Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:42:49 -0500 From: Daniel Falk <daniel-gimpdevlist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> >> Please do something to get in touch with users, I could never >> honestly ever say theGimp could be a replacement for photoshop >> ever if this continues. > Gimp may or may not be a Photoshop replacement. That depends on > the user. For me, it's a replacement because since I'm using it > I'm not using Photoshop. But certain people want to keep using > Photoshop. If your plan is using Photoshop for free, then Gimp > it's not for you. If you need an image manipulation program, be > welcome. If you want Photoshop for Linux, which is a valid > desire, you should start asking Adobe to port it, not Gimp coders > to create a feature by feature clone. > > Anyway, I also think that a better communication between existing > coders and users would be nice for certain situations. But > non-users-wanting-photoshop aren't gimp users. And I understand > when a coder pisses off if one of these guys say "Gimp sucks > because it hasn't X feature" and threatens not using Gimp if the > coders don't do what he wants. I understand such things can piss off the people who are devoting their own time to the project. But if I'm understanding you right, you're suggesting that users shouldn't hope for gimp to be as feature-filled as photoshop. But why not? As a believer in open-source, I want gimp to be the best it can be and I'm willing to submit feature requests and bug reports to help get it that way. I'd rather spend my time doing that than getting a proprietary software package ported to linux by Adobe (not gonna happen!) Don't confuse feature counts (my product has 101 features and yours has 100, so mine's better) or specific individual features that might or might not matter to a few people with overall product utility. In particular, just because GIMP and Photoshop do some things differently doesn't make one better or worse than the other, just "different". The GIMP developers aren't (at least for the most part) interested in building a Photoshop clone. Nothing's stopping someone else from taking the code base and doing just that, but the GIMP team has its own vision. Submitting feature requests by itself isn't usually a very productive endeavor for most projects. There's no shortage of people with ideas; what's needed are people who can and will realize those ideas. That doesn't mean that participating in discussions isn't useful, but if you want to help GIMP move along, you need to find more active ways of doing so -- programming is only one such way. Finally, to address more specifically your point about nested-window MDI (aka "window in window"): that paradigm may work on Windows (although it quickly grew tedious a dozen years ago when I used Pagemaker), but on Linux/UNIX it doesn't work. One reason why that is specific to X (the X window system) is that the windows inside the parent window can't (at least at present) be managed by the window manager running under X: they have to be managed by the application itself. There are a lot of different window managers available, and most of those window managers can be customized almost endlessly, and there is no one standard. Not just decorations -- basic window behavior can be varied. Not everyone likes "click to focus and raise" (i. e. you have to explicitly select a window, which raises it to the top). For example, I use its polar opposite, focus strictly follows mouse with no raising of windows except on my explicit request (i. e. whatever window the mouse is in is the one that's active, even if it's partially buried under other windows). What all this means is that the windows inside the container may behave very differently from what the user is accustomed to, which is very distracting (try using the newest version of acroread with multiple PDF files using focus follows mouse, and you'll see what I mean -- and yes, I know how to turn that off, but I've simply switched to kpdf instead). Nested windows are also a pain to use if you want to have multiple applications in use simultaneously, because the big container hides all the other windows. I prefer to either just live with the mess or use multiple virtual desktops. But if you want to implement nested windows, go ahead -- if the GIMP folks don't want to accept the patch, you can distribute it yourself. I think it is important to open source projects that they value their users and reach out to potential users. It's good for a project to have many people interested in it, even if those people don't code. I'm not saying that the GIMP doesn't value and reach out. I just want to establish the point that those are actually good things to do in the first place. Well, free software or open source isn't simply about freedom without responsibility. You certainly have the freedom to use and modify the software without restriction, to redistribute it (in the case of GIMP, under exactly the same terms as the original) with or without modification, and so forth. But with that freedom comes the responsibility to help the project along if you can, or at least to understand that if you're not going to actively help your ideas along that nobody else has the responsibility to do it for you. -- 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
