[Gimp-developer] input from the UI team needed

[Sven Neumann]

Hi Peter,

there are a couple of things that are waiting for input from the UI
team. Things that we would like to sort out for GIMP 2.6. It would be
nice if we could get some advice from you and your team. I made a list
of the things that in my opinion are most important right now. The order
is arbitrary:


 Merge toolbox and image menus

   It would be very nice if we could get this done for 2.6. It would be
   a major user-visible change and as such it would give a clear sign
   that GIMP is moving. What's needed here is a mockup that shows how
   GIMP should look like with no image window open. And a specification
   that tells us what should happen when the first image is opened, what
   happens for the second image, what happens when the last image is
   closed.


 Text boxes

   This is described in bug #122707 and Bill has a patch for the text
   tool that makes it use the rectangle tool interface similar to the
   Rectangular Selection and Crop tools. It would be nice to have a
   specification that defines how the text tool should behave.


 Keyboard Shortcut dialog

  This has come up in bug #507257. We already made the Keyboard
  Shortcut editor accessible from the Edit menu. So it is not any
  longer necessary to access it from the Preferences dialog. IMO
  this should be taken further by moving more Keyboard related
  stuff from the Preferences dialog to the Keyboard Shortcut
  dialog. Some comments on the bug report would be helpful.

 Remove the "add/remove alpha channel" option for layers

  This is described in bug #486902. Not sure if it is a good
  idea or not. Comments from the UI team would be very much
  appreciated.


 Show current aspect ratio in Crop tool

  As described in bug #508183, this is a regression from GIMP 2.2 and
  it would be nice to sort this out for GIMP 2.6.


 Make it easier to select and move areas

  As described in bug #505761, the new rectangular/ellipse selection
  tools get in the way of the workflow of some users. Bug #349340 is
  somewhat related to this. It would be nice if the solutions outlined
  in these bug reports could be evaluated by the UI team.


I hope that you and your team can help us to sort out these issues.


Sven