No way Jose! You didn’t spend hours doing a research for everyone to understand it. If you made an effort, people’ve got to show some respect! The’ve got to spend as much time on reading it as your spent on writing it. Or else they are cheating.

Tired of people cheating on you, my fellow blogger? I’ll show you the way forward. Then left, right, left, left again, forward, right, upside-down, inside-out, left… Nearly there!

The Core Concept

Forget it. You are a man of ideas, are you not? Put as many ideas in your text as you can think of. Don’t separate them. Instead, let them tie in crazy knots like a headphone wire in your pocket.

This is your ideal text visualized:

The Navigation

Huh? Navigation is for sissy girls. You write stuff only for the deserving who are tough enough to dig through ten layers of crap. In other words:

• Never use headings. Train of thought may do Brownian movements, but that’s no reason for stopping.
• Use inline lists. Because the colon was invented for a reason, dontcherknow.
• Put as many hyperlinks in your text as you can think of. Take that, Wikipedia!

The Text

• Write long, very long paragraphs. People’ve got to see you put some work into it!
• Right after those very long paragraphs use very short ones, no less that a single sentence. After all, you are not a monster.
• Nevertheless, most of the content should be made up of sentences with no less than 3 levels of nested complexity. Solve the puzzle, sukkas!

Illustrations

Eeeek! That’s abomination unto machismo. Make it a wall of text. No treacherous image should sneak in! Guard the perimeter!

On a second thought, you can get some extra points for making people go through illustrations with gritted teeth. Just use a really psychodelic color palette for all the diagrams and never ever put a legend on.

Tables

Yeah, baby. This is where you can go nuts. People may think you wear underpants on your head, but I say use long tables!

In fact, make all of your text a table. And put some nested tables in. I mean, aren’t all geniuses crazy? That must be it!

Conclusions

If you follow these simple instructions, few people will read more than 1/10 of your article. This is how your gain a true following of the like-minded! And with luck everyone will just skip your text! How cool is that?!

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: uh, oh, this sukka broke every rule he listed. Does the bugger ever follow his own advices?

And that’s my point exactly: never follow your own advices. This will only make it more interesting!

I hope you’ll excuse the fact that I’ve been working as IT journalist for seven years only (and as editor in an offline IT magazin with >100K copies run per issue several years ago). Not that much, but still a nice experience.

There are several simple rules in journalism.

1. Make sure the issue really exists.

If you are a good journalist, you don’t play with people’s minds and you don’t make up problems. You investigate, analyze and tell.

Nathan: “Twice in recent weeks open source projects have surprised me with their lack of openness. In both cases, developers acted or spoke out in such a way as to intentionally push other developers away from their work.”

Neither of parties tried to “intentionally push other developers away from their work”. In the first case we have a designer and a spokesperson who express disagreement with people not having respect for their (or, rather, Oxygen designers) work. In the second case amount of decision makers is intentionally limited to maximize signal/noise ratio, while amount of contributors is not limited at all.

Is it really worth a rant, not even speaking about an article?

2. Research, don’t guess

Nathan: “Through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, you can examine the Oxygen project’s site all the way back to 2005. Ever since the beginning, two things have remained unchanged: the only images available are “previews” licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs, and the team does not invite outside participation.”

OK, I look at the archive and I see that the website hasn’t changed. How does it related to openness of the project?

Instead let’s go straight to Contact page of Oxygen project:

“To get involved you can join the KDE Artists mailing list where everyone is encouraged to contribute, share ideas and offer help. You can also discuss Oxygen on IRC (freenode.net #kde-artists).”

Does it sound like the team is not inviting outside participation? Clearly it doesn’t. Every conclusion you make should be backed by facts. If you intend to prove that Oxygen team doesn’t welcome contributors, use facts: tell readers about people who actually studied principles of Oxygen’s approach to design, tried to contribute, but were rejected from participation. If such people ever existed.

Nathan: “But that absence of an open invitation to contribute is topped by direct rejection.”

