Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate
Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate
Posted Jan 11, 2011 16:46 UTC (Tue) by dneary (guest, #55185)Parent article: Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate
Most software has only a small number of active long-term developers.
Looking at Ohloh for the GIMP: https://www.ohloh.net/p/gimp/contributors there are the following active developers:
Mitch
Sven (less active for the last year)
Martin Nordholts
Alexia Death
And it looks like Alexandre Proukoudine is the 5th, and is pretty inactive, but still with a few commits a month.
Over the history of the project there are ~400 identified hackers.
For gegl: https://www.ohloh.net/p/gegl/contributors
Oyvind Kolas
Martin Nordholts
So we can say that between the two, there are 5 or 6 active hackers on the GIMP.
Now, Blender: https://www.ohloh.net/p/blender/contributors
Campbell Barton
Ton Roosendaal
blendix
Joshua Leung
mattebb
theeth
Nathan Letwory
Then we have people who're pretty new and moderately active: jhk, gsrb3d, dingto, damien78, Dalai Quintanilha Felinto, nazgul, metaandrocto, ZanQdo, mindrones, nexyon (we're dropping off a big cliff here at this stage - nexyon has ~100 commits over 2 years)
And older contributors who have been quieter recently, but are still around: ben2610, schlaile, genscher, elubie
So that's 7 very active developers, 10 active newcomers, and 4 old-timers who are still coding occasionally. 21 or so.
Yes, they're doing better - they have 10 new developers in the past 2-3 years, to 2 for the GIMP, and they have managed to keep old heads and knowledge around better than the GIMP, but people overestimate the number of active hackers there are working on projects like these.
Blender is seen as an amazing success primarily because Ton does such a huge job of fundraising, planning & doing these amazing projects around film & game development with Blender, and is very conscious of the importance of the artists using the software when planning features. Basically, he runs the Blender Institute as a company, and manages to pay 3 or 4 hackers full time 6 months of the year to work on features - which is an amazing success story - and not something the GIMP has ever tried to replicate.
That said, all the comments saying "GIMP UI sucks, that's what is holding it back" can't have used Blender much - now there's a UI where you really need to know what you're doing to be productive...
Cheers,
Dave.
Posted Jan 11, 2011 17:39 UTC (Tue)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link] (7 responses)
But the difference is that when you do know what you're doing, it's like Blender becomes an extension of your brain[0]. Its major flaw is poor discoverability, which is improved to a great extent in 2.50. On the other hand the GIMP's UI is simply awful, no matter how much practice you have.
[0] I would say that Blender and Vim are the only two applications I've ever actually *enjoyed* using.
Posted Jan 13, 2011 16:26 UTC (Thu)
by n8willis (subscriber, #43041)
[Link] (6 responses)
Whatever (unspecified) awful-ness you assert there is in the GIMP UI, at least it gets that -- and plenty of other basic HCI -- right.
Nate
Posted Jan 13, 2011 20:32 UTC (Thu)
by jthill (subscriber, #56558)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Jan 14, 2011 19:58 UTC (Fri)
by n8willis (subscriber, #43041)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Jan 15, 2011 3:59 UTC (Sat)
by jthill (subscriber, #56558)
[Link] (3 responses)
I must be missing something; it seems to me that's exactly what I described.
Posted Jan 21, 2011 22:13 UTC (Fri)
by n8willis (subscriber, #43041)
[Link] (2 responses)
Nate
Posted Jan 22, 2011 2:15 UTC (Sat)
by jthill (subscriber, #56558)
[Link] (1 responses)
File-open? Ok, we can change the subject, but you never mentioned this before. Blender does save every time you quit.
More: manually saving takes a backup, and if you want lots of those you can tell it how many right there on the same auto-save preference pane. So acquiring the habit of hitting ^W whenever you hit a nice spot, before moving on to the next thing to do, because you can casually recover from doing that by mistake too, seems like a no-brainer to me.
More: hit F1, double-click the filename, ... nothing happens. You have to hit Open File or use the keyboard. Just a little syncopation to remind you, like it asking for confirmation when you quit -- which it does.
The file-open behavior description is at least accurate, but that behavior doesn't seem to be a problem in actual practice - for reasons which are apparent to anyone who actually uses it.
Posted Feb 2, 2011 22:21 UTC (Wed)
by n8willis (subscriber, #43041)
[Link]
Nate
Posted Jan 11, 2011 17:40 UTC (Tue)
by prokoudine (guest, #41788)
[Link] (2 responses)
Eeek. No, by no means I'm developer. I mostly maintain Russian translation. Admittedly I did some lousy attempts at porting scripts to new API, but that's about it.
Oyvind Kolas is famously not a GIMP hacker, not until you strap him and torture for a week or two :)
There really are just two active developers: Mitch and Alexia. Sven, Martin and few more new occasional contributors make the other 0.5 developers between them.
Posted Jan 11, 2011 17:48 UTC (Tue)
by dneary (guest, #55185)
[Link] (1 responses)
Dave.
