GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 113165
Improve startup and calibration dialogs
Last modified: 2003-07-08 19:26:47 UTC
A friend sent me a pic but it was mirror inverted. I ran gimp on it ("gimp xyz.jpg") on a new Red Hat 9.0 system in order to flip it and was surprised at the amount of pain I had to go through before I could actually use gimp. I had to step through gimp installing a directory full of configuration crap and then scan the output for error messages (can't gimp tell itself whether there was an error?). Then I had to go through the screen calibration dialog to supply the dpi of my screen, which I have no idea of. Finally gimp launched throwing about 4 or 5 different windows up on the screen (I'm used to just one window). So this should be fixed in three ways: 1) You should be able to run gimp and do simple things without needing to go through any installation procedure. Just run it and use it. If you want to configure it to do something fancier, pick an option for that explicitly. 2) The dpi dialog should be extended to compute the dpi from the screen resolution and diagonal measurement. I'm using a 1400x1050 LCD screen (gimp can find that out from the X server) with 15" diagonal (gimp can prompt me for that). So one of the options should be "I see you're using a 1400x1050 screen and I assume the pixels are square. How many [inches/cm] is the screen diagonal?" and then calculate the dpi from the answer. Most everyone knows the diagonal of their screen and has no idea of the dpi. Sure it may be slightly imprecise but it usually won't matter. The "Calibration" screen (where you're supposed to go find a ruler and actually measure the lines on the screen) is way too big a nuisance for at least 90% of users. 3) The startup shouldn't throw so many windows on the screen. I don't think it did that in older versions. If the older versions were too confusing, maybe the initial screen could be redesigned to include the picture being edited, plus the toolbox, in one window.
I'll address your points in order... 1) Almost every app has a "completing the installation" part which generates some config filesand creates a user area. There was too much user interraction required in 1.2. In 1.3, the user interraction is limited to confirming agreement with the licence, clicking "continue" afterwards, and that's it. Although I for one think it's a good thing that we let people know what we're going to install on their system, and allow them the possibility of finding out what each of the files are for. 2) The screen calibration is indeed done by asking the XServer for your settings in the GIMP 1.3. We still allow you to set it manually if you want to, though. 3) The GIMP has always had several windows. This aspect of this bug has been addressed in bug #7379 ("The GIMP should offer an MDI interface") - opinions are very much divided on this. I am fine with lots of windows. Dockable dialogs have gone quite a way to cleaning up the desktop in 1.3. In short, I'm closing this bug as INVALID, because most of these concerns have been addressed in 1.3. And I disagree that the GIMP should install stuff without letting the user know it's installing stuff (even if this is what other programs do). Cheers, Dave.
I think this bug shouldn't be invalidated, since those answers miss the points that were raised. Re those answers: 1) I can't think of any other GNU/Linux app that requires any kind of user setup like Gimp does (that doesn't say they don't exist, but I haven't noticed any). User setups and clickthrough license agreements may be typical of MS Windows apps but that's part of the reason I want to use GNU stuff. I'm fine with Gimp not leaving config files around without telling the user. But when you just run it on a jpg file and make simple edits, Gimp shouldn't need to leave config files around AT ALL. You're just using Gimp as an image editor the way you might use Emacs as a text editor. If the default settings are ok with you, there's no need for any customized configuration. 2) It's possible that I missed something here, since you mentioned 1.3 and I'm using 1.2.3. But 1.2.3 offers to use the DPI received from the window system, and that's not so useful, since the window system generally thinks all screens are 75 dpi and is usually wrong. The window system knows the screen resolution and Gimp should get THAT from the window system. My proposal is that Gimp prompt the user for the screen size (diagonal in inches or cm) and calculate the dpi from the user-supplied diagonal and the known resolution. That is MUCH more convenient than what Gimp currently does (make the user calculate their own DPI or physically measure horizontal and vertical lines on the screen with a ruler), since most people know their screen diagonal but do not know their dpi. 3) I think previously Gimp started 2 windows by default. The number seems to have exploded recently, so now there's 4 or 5. They easily get lost among the windows of other apps that the user might have open. Many windows may be ok if Gimp has the whole screen to itself, but if it's sharing the screen with other apps, popping all those windows isn't such good UI design. Bug is re-opened because issues 1 and 2 were not addressed properly. #3 is more of a subjective thing so I mention it only in passing. Thanks.
Attempting to re-open bug failed, even though the bug screen says that as the original submitter I'm supposed to be able to re-open the bug. I don't know what's wrong but I think this should be re-opened. Thanks.
Use the right tool for the job. GIMP is a complex app, and requires complex setup. For flipping a jpeg, use the command line jpegtran tool, which in fact gives better results than GIMP since it operates on jpegs losslessly. If you'd like, open up a separate bug for the calibration suggestion. Read and comment on bug #7379 if you have opinions on the UI issue. And if you have any well thought out ideas on how to reliably detect tile swapping parameters and dpi calibration without user prompting, we'd be interested. And give GIMP 1.3 a try beforehand, changes like these won't be made in the stable series. I'm keeping this bug closed, one separate report per bug is much easier to handle.
