) or even less, so that it fits on a 1024x768
> screen. Web statistics from July 2006 show that only 19% of the users
> have screens larger than 1024x768. While I expect this percentage to be
> higher among GIMP users (maybe close to 40% or 50%?), we should still
> make sure that the default settings work fine on a typical laptop
> screen (widescreen laptops are not so common yet even if they represent
> the majority of the new sales in many countries).
>
>
1024x768 (or bigger) automatically zooms out for me, so I don't
think it's a real estate issue. I'd just like to see a slightly more
useful default size. The current defaults are pretty small in comparison
to the multi-mega-pixels camera images people tend to edit. I actually
default to 1600x1200, even on my laptop of smaller resolution.
>> 5. It might be nice to have the stock round/square brushes be dynamic
>> brushes by default. (If I understand correctly, theres a small
>> concern that this might break some existing scripts?)
>>
>
> This has been discussed before. From my point of view, I am not
> concerned at all about the scripts but I am more concerned about
> usability aspects. The current bitmap brushes allow you to quickly
> switch between different predefined sizes without having to play with
> the brush size slider. This is not so easy to do with scalable
> brushes.
>
>
No reason you couldn't have 10 sizes of the scalable brushes in the
dialog by
default. You just want a wide selection of useful brushes that are
browsable and easy
to access.
>> 6. A wider selection of basic brushes would be good, especially with the
>> #5.
>>
>
> Agreed. Any proposals?
>
>
hard and soft circles, hard and soft squares, hard and soft
"calligraphy" brushes, maybe
a wider set of "grunge" brushes. I'll see if I can come up with an
actual set.
>> 7. I'd like to see some high resolution brushes included, especially now
>> with brush downscaling being easy to get to.
>>
>
> Again agreed. Any proposals? ;-)
>
>
Maybe some water drop, frame, cracks, etc. I'll see what I can come
up with. This kind
of stuff seems to map well to one of the ui improvement goals of making
gimp a better tool for
creating original artwork from found images. It's pretty typical to use
grunge brushes or frame and border brushes to enhance and personalize
found images.
>> 8. Maybe some more examples of pixmap/hose brushes. I kind of hate that
>> green pepper and vine brush (and I made them...). Not sure what
>> exactly yet, but I have some ideas:
>> a. something that makes obvious use of the directional pipes
>> would be good.
>> b. Maybe a simple tube drawing brush
>> (aka, a rendered sphere with the spacing set to a low value)
>> c. Maybe a couple more (bigger) sizes of the Pencil Sketch
>> brushes
>> d. a wilber brush? (totally useless, but hey... it's wilber)
>> e. a series of flipped versions of the "Caligraphic Brush"
>> series
>>
>
> Some time ago, I found some nice examples of directional brushes: one
> with ants and the other one with feet. Alas I don't have them anymore
> and I am not sure about their licence terms. But something like that
> would be nice to include in the default GIMP package.
>
> I have seen many PSP brushes showing random water drops, snowflakes or
> other things similar to the animated "Sparks" brush. Adding one or two
> of those could also be nice. These may not be very useful for graphics
> professionals, but it would certainly be nice for the amateur web
> designers or for those who want to impress their friends by creating
> cheezy Christmas cards with GIMP.
>
>
I have the ant brush, but don't remember who created it off the top
of my head (which
brings up an interesting point about brushes not having much in the way
of metadata in the
file format, but alas...). Again, I'll try to put together a set.
>> 9. I'd turn on "Save Tool options on exit" by default. We have a "reset
>> to default" in the dialogs if someone wants to reset the tools.
>>
>
> Hmmm... I'm not sure about that one. I easily forget that I had
> lowered the brush opacity in my previous gimp session and sometimes it
> takes me a while to see that something is wrong. I prefer to start in
> a predictable state. Of course I can turn off the auto-save feature.
> But I am not sure about what the default should be...
>
>
Yeah, not sure which is better here. I much prefer that the session
remembers how I left it
off as much as possible, and these seems to align with the way dialogs
and other state info is
restored. On the other hand, I suspect some people would expect it to
return to some sort
of neutral state on restart.
> Adrian
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