Inkscape and GIMP etc are fine tools in their own right (I have had them installed for years) but where things have always broken down is when you’re working in larger teams and working towards a larger goal.
Inkscape, GIMP, Krita, LibreOffice is an awful chain when you compare it to say Affinity where you can shift between vector, pixel, and layout workflows within the same tool (or copy and paste seamlessly across Adobe tools).
Until the FOSS community sits down and works with creatives and end users who don’t use the tools (which Audacity did thanks to Tantacrul and the results speak for themselves), we’ll be stuck with proprietary tools.
The problem is when new users turn up to give feedback to say Inkscape for some of their weirdness like opening a blank doc each time the app opens, different tabs for fill and stroke color, weird behavior with fonts changing when you backspace out to an empty box, blah blah, the community goes “skill issue” or “this isn’t Adobe”.
Yet they fail to understand the design decisions as to why other products have more obvious behaviour patterns - they want the tool to be relatively self explanatory and try and align to user expectations as much as possible.
I really reeeally want to like GIMP, but I’ve never been able to get past the UI / learning curve. There are a number or patterns and interaction models that are significantly different than those adopted by the rest of the creative industry.
I’m surprised that, after 25 years, none of the projects to redo the UX have really stuck and gained significant momentum.
Designers are famously broke. Especially graphic designers. A raster graphics tool, with a half way decent UI, would easily gain traction.
I wonder if it’s because the project just doesn’t have UX designers contributing to design and users testing. A lot of the UX feels like a random idea that someone had. Not something that was actually tested with real humans.
Manually adding alpha channels to layers… I’ve seen so many people knock their heads against GIMP because, for whatever reason, they didn’t just add the channel by default. (Okay, sure it’s probably the default if you’re starting with a blank file but the background layer doesn’t have one and if you start by opening a jpg, then subsequent layers won’t have alpha because… reasons…)
I don’t think it’s because they don’t have UX designers, it’s because they only solicit feedback from existing users rather than researching new user experience and watching how a new user gets on with the program.
I also think very few Adobe or Affinity power users get stuck into GIMP etc because they bounce off it so quickly. So they never get feedback from the very users they want to convince to move over.
Oh, I know (I am a greying wizard), but why should the editor care? In theory, it should assume XCF, with the opened JPEG as the first layer.
Instead, it’s gotchas and RTFM. Which is sadly a very poor approach when developing a tool used by creatives who are vastly less likely to RTFM than the engineers making the tool.
There is a “photoshop UI” GIMP plugin that you could use if you prefer the layout/have muscle memory, but admittedly that’s not a perfect solution. It is cheaper tho.
Yeah, but that project isn’t really getting the attention it deserves. Part of me wants to contribute, but I’m totally swamped with a million side things.
Also, at least for something like this feels like hack more than anything. Maybe its not, i did not look inside the code. But just from outside I would assume that would break with every GIMP release and even if not it would never feel “right”.
If you mean PhotoGimp, it’s just a config file thst rebinds keybinds and sets up UI layout, like location of tools and windows, to be similar to photoshop.
Gimp is I think a more challenging comparison to its proprietary counterparts than the others you listed unfortunately, but I appreciate and agree with your sentiment here. Ui/ux is such a big part of where foss creative tools struggle, and while some are better than others, its a difficult thing to improve because there’s a lot less design talent in the foss world than dev talent. And ui design for large creative software is REALLY a hard design challenge, its not as though the design skill involved is trivial
Anyway, I think inkscape no longer opens a blank document anymore, at least with fresh installs. Maybe for older installs it keeps the old behavior? You should be able to switch it to a nice little welcome splash with document templates and recently opened files if you’d like :)
Inkscape and GIMP etc are fine tools in their own right (I have had them installed for years) but where things have always broken down is when you’re working in larger teams and working towards a larger goal.
Inkscape, GIMP, Krita, LibreOffice is an awful chain when you compare it to say Affinity where you can shift between vector, pixel, and layout workflows within the same tool (or copy and paste seamlessly across Adobe tools).
Until the FOSS community sits down and works with creatives and end users who don’t use the tools (which Audacity did thanks to Tantacrul and the results speak for themselves), we’ll be stuck with proprietary tools.
The problem is when new users turn up to give feedback to say Inkscape for some of their weirdness like opening a blank doc each time the app opens, different tabs for fill and stroke color, weird behavior with fonts changing when you backspace out to an empty box, blah blah, the community goes “skill issue” or “this isn’t Adobe”.
Yet they fail to understand the design decisions as to why other products have more obvious behaviour patterns - they want the tool to be relatively self explanatory and try and align to user expectations as much as possible.
Tantacrul did a great talk at FOSS Backstage Design conference that is really worth watching if you’re interested in the topic.
I really reeeally want to like GIMP, but I’ve never been able to get past the UI / learning curve. There are a number or patterns and interaction models that are significantly different than those adopted by the rest of the creative industry.
I’m surprised that, after 25 years, none of the projects to redo the UX have really stuck and gained significant momentum.
Designers are famously broke. Especially graphic designers. A raster graphics tool, with a half way decent UI, would easily gain traction.
I wonder if it’s because the project just doesn’t have UX designers contributing to design and users testing. A lot of the UX feels like a random idea that someone had. Not something that was actually tested with real humans.
Manually adding alpha channels to layers… I’ve seen so many people knock their heads against GIMP because, for whatever reason, they didn’t just add the channel by default. (Okay, sure it’s probably the default if you’re starting with a blank file but the background layer doesn’t have one and if you start by opening a jpg, then subsequent layers won’t have alpha because… reasons…)
I don’t think it’s because they don’t have UX designers, it’s because they only solicit feedback from existing users rather than researching new user experience and watching how a new user gets on with the program.
I also think very few Adobe or Affinity power users get stuck into GIMP etc because they bounce off it so quickly. So they never get feedback from the very users they want to convince to move over.
Because JPEG images don’t have alpha transparency
Of course, my problem is that I am familiar with too many technical details
Oh, I know (I am a greying wizard), but why should the editor care? In theory, it should assume XCF, with the opened JPEG as the first layer.
Instead, it’s gotchas and RTFM. Which is sadly a very poor approach when developing a tool used by creatives who are vastly less likely to RTFM than the engineers making the tool.
There is a “photoshop UI” GIMP plugin that you could use if you prefer the layout/have muscle memory, but admittedly that’s not a perfect solution. It is cheaper tho.
Yeah, but that project isn’t really getting the attention it deserves. Part of me wants to contribute, but I’m totally swamped with a million side things.
Also, at least for something like this feels like hack more than anything. Maybe its not, i did not look inside the code. But just from outside I would assume that would break with every GIMP release and even if not it would never feel “right”.
If you mean PhotoGimp, it’s just a config file thst rebinds keybinds and sets up UI layout, like location of tools and windows, to be similar to photoshop.
Gimp is I think a more challenging comparison to its proprietary counterparts than the others you listed unfortunately, but I appreciate and agree with your sentiment here. Ui/ux is such a big part of where foss creative tools struggle, and while some are better than others, its a difficult thing to improve because there’s a lot less design talent in the foss world than dev talent. And ui design for large creative software is REALLY a hard design challenge, its not as though the design skill involved is trivial
Anyway, I think inkscape no longer opens a blank document anymore, at least with fresh installs. Maybe for older installs it keeps the old behavior? You should be able to switch it to a nice little welcome splash with document templates and recently opened files if you’d like :)