Hi, I'ts been a while since I've last written here. First of all congrats for getting 2.4 out the door. I'm not a developer, just a humble graphic artist & semi-professional UI designer. I think making a roadmap is a very important step in the development of Gimp. But I suggest before that, Gimp needs a mission statement. If you've happened to read the talkback on /. to the release announcement, you may have noticed most people compared Gimp to Photoshop and complaining on its shortcomings. I think a clear message as to the direction Gimp development will take in the future is important. The choice is simple: Professional tool for the Graphic artist, or image editor for the home user and amateur photographer. Mozilla suite - or Firefox. I believe Gimp's target audience should be the home user and amateur photographer, and future development in this direction should take precedence over features for the professional artist. Gimp is already a default install in many distros. Many more people will benefit from a simple, easy to use tool that will enable them to create web art and modify pictures than they will from a complex app crammed full of incomprehensible functions. But this must be written down and displayed on the website so everyone can see and understand just what is Gimp and where it is going. Back to the subject of the roadmap. As well as a guide for future development, a roadmap can be used to recruit potential developers by creating a vision for the future of Gimp which will inspire them to join the effort. I believe the internals work is important and necessary, but it does not inspire. Perhaps a roadmap should be drawn for the next two or three releases, leading up to Gimp 3. If the vision is attractive enough (and accompanied by detailed mockups and design documents), more people will want to join in and will agree to do some grunt work, knowing what all the hard work will eventually lead to. As for user-visible changes in version 2.6, I think an important goal should be to get Gimp to work well with the desktop environment. I'm talking about the multiple taskbar buttons and related subjects. I'm writing this on Ubuntu 7.10 and Gimp is showing some strange window behaviours here. I know similar thigs are happening in the Windows port. If there's anything most users will appreciate it's this. Michael ----- Original Message ---- From: Sven Neumann <sven@xxxxxxxx> To: gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 9:25:46 AM Subject: 2.6 roadmap Hi, so it looks like we should toss some ideas around here on the mailing-list to get an idea what could be our goals for 2.6. Let me just propose a few things for discussion: <snipped> _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
