[Gimp-developer] 2.6 roadmap: my summary.

[Guillermo Espertino]

Roadmap will be closed by the end of this week, so I'd like to make a 
summary of the main issues I'd like to see fixed for 2.6
Since I'm not a coder, I just can give my user pov, so I'll try to be 
realistic and don't ask for too radical things, just changes to improve 
the existing tools. Please consider this list just as mere suggestions.
Of course, maybe some of these things need full GEGL support and are 
impossible at this stage, so please ignore them if that's the case.

1) Semi transparent overlay of the original layer when transforming 
(scale or rotate).
(It seems pretty obvious with the planned Cairo support)

2) Redrawing speed at <100% zoom
Redrawing when a large image is zoomed out is still slow. the quality of 
the display is excelent, but just turning on or off a layer (for 
instance) is slow.
I guess that using a low resolution proxy of the actual image for this 
operation and processing the actual pixels in the background would make 
the process of displaying layers and applying filters / color 
adjustments more agile.  But again, I'm just guessing, and the roadmap 
isn't the place to say how it shoul/could be done :)

3) Axis Constrain for move tool.
This is very, very useful.

4) Angle constrain for path tool.
Afaics in the documentation, this feature existed in previous versions. 
Was it removed?

5) Fade Tool should work for all the filters and color adjustment tools.
Currently it doesn't work for curves or levels, and that would be very 
useful.

6) Better screen space usage by default.
 I'd really like to see as an intermediate solution (until the UI team 
brings a more complete solution) a minor panels re-arrangement to get 
more screen space (two-column narrow toolbox and tool properties moved 
to the main docker). An introductory window with the current toolbox 
menu when no image is open (as I proposed a couple of days ago) would be 
nice too.

Also, the size of the widgets and input boxes in the dialogs is quite 
big. Everything is spaced, which is pleasant to the eyes, but frequently 
eats too much screen space. I don't really know if this has to do with 
the GTK theme or it can be adjusted in GIMP, but just watching the UI I 
can see that reducing the padding and spacing just a couple of pixels 
could reduce the size of the dialogs and panels without sacrificing the 
visual goodness.

7) I left this for the end because I don't know if it will be possible 
at this stage:
The text tool needs improvements. I don't know if they can be made 
before GEGL or it should be bumped to a future version.
- Text edition on canvas.
- modify text properties "inline" (selecting a part of the text and 
changing the options doesn't change the whole paragraph).
- Don't destroy transformations when editing text properties.