I don't buy the argument that a complex app requires complex setup. Emacs is an equally complex app and requires no setup at all. I don't think OpenOffice required any setup but I'm not sure (I only tried it once). Mozilla required no setup. Konqueror required no setup. Gimp required setup for the simple edit that I wanted to do, but the setup it required should not have been necessary. Some features of Gimp (or Emacs, or Mozilla) may require setup, but setup should only be needed if you actually use those features. Gimp is not up to the ease-of-first-use standards of those other apps. I'll open a separate bug for the calibration issue.
(1) Going through user installation takes less than a minute. All you need to do is click Continue a few times. (2) Your comments show that you don't have a clue about what you are talking about. You propose to calculate the DPI from the known resolution. However DPI is the unit used for the resolution; If we knew it, we wouldn't need to calculate it. I also doubt that any user knows his/her screen diagonal. You might know what was printed on the box your monitor was shipped in (19'' or something) but that is not the viewable screen size. BTW, noone forces you to hit that "Calibrate" button...
By resolution I mean the number of pixels on the screen, not the dpi. Gimp can find the number of pixels from the window system and it will usually be right. From that and the diagonal, Gimp can compute the dpi. With LCD screens, the diagonal printed on the box is (close to) the viewable diagonal. With CRT screens (I think a few people still buy those) the viewable area is printed separately. Anyway it's easier to measure than those calibration rulers. Even if the user's guess at the diagonal is off by a little, it's still good enough for most purposes while believing the window system is often not good enough.
> (1) Going through user installation takes less than a minute. All you need to do is click Continue a few times. I don't want to spend that minute and I don't think it's good design for Gimp to demand that I spend that minute. The OS I'm using came with hundreds of packages pre-installed. If each of them made me spend a minute on user setup, that would add up to many hours. I didn't have to spend a minute configuring Emacs or Mozilla or Perl or Python or GCC or GDB or X Windows or the Gnome desktop or any of the other programs I use, once the OS was installed. I just start them up and use them. I don't see why Gimp should need special attention. Gimp doesn't do anything more complicated than those other programs do. Saying "it only takes a minute" is a bad answer.
I do think that it is good design to inform the user before installing anything into his/her home directory. GIMP depends on the .gimp-1.x directory being present and I don't think it should just put it there silently. I never liked the fact that GNOME hides the .gnome stuff from the user but then it's probably because you usually don't need to care about it. We want GIMP users to be aware of the possibility to extend the GIMP installation by adding resources to their .gimp directory. IMO, the user installation is as fast and simple as possible and it shouldn't be dropped.
OpenOffice requires user setup. Postgres and MySQL require initial setup. Your mail system requires setup. You setup X when you installed your OS. Emacs is aimed at the developer, and the developer is expected to know better and configure things to their liking. The GIMP artist is not the same person. You haven't given any real suggestions to the problem of it being hard to come up with sane defaults for things. It's asking the user for hints on how to behave properly in complex situations. A new user isn't going to fiddle in preferences after the fact, they will just get frustrated. How is GIMP supposed to guess what you want to do when you first start it up?
I just tried all 5 of the OpenOffice applications in my Gnome menu and none of them required setup. I also tried the KDE paint and scan programs and they didn't require setup either. They're used by the same artists who use Gimp. Emacs isn't especially aimed at developers, though many developers use it. Lots of non-developers also use it for typing in ordinary text. And there's no need to configure it much, the defaults are ok. I used to customize Emacs a lot but I got tired of moving from one system to another and losing my customizations, so now I just use the defaults. X and MySQL and so forth may need some configuration at OS installation time, but that's system-wide configuration, not separate configuration for every user. It's not comparable to the Gimp initialization dialog. You guys are saying contradictory things about whether setting up good Gimp defaults is practical. One of you says it's enough to just click "Continue" a few times while the other implies that every user needs a different setup. If clicking "Continue" til the end of the setup dialog does something reasonable, then you should be able to set the defaults to whatever you'd get by doing that and skip the dialog. If not, then a deeper question has to be asked of what makes one user different from another and an optional dialog can be added. Gimp already advertises to users that there's settable preferences by putting a "Preferences" selection in the File menu. I can't believe that "Gimp is a complex program requiring complex setup" and "We must expect users to be too inexperienced to choose "Preferences" from the File menu" can simultaneously make any sense. I have some sympathy for not wanting to leave stuff in the users' home directory without telling the user, but two things: 1) as mentioned before, using the defaults should result in not having to leave anything in the user's home dir. 2) It's weird for Gimp and Gnome to have conflicting policies about leaving these config files around. I'd say if it's ok for Gnome to do it, then it's ok for Gimp to do it. At worse, the initialization dialog for Gimp can be reduced to one click ("Leaving config info in ~[username]/.gimp [OK] [Customize] [Cancel] [Help]"). Maybe some future version of Gnome should have a per-user registry similar to Windows registry, so apps like Gimp can leave config info there without having to leave files in the user's home directory.
Sorry, I don't see the relationship between GIMP and GNOME. Both start with a G and both use GTK+. That's how far the relationship goes.
*** Bug 117010 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***