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[Gpaint-develop] Fwd: Gpaint feedback (long) (ridiculously long)


From: Andy Tai
Subject: [Gpaint-develop] Fwd: Gpaint feedback (long) (ridiculously long)
Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2003 17:55:53 -0700 (PDT)

An interesting feedback from not long ago that I think
is worth sharing with the world.


Note: forwarded message attached.


=====
Andy Tai, address@hidden
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people! 
Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
--- Begin Message --- Subject: Gpaint feedback (long) (ridiculously long) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 19:28:53 +0100 (BST)
On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Andy Tai wrote:

> Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 02:36:05 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Andy Tai <address@hidden>
> To: Alan Horkan <address@hidden>, Andy Tai <address@hidden>
> Subject: Re: Trying agian [was Re: gpaint - build without gnome print?]
>
> Hi, sorry for getting back to you so late.  I hacked a
> version taking out all gnome-print stuff.  I did not
> add an option to selectively disable it; that should
> be a next step.
>
> The tar file is attached.

Worked like a charm.
It is a pleasure when a program compiles
first time and does it so very quickly.
Thank you very much.

I hope you like user feedback, I've got a fair few ideas I hope you will
consider.  Feel free to reject any you dont like, a simple no thanks is
all you need say, I'll file bug reports for the suggestions you approve
of, if you like.  I am interested in usability but I dont consider myself
an expert by any stretch of the imagination but I hope you will consider
my suggestions and maybe also try to follow the Gnome Human Interface
Guidelines where appropriate. [1]

These notes were taken as I was using gpaint, most of yesterday afternoon
and as such the writing may not be particularly clear, kind of 'stream of
consciousness' writing.  If any of it is unclear, I will be more than
happy to try again to explain it better.

I was only able to crash gpaint once.  Not sure what caused it and I was
not able to replicate the problem so the description, bug report and stack
trace may not be very useful but here it is anyway:
http://matrix.netsoc.tcd.ie/~horkana/dev/gnome/gpaint/gpaint-bugs01.txt

I was surprised at how much functionality you have packed into gpaint-2.
I just wanted a simple replacement for mspaint and an antidote to the
overcomplexity of the GIMP, but gpaint-2 is plenty more than that.  (I
have to admit that mspaint is actually quite good within its limitations,
often having little other choice I have used it fairly extensively).
The impressive features of Gpaint begs the question how far to you think
gpaint should go, how complex are you eventually willing to let it become?

I would be very interested to know what you think the limits of gpaint
should be?  In theory I am sure gpaint-2 could keep a simple default but
also allow  incredibly complexity if it eventually supported some GIMP
plugins, do you think your ambitions might eventually reach so far?

I read the TODO list and it gave me a vague idea of your plans.

The first features I miss in gpaint would be Undo/Redo and perhaps Zoom to
a lesser extent, so I'll be quite happy when you get the chance to add
these.  My screen is small and crappy so I really need to Zoom
out when handling larger images, being able to Zoom in very close would be
useful for creating icons (a grid option migth be useful too, i've grown
very accustomed to mspaint which has a grid but does not have as powerful
and flexible Zoom levels as I might like) but I have gotten the hang of
creating icons using the GIMP.
I notice that in the TODO list you mention Zoom in terms of a 1:6 ratio,
but I would recommend using percentages instead of ratios because 75% is a
useful Zoom level to have but it is pretty ugly looking to try and express
it as a ratio.  I'm more accustomed to programs using percentages for Zoom
rather than Ratios, and I never figured out why ratios might be better.

In the Help menu there is an item "About Gnome".  It is certainly a nice
gesture but I think most Gnome developers are humble enough not to mind if
you removed it.  KDE has been criticized for having "About KDE" in every
application, RedHat went so far as to remove it, much to the annoyance of
many KDE advocates but I think it is an improvement.

I understand perfectly if you want to leave "About GNU", I know how
strongly people feel about promoting Free Software.  However I do
find it a little disconcerting to click on a link and have a web or help
browser start running especially on a computer without an internet
connection.  An menu icon that indicates that a page is in a help browser,
helps me to avoid accidentally start the help browser, unfortunately no
one has decided on a good icon to indicate a link to web page (maybe i can
find a chain link icon, hrrmm).
It might be better to link to a specific page within the documentation
explaining what GNU the GPL and the Free Software Foundation are about,
and providing a web link from there.  Even a local copy of
gnu.org/philosophy/ would help users who use Linux on machines without
internet access (or crappy dialup access).

The "Help, Contents" link was confusing, a link to a placeholder file
would be better than doing nothing at all.  (granted this is mentioned in
the TODO file but normal users only read documentation if they have no
other choice).


The File New Dialog has the buttons ordered OK Cancel, but the Gnome
desktop has decided to always put the OK button on the bottom right.  It
might be worthwhile to borrow the New Image dialog from the GIMP and strip
it down to be more simple and clear rather than trying to complicate the
existing dialog.  This is definately a dubious idea, i know, but the
gpaint new image dialog is so very simple i feel it is missing something.
I dont know how familiar you are with mspaint, but it does not have a
dialog for creating a new image it just creates an image based on a
default size or the size you previously used and it has some tools that
make resizing the canvas fairly easy.

