Re: CinePaint Film Gimp plans

Alan Horkan wrote:
> 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?
>
>
>   
Hmm, I don't particularly think copying the photoshop interface would be 
a good thing for any other graphics program. Gimpshop is actually little 
more than a dirty hack (the developer says as much) and changing menu 
structures is not exactly a really impressive bit of coding. Nor does it 
make Gimpshop any easier to use than Gimp, at least not from my point of 
view.

One thing I would like to see in the Cinepaint gui, is the ability to 
dock several dialog windows in a tab frame. The multiple windows is the 
exact reason everyone hated Gimp back during the 1.x days, and of course 
Cinepaint is a fork of that old code base. This is also something like 
what you have in Photoshop, speaking of the pallete well of course. 
Actually I wish they'd take that a step further in Gimp and let me tab 
up multiple images into one image window. Now there's something I like 
about Cinepaint in comparison, because I can use a flipbook. But really, 
I could care less about changing the menus around. Once I've used a 
program for a few weeks I've gotten used to it's menu no matter how it's 
arranged. And frankly the way Cinepaint has it's menu arranged right now 
makes perfect sense to me already, with the possible exception of the 
flipbook menu (I'd put that one on the toolbox rather than the image 
window).

Personally I think the best direction to take is exactly what is being 
done, that is to say moving towards an fltk gui. Gtk2 has gotten too 
bloated and slow, not to mention dumbed down (the file selector doesn't 
let me type in a path anymore?). We need a fast toolkit. Gtk1 is 
unmaintained and largely broken, plus it really does look like crap. 
Fltk seems to work really well in the few mature programs I've found 
using it, plus it actually looks rather nice and relatively modern. The 
big problem seems to be that Glasgow does not have enough people working 
on it, and those who are just don't have the time to devote to it. So 
unless Gegl mysteriously shows itself next month in a working format, 
the only serious cross platform tool for raster graphics remains 
Cinepaint-filmgimp. In other words, lets please continue to maintain 
this branch as well as possible because quite a lot of people depend on 
it for daily work.

Nathan

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