Re: CinePaint Film Gimp plans

On Mon, 20 Nov 2006, Bradley A. Hare wrote:

> This sort of sounds like three projects for one goal.  At some
> point, if you ever want a finished product, you will have to
> pick one winner and cut your losses on the rest.

> but to the outside world it's all about appearances.

> For some reason I can't quite figure out, software for
> still and moving image manipulation on Linux is in a
> very bad state (Blender excepted).  Cinepaint is
> about the only hope for still image manipulation.

I assume you are only talking about raster graphics and video since
Inkscape is doing rather well and Synfig is certainly interesting.

> Otherwise we either continue to wait, or we come up
> with the money for Photoshop seats.

You mention Photoshop and Kai Uwe mentions the menu code is broken in his
experimental GTK2 work and I cannot help but think of the possibility of
using it as an opportunity to overhaul the menu layout.

GIMPShop, a experimental project/hack to make GIMP behave more like
Photoshop gained a lot of attention but the idea was largely rejected by
the GIMP developers.  This might be an opportunity for cinepaint.

Perhaps niavely I thought one of the first things Cinepaint would have
done would be to make the interface much more like Adobe Photoshop,
especially since Cinepaint didn't seem to have an entrenched userbase
resistent to change.  This kind of embrace and extend is fairly low
hanging fruit, and although it isn't perfect, borrowing from the market
leader has its benefits.  Both GIMP and Cinepaint are quite a bit further
away from Photoshop than raster graphics software such as Corel Paint or
Macromedia Fireworks.

If you look at the big forks[1] of the past the ones who put usability
first won out.  XEmacs gave users the interface they wanted helped make it
successful
http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html
I attribute Lucid Emacs's success to two things, primarily:
First, that my focus was on user interface, and an attempt to both make
Emacs be a good citizen of modern GUI desktops, and to make it as easy for
new users to pick up Emacs as any other GUI editor;
[openness of development being the second thing]
OpenOffice embraced the layout users expected from Micrsoft Office but
they are now in the wilderness as they dont seem to have much of a plan on
how to extend, which if anything is more important than embrace.
The reason for the X.org fork was licensing but improved usability in the
form of modularisation and a more popular build system has helped make it
successful.

Have I misread the situation, is there willingness and interest in making
the cinepaint interface more like photoshop?  Perhaps inviting
participation from the GIMPshop devlopers?


-- 
Alan

[1] more on forks
http://producingoss.com/html-chunk/forks.html

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