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0 pointspurerandomness7y ago0 comments

Your definition of "save" is not the common, user-centric one.

As a user, I think about "saving" as a process to persist my work. If there might be technical fine-grained issues, show me a warning sign in the save dialog, but don't come up with a process that "makes me think".

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gnulinux7y ago

> As a user, I think about "saving" as a process to persist my work.

PNG is just a compressed pixel-to-colorspace format. It does not and cannot contain most of the information in your work. When you save a .png you're basically doing something similar to compiling C to machine language. You permanently lost all the high level information, possibly in a way you cannot track back (in the case of .JPG). This is not saving, your work will not persist, the format you're "saving" is specifically engineered in a way it doesn't persist any more information than it needs. I hope we agree thus far. As I said above, it's merely a terminological difference, in gimp this process is called "exporting" and I can't understand why this is such a big deal. You literally wouldn't be able to navigate Gimp or Photoshop or Blender etc without having basic knowledge about the program (i.e. looking at the manual) like where menus are etc, and this is just one instance.

> If there might be technical fine-grained issues, show me a warning sign in the save dialog, but don't come up with a process that "makes me think".

Is this a joke? You literally have to just click the very next button under "Save" which reads "Export As". What "makes you think"?

tracker17y ago

"Export As" vs "Save As" ... Almost any program that can "export" to multiple formats uses "Save As" for the display. This is just one example. And while I appreciate the nuanced nature, and frankly in this case could go either way. When you combine all the options/features Gimp is by far the hardest image ui I've used.

My favorite was probably PaintShop Pro before 10, and second is probably Paint.Net (if it had a few more features). A simple, easy to use interface with the majority of features really accessible. Gimp offers so much more, though frankly, it's about 10x as hard to use. I only do so when I want to do something that's difficult in Paint.Net or Krita.

I want to like it, I want to use it... that said, If you had a few users who like other software use it, nobody I know would choose Gimp over other tools as a preference. I don't always like changes that are made to an application I've used for a while, and can understand resistance from Gimp developers and users. It doesn't matter, sometimes convention should win, sometimes making things easier means change, and sometimes making things consistent means an inferior technical choice.

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