GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 141443
improve tips of the day
Last modified: 2006-12-22 16:44:48 UTC
The first tip of the day says Welcome to the GIMP! Nearly all image operations are performed by right-clicking on the image. And dont' worry, you can undo most mistakes... I see 3 problems with this... (1) you can use the menus at the top of the image instead of having to remember that there's a secret pop-up menu. (2) some users might have configured their mouse to be left-handed, and then it's the left button, not the right one. (3) there's nothing more worrying than telling people "most things are safe". it implies some things are dangerous :-) I suggest, Welcome to the GIMP! Gimp can undo changes to the image, so you should feel free to experiment. I'd make a separate tip for, You can also get at the menus that are at the top of the image window using a pop-up context menu. Press the right mouse button anywhere over the image. This isn't strictly true, as the pop-up menu can be torn off and the menus at the top of the screen can't be, but tha's just a weird bug :-) and only the gimp developers can really tell the difference.
Feel free to submit a patch for the gimp-tips.xml.in file.
*** Bug 141442 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
How about a tip for former users of Adobe Photoshop explaining that IWarp is similar to what they know as 'Liquify'?
Depends on how many GIMP users are really familiar with Photoshop. If this is only a minor percentage then this tip would be useless for most of our userbase. In that case I would prefer to have a separate help menu with tips for (ex) Photoshop (and maybe paintshop pro) users. This could contain a mapping of plug-ins from these programs to the GIMP and other tips that would help the migration.
I don't think this is worth to be included in the startup tips but it could be useful to add a chapter with such information to the manual (gimp-help-2). Is there any chance that the original bug reporter will provide a patch or do we need to do the suggested changes ourselves?
since some time has elapsed and the original reporter has not responded in anyway, i made a patch for this. slightly corrected to use more active sentence structure (no 'you should'). please verify that this patch uses correct paths (tips/gimp-tips.xml.in rather than just gimp-tips.xml.in is what i understand to be appropriate.)
Created attachment 27305 [details] [review] adjustment of introductory message.
That's the right file to change but we don't write "Gimp", we use "The GIMP".
> Gimp can undo changes to the image, so you should feel free to experiment. how many undo levels are there by default nowadays? revert works well but ordinary users may be surprised by the limited undo stack (I know I was when I first started using the Gimp and sometimes I still get caught out by it)
There is no simple answer to your question and I am not going to explain The GIMP to you. Alan, if you want to help, then make yourself comfortable with the current GIMP version and how it's undo system works.
Hi, Hi, There is a simple answer - every operation records the minimum of information required to get back to the previous step, and the limit is not a fixed number of steps but the amount of memory you want to allow for undo steps. This is a parameter in the preferences. By the way, how easy or hard would it be to save the undo history in an xcf? I assume it would require the file format to be extended... Cheers, Dave.
It would be a major effort. Far more than just extending the file format. Go read the undo code and you will see what I mean.
141442 has been marked a duplicate of this bug, but I am not sure that is entirely true. Liam Quin (_the_ Liam Quin?) reports: "'When you save an image to work on it again later, try using XCF...' claims it preserves every aspect of the work in progress. This is not true - undo history isn't there, a very important part of the work in progress! Either say, "preserves the layers and most aspects of your work" or, "preserves the layers and every aspect except undo history". "(I don't know if the current active brush and colour pallette are restored either, nor plugin settings, nor other aspects that one might reasonably consider part of one's GIMP work environment)"
All bug reports that ask for enhancements of the Tips will be marked as duplicate of this own until someone finally sits down and spends half an hour updating the tips and incorparating the suggestions made here. People, the time you all spent on replying here would have been sufficient for doing this.
The bug reporter of bug #143125 has been so nice to hear my plea for contribution and sent us an updated version: 2004-05-25 Sven Neumann <sven@gimp.org> * gimp-tips.xml.in: applied a patch graciously provided by "biroa" (bug #143125). There is certainly more room for improvements, so I am going to keep this report open.
Comment on attachment 27305 [details] [review] adjustment of introductory message. This patch has been committed.
We definitely need to review the tips before the 2.4 release. Let's wait until the rewrite of the selection tools is finished, then make sure that all tips are correct. I would also welcome an effort to reduce the number of tips. Perhaps check what's handled in the user manual and only keep the most important tips.
Marking as a blocker on the basis of comment #17.
I have reviewed the tips and I think they are all valid, even if there might be cases where some could be improved or new ones could be added. So, it seems appropriate to reduce the severity.
Some of the tips are just plain wrong due to changes in 2.4. And we can't really decide this as long as the UI isn't frozen. As soon as that has happened, we will need to review the tips again.
Please use Milestone + Priority==Urgent instead of Severity==Blocker.
We need to get this done real soon now as we need to freeze our strings.
Created attachment 78729 [details] [review] some improvements to the tips 3 deleted (unneeded), 1 merged, 1 fixed so far.
Thanks for the patch. I think we can close this bug now. The tips seem to be ready for 2.4.
I'd remove the one about Alt-dragging a selection to move. I'm using XFCE which uses alt to move windows, when I add the shift modifier it floats a selection... (maybe it's just a problem with XFCE) But I think the new selection tools were designed to be used differently, just click the selection with the tool to enter edit mode, then you can move the selection... Could possibly change it to read something like: "To adjust or move a selection, click on the selection with a selection tool to enter edit mode. Make your adjustments, then click on the selection again to set." or something like it...
Alt still allows to move a selection. I have removed the part where it suggests to use the Shift key to work around broken window managers. The text you suggested is not correct; not all selection tools allow to edit an existing selection.