On 06/20/2012 02:50 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
A universally accepted truth is that users don't read warnings. This
will surely freak out few geeks who do read warnings carefully and
recite them occasionally over a pint of beer in a pub, but mostly
people really try to make stupid dialogs go away ASAP.
Alexandre Prokoudine
I have to agree that most users don't read (or perhaps more correctly,
don't comprehend) warnings. However, often in open-source development
there seems to be a general attitude that the "quality" of the software
should be primary and protecting users from their own stupidity should
be secondary. In fact, in my observation of open source conversations
over the years, including occasionally in the past by only one or two
people that were on this list, there has been a general attitude on the
part of a few individuals that "ordinary users" are morons and should be
ignored. Yet in this situation, the developers are tripping over
themselves to protect the users from their own ignorance and inattention.
It just seems so odd... I feel like I have fallen into software Wonderland.
It has been pointed out several times that most of the developers are
located in Europe. Europe has a reputation of having much more stifling
government regulations and rules than North America. Could this be
related -- the concept that people must be protected from themselves?
Pretty soon there will be a law that coffee may only be served cold
because somebody might burn their tongue.
People seem to learn best from adversity. If you corrupt your own image
file and did not make a pre-editing backup copy, you just might learn
something. However, if that same user is "protected" from doing
something stupid, then the user will learn nothing. They will not
become a better user. There is a fine line between successfully using
the software and everything being a "learning by making mistakes"
experience. However, if users are coddled, you will simply end up with
users that become progressively even more ignorant. If users choose not
to read warnings or don't take the time to think about and comprehend
the meaning of warnings, then maybe the users deserve the spanking that
they will receive as a result of their own action / inaction. Or is
spanking illegal now too?
[Not a serious suggestion] Maybe Gimp should, upon opening a file, make
an archival copy of that file so that he user who fails to make a
pre-editing backup copy, the user will be protected from his/herself.
The bottom line of this change to best serve a particular "target user
group" is that *my company* has fallen outside the definition decided by
the developers. My company is now outside the "target user group".
IMHO I think the developers meant well to change the save/export
situation, however, a mess has been made of it.
What's wrong with the Libre Office method: Open a non-ODX file, make a
change, do a Save, get a dialog box that asks if you want to save in the
old format (and lose any non-compatible changes) or in ODX format? The
'old format' button is already highlighted, so the user just has to hit
the Enter key. Why is that approach so terrible? It seems to be okay
for those (perhaps millions???) of users? And certainly users of word
processing programs may possibly be less sophisticated than users of
powerful image creation/editing software.
Unless something is done to arrive at a reasonable solution, my only
remedy for my company is to lock down Gimp upgrades at the pre-change
(save/export mess) level. When the time comes when the "old" Gimp will
no longer run on our workstations, we will have to switch to another
program ... and retrain staff on that other program. It is a real
shame. I would much prefer that my staff would be able to use one
SINGLE program for both highly productive workflow (open TIFF, make
minor tweaks such as Curves, save/close as TIFF) and major
editing/creation work that does need everything that XCF has to offer.
It is extremely valuable in a commercial environment to train on a
SINGLE program, rather than duplicate training in multiple programs (to
say nothing of maintaining, upgrading, etc.). The needs of commercial
environments often seems to be forgotten in open source development
planning.
ONE QUESTION... relating to locking down Gimp upgrades due to this
situation: As of Gimp 2.6.6 (on Ubuntu Linux), the creation perms for
TIFF (and I think some other) file types are wrong. I reported this bug
(after being told that *I* must be doing something wrong) and the bug
was quickly confirmed & fixed in development versions (thank you for
that). However, what is the most recent (if there is one at all)
non-development Gimp version (to run on Ubuntu 8.04 or 10.04) that
contains the creation perms fix AND is BEFORE the new save-export-mess
version?
Jay
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