Re: [CinePaint] Interface Design for OSS

Arno,

 > Me (Arno) and Joao are students of the
> University for Applied Sciences Schwäbisch Gmünd and currently working 
> on a project about interface design, especially for Open Source.
> For this semester we have chosen Cinepaint as a project....

That's exciting! What's the schedule and the scope of your R&D? How will 
you be graded? Is this for a thesis? Will your work be published? What 
will be the end-product of your work?

> For us interface design doesn't mean to make nice buttons 
> and icons, the way we work with a program and how the workflow evolves 
> is more important.

Good. Workflow is everything in motion picture pipeline production. 
You'll have a learning curve to overcome without the domain experience 
of working in a studio motion picture pipeline.

FYI, there's interesting UI R&D that's been done at Georgia Tech based 
on GIMP. Pretty stuff. You may want to look at this prior art.

> -Cinepaint (0.20) is, as far as we understand it, a modular program, it 
> can run different tasks at the same time (like color correction, gamma 
> exposure, etc.)

CinePaint Film Gimp (0.x series) is based on a legacy GIMP architecture. 
It's largely monolithic, single-tasking, brittle, and difficult to work 
on because of design choices that defeat debugging such as the use of 
variargs in the plug-in communications protocol, plug-in spawning, image 
tiling with layers of indirection, and a GTK maze of plumbing that can 
render bugs untracable except by the brutish method of sprinkling print 
commands in the code. Because QA is so hard, working of Film Gimp is 
very challenging technically and time-consuming. CinePaint Film Gimp 
development enhancement is led by Kai-Uwe in Germany. He's taken that 
over while I focus on CinePaint Glasgow.

CinePaint Glasgow (in CVS only so far) is a ground-up rewrite of 
CinePaint that does have a modular architecture, but is only mostly 
there (in CVS, but some features are missing or not integrated across 
modules), buggy (not because it's hard to debug but because it hasn't 
had very much QA yet), and hasn't had its first release yet. (December, 
knock wood.) I'm preparing that release. I'm based in California.

When everyone considers Glasgow a complete replacement, CinePaint Film 
Gimp will be retired.

> What we lack is a knowledge on the programming, so what can be done and 
> what not. 

That would slow you down considerably! Where will you find programmers 
to implement your ideas?

There's a lot I'd like to do myself in the interface design of Glasgow, 
but can't yet because I'm working on more basic building blocks. To me, 
the UI is the fun part. Other nuts-and-bolts stuff comes first.

> What we have is experience in interface design as a very 
> important element in the communication between man and machine.

How do you want to proceed?

Robin
--
CinePaint Project Manager

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