GTK handles the UI as well as UI events (click, key, scroll, drag, etc). It's very tightly integrated into GIMP itself (the 'G' in GTK use to stand for GIMP, in fact), and has been for decades. GIMP is not new software. :)
The challenge of new GTK versions is that they keep simplifying things, because it's aimed at software that's much less complex than GIMP. For instance, the tree views that GIMP relies on for so many things like layer docks are deprecated in GTK4. To deal with that, we'll have to do some redesigns of core features.
There's no intermediate layer in-between GIMP and GTK. It wouldn't be impossible to code, but with the current number of volunteer developers, it would mean further delaying features that most users care more about.
The icon clash is unique to me - I prefer the colorful Legacy icon so I set it to that. It's not the "default" view, it's just a screenshot I grabbed from my own development build.
I appreciate the annotated screenshot! I'll compare with our default view and see what's applicable and fixable. We also have a pending merge request to do a more thorough redesign of the Text tool options if you're interested in looking at that: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/merge_requests/2374
Just FYI, the screenshot was a separate post by dsego, not mine.
> It's not the "default" view, it's just a screenshot I grabbed from my own development build.
Prooobably best to avoid that in release notes. It is official communication, so people expect that the final release will also look like that. I know the default UI is now the Dark Mode (as it is on my machine), but besides the colors it isn't immediately obvious to a casual reader what else is theming versus UI design.
We're normally more selective with screenshots in actual release notes, but since this was a (even more) informal development update post, I used what photos were available (for instance, the spectral blending video and native file chooser dialogue picture use a different theme).
Thanks again, and I'll see what we can do about both of your design feedback!
Thank you for engaging here! Being critical of someone else's work safely from behind a keyboard is trivial, but seeing your baby being torn to shreds is never fun. The fact that you are taking it in stride and are this open to constructive feedback leaves me hopeful for GIMP's future.
As we've seen with Blender: all it takes is a few handful of people who really care about the UX to turn a project from a developer-focused "I guess it technically has all the parts?" into a user-focused "It is actually a pleasure to use and it is free - why haven't you switched yet?".
1) When you apply a filter, there's a "Merge filter" checkbox. If you check it, filters will be merged down immediately like in 2.10. The setting is remembered, though currently the unique Color filters are remembered separately from the generic ones.
2) If you go to Edit -> Keyboard Shortcuts and search for "Paste as Floating Selection", you can bind Ctrl + V to it so that you get the 2.10 floating selection behavior.
The problem is that there's not just one "user". Tons of people have used GIMP for decades and are use to how it works - so changes to be less "user-hostile" can make it hostile to existing users.
For instance, we were repeatedly told that copy+paste creating a floating selection instead of a new layer was confusing and aggravating for users. So we changed it in 3.0 to make a new layer like other software. While we got praise from some people, we started getting new complaints that we'd broken people's workflow (see https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/1vmrza2/it_is_not_str... for a wide range of user feedback as one example)
That doesn't mean we don't try to improve things (obligatory link to our user design feedback site: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/work_it...), but making big changes is difficult when you have an existing user base who are using your software successfully as-is.
Consider that the overwhelming majority of this thread on a tech-focused forum have issues with the UI. That should tell you something about how ridiculously illogical the UI is compared to every other program in the space.
GIMP has been catering to the extremely tiny niche of people who "successfully" use its software since at least the Slashdot days. And it's remained a niche product while all of its competitors in the opensource space have grown.
To your first point, it's difficult to know people's frame of reference online. I've listened to many complaints on forums, only to find out the person was thinking of older versions of GIMP and it no longer applied (like multi-window mode being default, outlining text being an ordeal, etc). We also see plenty of feedback like https://lemmy.world/post/50729195/25325527, so it's not always easy to figure what's universally illogical.
I'm not deflecting or saying that GIMP's UI is perfect the way it is - there's a lot of improvements I want to make to the non-destructive filter UI alone. But we can see that real people use the software for real work, so we try to keep existing users in mind when making UI improvements since it impacts them and what they do. There's been some well intentioned UI/UX requests I've implemented that ended up breaking a lot of people's workflows, and those still weigh on my soul. :)
We didn't go into this in the news post since it was a quick overview, but GIMP uses GEGL for its main color and pixel engine. GEGL has a feature where you can automatically sync data between "buffers" in memory and in file - so as you're editing the image/layer/etc in GIMP, the buffers in the new format will automatically auto-save the data from the canvas.
It's still in-progress, so we'll have more technical details in the 3.3.2 release news.
We added import support for most Photoshop palette formats (ACB, ACO, ASE), so you can use them in GIMP. I don't think we can directly include Pantone palettes in the install because of copyright issues, but if you already have them, they should work fine in GIMP (and if not, let us know so we can fix it!)
To be honest, I didn't think about it too hard - I just wrote "a XCF" because it doesn't start with a vowel. I don't think it's worth submitting an edit for, but you're welcome to consider it "an XCF".
We didn't go into it in the news post, but one of the big benefits of this new format is that we can sync GeglBuffers (how pixel data is stored) automatically between GIMP and the new file. So you'll get fast auto-saves as you edit, which we couldn't do with OpenRaster. Also, the OpenRaster standard doesn't support all the features of GIMP/Krita (like non-destructive filters for instance).
(Also, currently our OpenRaster support is a plug-in that calls our PNG plug-in to do the rendering, so we'd have to rewrite it to be a core process if we wanted to use it as our main project file).
That someone is actually the maintainer of GIMP, and the person who is currently developing the new format (unless you mean one of the commenters, not the person who made the initial post).
I share this link a lot in the hopes that more people take us up on it, and provide specifics on where problem areas are for their workflow. So many people use GIMP in so many different ways, even something that seems "obviously bad" to one group might not be encountered by others.
Thoughts on posting a UX and/or workflow related Issue under Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux that would pretty much just recite an existing Issue from GNOME/gimp?
One of our contributors does a lot of upkeep work, and he normally ports UX-related issues from the code tracker to the UX repo. Not 100% perfect, but it helps keep the focus in the right spot.
If you think it's UX related concern, then I'd recommend posting it on the UX tracker first. But even if it's posted in the "wrong place", it'll likely be moved to the right one after it's looked at, if that makes sense?
However, if you see an older issue that could use some UX design discussion, feel free to suggest it be moved.
We're working on an extension platform, and once that's up and running we'll probably reach out to PhotoGIMP developers (https://github.com/Diolinux/Photogimp) and see if they want to host it there.
Then people can easily download and install it directly in GIMP, hopefully making everyone happy.
The challenge of new GTK versions is that they keep simplifying things, because it's aimed at software that's much less complex than GIMP. For instance, the tree views that GIMP relies on for so many things like layer docks are deprecated in GTK4. To deal with that, we'll have to do some redesigns of core features.
There's no intermediate layer in-between GIMP and GTK. It wouldn't be impossible to code, but with the current number of volunteer developers, it would mean further delaying features that most users care more about.
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