Is it time for Edit | Preferences?

Bug #671874 reported by grofaty
6
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Pinta
Won't Fix
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

In Pinta 0.5 I think it is time to set some settings on one place like Edit | Preferences.

On this menu there could be the following settings:
1. View | Ruler Units
2. View | Tools Windows
3. JPEG Quality window settings from bug report:
   https://bugs.launchpad.net/pinta/+bug/671744
4. New Image Size window settings from bug report:
   https://bugs.launchpad.net/pinta/+bug/671742
5. Default data type saving from bug report:
   https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/671500

grofaty (grofaty)
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Jonathan Pobst (jpobst) wrote :

I would really like to avoid a preferences page. When possible, I would prefer we just store the user's last choice, and default to that.

Changed in pinta:
status: New → Won't Fix
Revision history for this message
grofaty (grofaty) wrote :
Download full text (5.0 KiB)

Where do you see Pinta in comparison to other image editors?

I would like to understand where do you see Pinta in comparison to other image editors in few releases time when program matures?

On Windows XP I use the following four image editors:
1. Gimp
2. Paint.net
3. Microsoft Paint
4. Pinta

All of them have some advantages and some disadvantages.

Gimp
Description: Advanced image editing tool for advance professional users. It is assumed that you can't launch a program and begin to edit image without learning. It is just like Vim text editor, needs a lot of time to start-up, but when you have learnt it enough it can be very powerful tool.
Advantages: powerful tool.
Disadvantages: advance learning is needed, extremely slow when starting up.
User base: advance professional users

Paint.net
Description: Nice tool with some of the elements of simple tool and some of the elements of advance tool.
Advantages: it is simpler to use. If you have used some other simple tool like Microsoft Paint, you can start editing pictures without big hassle.
Disadvantages: it's becoming blooded, it just ask you too many questions instead of doing the default one. For example: Save as into JPG it ask you about quality instead of just set it as default one. When pasting image it asks you if you would like to expand canvas or not, instead of just do it.
I don't like that it is reinventing the wheel with answers instead of simple buttons etc.
It only runs on Windows. I am also Ubuntu user, so I would like to have one tool on Windows and on Ubuntu. I don't like to have two tools that behave slightly different.
User base: middle to advance users

Microsoft Paint
Description: Very simple tool already included in default operating system with no additional costs.
Advantages: Simple to use. It starts up instantly.
Disadvantages: Simple undo. Missing basic features like crop file. Unable to set default save image format like png. No toolbar for copy/paste/delete/print etc basic functions. Windows only. Multiple task to do for single draw action, like selecting line object where line width is selected then select Rectangle to draw a rectangle on canvas.
User base: simple users that would more like to draw a simple picture then edit existing images.

Pinta.
Description: simple to use non-bloded image editing tool
Advantages: Multiplatform. Easy to learn comparing to Gimp. Does not reinvent the wheel in GUI. Does not asks unnecessary
questions like pasting the image and asking for canvas width etc.
Disadvantages: Early in development, so some bugs.
User base: average user

How I see Pinta in this 4 tools. I see it between Paint.net and Microsoft Paint. It should not become blooded and should stay as simple as possible for average user.

In my humble opinion there are two ways of having advance features. Asking user to make a decision each time (nice for advance users that are choosing different options each time they use a tool) or set some settings as default and make a possibility to change it from some Edit | Preferences window (it is assumed that user will set some settings and have the same settings for every time he/she is using the tool - this is perfectly acceptab...

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Revision history for this message
Jonathan Pobst (jpobst) wrote :

To me, Pinta's feature list is pretty much done. From here on out, it's mainly bugfixes and a robust extension system so other people can add features if they want.

Therefore, I don't foresee us adding a lot of new things that will ask new questions, which leaves us basically concerned over 3 questions we currently ask the user.

New screenshot - I think we have to have this one, but it now saves your last selection. I think you have to have some dialog to prepare the user for what is about to happen.

New image size - The current dialog is terrible. I would like it to have buttons for common presets. In master, it at least saves your last selection now. I also like "drag the canvas to change the image size", but that is a very advanced feature we will likely not have for a very long time, if ever.

JPEG Compression - Looking at GIMP, it looks like you can add custom controls to the Save File dialog. I think it would be nice to put it directly on the dialog where most people would ignore it unless they wanted to change it. I haven't looked at what it would take to do this.

I understand the desire to avoid the proliferation of asking the user questions, but I do not think we are on that path. I think the first 2 are very sane questions to ask. I agree with reworking the JPEG issue, because that's not something we should be asking the average user. And that's it. With only 3 questions (2 of which I think we should ask regardless), in my opinion, a preference dialog is overkill.

Revision history for this message
grofaty (grofaty) wrote :

Now I understand: "Pinta's feature list is pretty much done." I didn't know that. I was just of influence of
statement on http://pinta-project.com/ "It is currently early in development."

I just though that you are planing to add multiple features and so having multiple of questions. So I wanted to somehow prevent "Paint.net" road...

Thanks for explaining.

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