Is it the same Nathan Willis who earlier wrote “When I researched the GIMP UI brainstorm in October…”? Research is the wrong verb here. Looking through is the right one. You wanna proofs? Here you are.

a) We can see Sven saying: “The process is completely open and you have obviously misunderstood quite a few things about it. … Can we please not distract ourselves right now with a discussion that is based on nothing but fear, doubt and misunderstandings? Thanks.”

b) “Participate in the UI brainstorm” is listed among “Ways in which you can help” at GIMP’s website.

The term direct rejection is a clear case of no good research at all. For every conclusion you needs solid facts. To get solid facts you have to research.

3. When writing about a conflict situation, talk to both parties.

This is not even an option like buying or not buying ice-cream in a supermarket. This is golden rule. If you don’t follow it, go blogging elsewhere.

• Did Nathan contact the creator of “Oxygen Refit” icon package to ask him if he was really abused? Since this is not mentioned, I’d say, no — the guy wasn’t contacted. You say you disagree? Then prove me wrong. Use facts.

• Was Oxygen team contacted to provide comments? Not mentioned in the article, therefore not contacted.

• Was Esteban contacted to have him say he was abused by GIMP UI design team rules? Looks like he wasn’t as well. Too bad, because after initial misunderstanding, how the UI design project works, he keeps contributing. To the “closed” project

• Was GIMP UI design team contacted to provide explanations? All the same.

Googling and quoting isn’t enough. Go blogging, if you think it is.

4. Tell, but don’t teach.

Nathan: “The secondary complaint — that it is wrong to release the icons before the project declares them “ready” — is entirely incompatible with the “release early, release often” philosophy. Artwork is no different from executable code in either regard.”

A journalist is not supposed to teach (unless he writes tutorials), especially in an agressive manner. Never. Ever. Primary function of a journalist is to tell people what is going on. If you try to be both journalist and evangelist, you will fail at both. This is simple.

Anyone mad about the way Oxygen project works? Buy a punching ball and contribute to it.

Just for the record, I’m not affiliated with Oxygen project. I’m a tiniest bit affiliated with Tango project and I did feel angry about this silly Tango vs. Oxygen opposition. They are good friends.

5. Learn what you are writing about.

A good journalist can write about just anything at all. Sure, noone would expect a great SAN related article from someone who has been writing about agriculture for last 30 years. But if you are an IT journalist, you have no excuse for not knowing basics.

Very few users use most of functions in an aplication like GIMP. Therefore they can contribute with ideas how to improve a small part of the application, but they can’t be great UI architects, because they don’t see the big picture. As simple as it is. Basics, as I said before.

Now think about reasons, why decision making is limited to Sikking’s team. And think about the way OpenUsability project works (and it wasn’t even mentioned in the article — another sign of no proper research).

That’s it. Five rules is enough for now.

Oh yeah, and because this blog posting is about teaching, you are free to consider it a rant

This is a shorter version of the article I published yesterday at linuxgraphics.ru. The sole reason for doing it is that I wrote all these things many times in forums and I ‘d like to refer to one single text in the future. How selfish Please note that it implies you are using GIMP 2.3.11 and above.

Here is a visit card of people who use GIMP mostly for taking screenshots:

What do we see there except a geeky (IMHO) Gtk+ theme?

1. Font size in GUI is quite large.
2. Widgets are quite large.
3. Instrument properties palette doesn’t fit the window horizontally.
4. Default set of dialogs has, IMHO, both useful and not so useful dialogs.

This is what GIMP suggest users by default and what they often complain about. Could this be improved? Definitely yes, let’s have a look, how exactly.

Fonts and widget size

GIMP uses its own Gtk+ themes for ages. Usually you can choose between Default theme and Small theme. Currently most noticeable difference between them is taking place thanks to reducing font size, which makes checkboxes and buttons smaller, because they automatically adjust to length of text. Besides, Small theme uses smaller icons for toolbox window (16×16 instead of 22×22).

To switch a theme open Preferences dialog, go to Theme tab, click on “Small”, then “OK”. Changes will apply immediately.

That’s not all. Remember about font size? Have a look at /usr/share/gimp/2.0/themes/Small/gtkrc file. It has such a string:

# font_name = "sans 8"

Now copy /usr/share/gimp/2.0/themes/Small to ~/.gimp-2.3/themes/ and rename it to, say, “even smaller”. Now you can pick your favourite text editor and adjust ~/.gimp-2.3/themes/even smaller/gtkrc like this:

font_name = "Tahoma 7"

This will make GIMP using Tahoma 7pt font for all widgets that contain text and dialogs, therefore, will become smaller.