Posted Jan 11, 2011 18:07 UTC (Tue)
by prokoudine (guest, #41788)
[Link]
I'm afraid that you are doing rather quantitative analysis without referring to timeline. Martin hasn't been doing much in Git since last spring. I've been doing weekly digests of changes in Git for about a year, so I kind of watch that. If you are keen referring to Ohloh, look at the timeline and do comparative research re amount of commits for e.g. Martin and Mitch. You'll see what I mean ;)
Posted Jan 11, 2011 19:04 UTC (Tue)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (2 responses)
As a result it's like the Vi of 3D modelers. It's extremely fast with a bit of a esoteric interface. (different though that it's extremely non-modular.. this was a design goal.)
Not 'fast' as in processing speed, but 'fast' in your ability to crank models out. For cranking out 3D models there is very few applications that can keep up with a experienced Blender user.
The problem with Blender is that it's not just a modeler. It's a entire product suite with integrated renderer, texture editor, animation, composition engine, game engine etc etc.
The stuff that was made AFTER it was open sourced, and all the non-modular stuff generally sucked. Especially UI-wised. It did not provide the functionality that artists need, nor did it provide the existing functionality in a way that was accessible to artists.
That is why.....
With those projects they went back to having the developers working with artists in professional-like settings. They were then much better able to identify missing functionality, poor functionality, and identify areas in the UI that needed improvement. As a result a lot of the animation suite and game engine was completely overhauled. The UI changes and new functionality is what makes up the major reason for the Blender 2.5 release.
Human communication is extremely difficult and if your going to depend on just mailing lists and bug reports then it's going to be extremely difficult to write good software for other people.
Linux has benefited heavily from the fact that it was written by developers for developers. The 'by hackers for hackers' type thing. When you have a close tie between yourself and your users then that allows you to really get done what is needed to get done. There is a lot of poor UI theory and guesswork, but every application is different, and every group of users are different. Unless your able to work directly with them and observe people using your software in a real world environment _during_development_ then it's going to put the developers at a real disadvantage.
How many times have Gimp developers had a chance to sit down and observe professionals using their software and interacted with them while this was happening? Users know what they need and what they want, but they are going to be very ill-equipped to actually communicate this with programmers. Users generally will do a poor job guessing on what they need to say to programmers in order to get what they want. Programmers will tend to focus on things they need and things that fascinates them or holds their attention.
Working closely with users and observing them work is something that Adobe would do with Photoshop on a regular basis...
Posted Jan 11, 2011 21:57 UTC (Tue)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link]
"How many times have Gimp developers had a chance to sit down and observe professionals using their software and interacted with them while this was happening?"
I would think quite a few times. And they are helped by a profession interaction designer right now, and the improvements are staggering. I regularly compile gimp's git master, and it's getting better all the time.
But for the rest you're quite right, of course. It's why all graphics app projects went wild when David Revoy started giving feedback last year. It's so immensely useful.
All I can say is that any artists who tests Krita gets a spot in the About box!
Posted Jan 12, 2011 7:25 UTC (Wed)
by prokoudine (guest, #41788)
[Link]
At least once, during one week in 2006, as part of OpenUsability project. Some of the already implemented specs (new crop tool and rectangular tools, new freehand selection etc) comes as result of that.
Posted Jan 24, 2011 7:00 UTC (Mon)
by LetterRip (guest, #6816)
[Link]
1) Superb leadership - both at the top (Ton) but we also have a great deal of leadership throughout the team.
2) Good communication skills - we don't do flame wars, we hold a meeting once a week to plan technical goals and keep everyone on the same page.
3) Market related - When Blender first went open source, there weren't any decent tools that did everything Blender did for much under 10,000$. So unless one was willing to pirate, it was Blender or a huge up front cost, or a tool inferior to Blender that was still 500$+.
4) Sexiness - Working on 3D is something most programmers grew up dreaming about; simulation tools are a sexy, high prestige, and exciting part of programming.
The confluence of those factors have lead to Blenders success.
Note that the post I'm responding to actually underestimates our dev base by quite a bit, since we moved most of our scripts to a seperate svn which the main tree pulls from.
Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate
Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate
As I recall Blender _always_ saves your work when you quit. If you meant to save it, pop back in (it starts _fast_) and save the blend you quit on to the original file. It's even dead easy to get it to always start where you left off.
Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate
Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate
From that link:
Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate
Other File Open Options [...]
Recover Last Session
This will load the quit.blend file Blender automatically saves just before exiting. So this option enables you to recover your last work session, e.g. if you closed Blender by accidentÂ…Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate
Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate
that snippet implies that Blender auto-saves changes made to open files
blender does auto-save, in exactly the way you say is proper. The "Vitals" section of the manual says so, and it's hard to miss the big "Auto Save" button on the preferences panel. It defaults to every five minutes, per file.
if you are working on one file, then open another
Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate
Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate
> and is pretty inactive, but still with a few commits a month.
Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate
Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate
Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate
http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/blender-open-proj...
Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate
Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate
> and observe professionals using their software and interacted
> with them while this was happening?
Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate