Help Redesign The GIMP Photo Editor
Open source software prides itself on user contributions, which is why the team behind GIMP is asking for community input on a coming redesign. GIMP, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, is intended to be an open source competitor to Adobe Photoshop.
While GIMP’s features rival those of Photoshop in most areas, interface design is not one of them, particularly now that Adobe has further streamlined and improved the UI in Photoshop CS3.
The GIMP UI redesign team has set up a blog which is accepting user submitted interface ideas, so if you know just what GIMP needs, whip up a screenshot with some explanatory notes if necessary and submit your ideas to the site. (As a side note, might we suggest that if your ideas require copious explanatory notes, uh, they may not be the best of ideas).
So far many of the redesign ideas essentially argue for copying the look and behavior of Photoshop, particularly the single window interface. Many seem to hate the fact that every workspace palette in GIMP has its own entry in the system taskbar, which is admittedly kind of silly and fairly annoying.
If you’d like to participate, bear in mind the following guidelines:
Explain your idea in an image or two. Only these images will be published, so make sure any needed explanation is inside them. Images must be in jpg, gif, bmp or png format, maximum 8MB each.
Your images should show your idea in a clear way, but they don???t have to be glossy and polished. Plain vector drawings or even scanned pencil sketches should also work.
The discussion on Slashdot ponders whether or not a redesign can help GIMP gain some users from Photoshop, and, while it probably will help, we can’t help thinking that the GIMP team might want to consider renaming the program as well. For instance, something that mentions, oh, I don’t know, “photo” might be good. That way the first thing people think about when you mention the software won’t be a scene from Pulp Fiction.
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