Further optimization is possible by tweaking gtkrc. You might like read documentation on Gtk+ for that.

Width of dialogs

You might like disabling Help button to get narrower dialog windows. Some dialogs have several buttons in the bottom row, and if at least one of the buttons has a long caption, all other buttons will have same width. Thus getting rid of one of the buttons you don’t use regularly, might be a good idea, and Help is a good candidate. You can do it in Help system part of Preferences dialog. Here is before:

Here is after:

You can still open context help by hitting F1 (can be disabled as well in the part of Preferences dialog).

Layout optimization by redocking

You can redock any floating dialog and start a new group of docked dialogs easily. For reference please read appropriate part of GIMP docs.

Layout is a very objective thing. A set of dialogs a user might need varies from person to person. However, if you do a lot of photo retouching, I suggest keeping Layers dialog and Instrument Properties dialog opened simultaneously (therefore in different docked groups) and add the Histogram dialog to the top or the bottom of one of them. Note that you can switch between many dialogs using default hotkeys. Here is my usual layout:

Preview size

By default GIMP uses quite large (again, IMHO) preview areas for Layers, Channels and Undo History dialogs.

Adjusting Layers and Channels dialogs is a piece of cake. Just like any other dialog they have a context menu, and in these particular cases you can find there a submenu Preview size, where you can pick a size that will suit you. I for my part went for tiny, because when I do retouching, I use text for reference, not previews. Sure, if you are blessed to use 21’’ Lacie and you use preview for reference, you can go for Gigantic (saw it a couple of times in tutorials by Bernhard “devvv” Stockmann from gimpusers.de — great information resource in German, by the way). Here is tiny:

Here is gigantic:

You can do the same in Interface part of the Preferences dialog.

It’s not same easy regarding Undo History dialog. Sven reported that it’s difficult to recalculate previews of actions on-fly, so you are doomed to use text editor again Open ~/.gimp-2.3/gimprc and add the following:

(undo-preview-size large)

Large is the default value used by GIMP. You need to change it to one of the following values: tiny, extra-small, small, medium, extra-large, huge, enormous or gigantic. You need to restart GIMP (if running) to let changes apply. Here is what you will see with tiny:

Normal and fullscreen modes

Fullscreen mode in GIMP is considered as mode for editing by default, since it has all the same settings the normal mode has, including color of background. It’s up to you whether it suits you. I know many users who want fullscreen mode to be preview mode by default. If you are one of them, go to Preferences dialog and Image windows→Appearance. Here you can change default settings. For instance, scrollbars that are enabled by default are of no use, since you have much better ways to navigate a large image (see below).

As for guides and grid, again, it’s up to you whether top leave them or to disable them by default. For me they are disabled, and to enable them I’ve setup two hotkeys taken from Inkscape: “|” for guides and “#” for grid (I use them in Scribus too). If you are migrating from Photoshop, you might like set Ctrl+; and Ctrl+��? instead — just enable dynamic hotkeys in Interface tab of Preferences dialog and go through View menu, pressing hotkeys you want for each menu element.

Image navigation

This is rather user experience, not UI, related. One thing you might immediately like in upcoming 2.3.12 is using Spacebar for panning by default. You can still revert this behaviour to the previous in Image windows tab of Preferences dialog, if you prefer to switch to Move tool and not to Panning.

There are other ways to navigate images you might like to use:

1. Dragging with middle mouse button.
2. Combination of Shift + arrow keys.
3. Small navigation widget in right lower corner of image window.
4. Navigation dialog.
5. Using bottom and right part of touchpads (for laptop users).

I hope that was helpful for ya!

And here is the fun: about a month ago some weird russian guy started a web-site where he claims that a comet is going to crash into Germany end of October this year. He doesn’t supply any facts of course, just some clearly homemade fake video of the comet.

Now the spicy part of the story: the gradient used in the tutorial is shipped with GIMP by default and its name is…. drumroll… “German flag smooth”! I think, God has an outstanding sense of humor