From: Sven Neumann <sven@xxxxxxxx> Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 09:35:17 +0100 On Tue, 2007-01-30 at 02:26 -0600, Clarence Risher wrote: > On 1/30/07, Sven Neumann <sven@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > > to propose a user interface that fits all needs. > > imho, the 2.2 interface met all needs. i have yet to hear any > reason for eliminating either option, other than removing ONE > element from the screenshot GUI. We have had several reports about this UI being confusing. Users filed bug reports claiming that the plug-in wouldn't do the right thing. Obviously they did not understand the user interface. And that is not surprising because it is quite irritating. Just try the user interface on your grandmother. Now someone please show some creativity. Asking for the changes to be reverted is a punch in the face of the people that have put their free time into improving the usability of this plug-in. If those people choose to take it that way. Another way to interpret it is that the experiment was tried, but failed. IMHO the criterion that all functionality should be easy and obvious for a naive user is misplaced, particularly when it's taken to the extreme of "we shouldn't have any functionality that isn't easy and obvious for a naive user". There are a lot of interesting things that aren't easy or obvious to people who don't have the context, and sometimes that context is by its nature quite extensive. To say that we shouldn't do these things because innocent users might stumble across them and get confused is to permanently doom ourselves to having very limited functionality. I'm well aware that I tend toward the opposite extreme, but even with Gutenprint I have people asking for more tunables because they have no other way of doing what they want (these are OS X users -- largely professional photographers, I think -- who want very fine grained control over the ink generation). I understand that no project has time to implement every single feature demanded by every single user, and that feature bloat carries maintenance costs. That argument doesn't apply to this situation -- this isn't a newly-added feature; it was a conscious decision to remove something (in a plugin, not in the core application) that was already there and working. If the interface is confusing, then maybe it's a reason to improve it; maybe something as simple as improving the help message would serve the purpose. The two options really serve two entirely different purposes; it may inherently be impossible to combine them into one that works for everyone. For my part, I've been awfully tempted to port the GTK 1.2 file load and save dialogs forward to GTK 2.x. I suspect that my limited time is better spent on Gutenprint and perhaps KPhotoAlbum, but those dialogs are simply very painful to use. -- Robert Krawitz <rlk@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2 Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@xxxxxxxxxxxx Project lead for Gutenprint -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
