[Gegl-developer] DAGs make users' eyes cross

[Shea McCombs]

I certainly agree with your reservations on using the DAG as *the*
user-manipulated UI, but I don't think it's entirely black and white.  There
are often two types of artists, those who love DAGs, and those who hate DAGs
-- and even the ones who love DAGs can sometimes hate them :-)

>From a high-level point of view, I'm personally not happy with hiding the
flexibility a DAG-based UI provides in favor of a mostly linear interface.
I think it would be very helpful to figure out the most important reasons
artists have for disliking DAGs, and pointing out the reasons DAG-based UIs
can be unwieldy (even if completely obvious).  Maybe we can come up with a
"middle" ground (though I hate to use the word middle) which really improves
on both approaches :-)

I like your spreadsheet idea a lot -- but I have concerns that it would be
trading one form of visual complexity for another.  It's really hard to say
without some prototyping, of course.

It's something to consider!

-shea

On 10/17/06, Ken Bateman <kbateman at cymbym.com> wrote:
>
> I've independently been thinking of a similar imaging core for the last
> month or
> so.  Of course, I think it's a good idea.  Logically, behind the scenes,
> everything should be in the form of a DAG.  But I think that a raw DAG
> does not
> make up a part of a good user interface.
>
> Spreadsheets are in essence a DAG for performing numerical calculations,
> and I
> would suggest that the user interface should take the form of a
> spreadsheet
> since this is a model familiar to many users.   Some cells would contain
> source
> rasters, other cells would contain paths, vector graphics, or masks (or
> even
> references to other functions), some cells would contain a function that
> referred to other cells for inputs, some cells could contain labels or
> comments,
> and most cells would be empty.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Gegl-developer mailing list
> Gegl-developer at lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU
> https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gegl-developer
>



-- 
Shea McCombs
http://www.upvector.com/
------
If you're a cowboy, and you're dragging a guy behind your horse, I bet it
would really make you mad if you looked back and the guy was reading a
magazine.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /lists/gegl-developer/attachments/20061017/03d4cb5f/attachment.html