The Image, Effects is a fairly long menu.  It might be a good idea to move
it to a top level menu, depending on your future plans for gpaint.

The Gnome HIG suggests that any application with a status bar should
provide a way to hide it.  It is a small non-essential detail, but you
might add it to the very end of your TODO list.
It would be nice to be able to hide the Text Toolbar as well, and
presumably people will also want to be able to close the standard toolbar
and colour box and even want to have a Fullscreen view to make the best
possible use of the available space.  With this and Zoom you could easily
have a pretty full toplevel View menu.


Flip, Left to Right || Top to Bottom.
Interesting choice of label text, I can see that might be simpler than
Flip Horizontal || Vertical.  I have seen some applications that just use
Flip and Mirror which I think would make sense to most normal people.
I dont have any particular urge to change the menu lables but the idea of
having Ctrl+I and Ctrl+J as shortcuts for these items seems appropriate to
me, although the mathematical reference might be a little too obtuse for
ordinary users.  (Of course if you really prefer the Flip/Mirror idea
Ctrl+F and Ctrl+M would probably be better keybindings)

Along the Same lines I have always thought that
Rotate Right    Ctrl+R
Rotate Left     Ctrl+L
would be good keybindings.  From the source code i notice you have Rotate,
+45 || -45 which i find quite suprising given that 90 degree rotations are
far easier to program and can be programmed using faster simpler
algorithms.  To provide for a 45 degree rotation you have probably done
the work necessary to allow any rotation from 0-360 to at least 1 degree
of precision.  I'll have to look at the code further and borrow the
Graphics Gems book I skim read last time I was looking for a
transformation algorithm.

I should mention that both the Gnome and Apple Inteface Guidelines
recommend against submenus with as few as two items or three items.  You
might consider putting the Flip/Rotate transformations together in a menu.

Edit, Clear.
Since GTK2 you can bind delete to a menu item.  Clear should probably use
the Delete keybinding, in fact it should probably be labelled Delete and
use an icon that looks less like a paint/sweeping brush, but the
flawed metaphor used by the icon is not your fault.

"Get Snapshot of Desktop", I found this choice of wording slightly
confusing.  What exactly the term desktop refers to has been the subject
of some discussion, i still forget how they finally managed to describe it
clearly.  In this situation something along the lines of 'Screenshot' or
"take a screenshot" might be clearer.

the line width toolbar widget does not adjust to follow the toolbar
settings for Text/Priority Text.  If you have your toolbars set for
priority text it forces the toolbar to be taller than it should be.  I
cannot think how best this might be dealt with.

Was it a deliberate decision to disable tearoff menus?  Do you think maybe
this is a feature that users should be able to turn on or off for the
whole desktop?

About Dialog too small, see screenshot.  Might be a good idea to Crop
the image and replace the text part of the image, with actual localisable
text.  I took a screenshot of the gpaint about dialog and it appears just
a little bit too narrow by default.
http://matrix.netsoc.tcd.ie/~horkana/dev/gnome/gpaint/Screenshot-Gpaint-2_aboutdialogtoosmall.png

There is a generic Gnome widget for "Recent Files" you might consider
using.


I see from the TODO you are interested in nicer icons for the toolbar.
The icons Jimmac drew for the GIMP are here
http://jimmac.musichall.cz/i.php3?ikony=50
there is a paint brush
http://jimmac.musichall.cz/ikony/i50/stock-tool-button-paintbrush.png
bucket fill
http://jimmac.musichall.cz/ikony/i50/stock-tool-button-bucket-fill.png
eraser
http://jimmac.musichall.cz/ikony/i50/stock-tool-button-eraser.png
and more.  If you asked he might even help you out and provide extra
specifically for gpaint for features that the GIMP does not also
have.
However this made me think that perhaps it was a bad idea to have the
straigth line as well as the poly-line tool.  With only minor changes the
poly-line tool could easily replace the straight line tool completely.

I keep considering making my own icon theme of paint and select icons,
largely based on the GIMP 1.2 icons but with a bit more colour but I have
not gotten around to it.  (The GIMP 1.3/2.0 icons are not as sharp and as
clear as the low colour icons I'm used to from Windows95 and older
versions of MacOS, it is just a personal preference).
If you were to make the extra effort and follow the freedesktop.org icon
specification and make the icons themeable then users will (in theory) be
able to automatically get the icons that match the rest of their desktop.

If you are interested and I have time I would like to try and provide
patches for the simpler changes I have suggested (keybindings, string
changes, icons, etc).

I spent all of yesterday afternoon and evening playing around with gpaint
and thinking about it and trying unsucessfully to crash it.
I hope my extensive feedback is useful and not too boring, and I really
like gpaint and I hope you will continue to tweak and improve it.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

[1] http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/

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