Rethinking GIMP Tool Options

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Revision as of 08:29, 16 July 2012 by Foser (talk) (intro/vision/functionality added)
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Introduction

Tool Options have grown out of the need for having a greater control over the active tools behaviour. However, there has not been a clear guideline of how this interaction is supposed to take place. Examples of what this project addresses are: interaction with the live canvas object; widget lay-out and design; working with setups.

Vision

The vision during the design process is based on GIMP's product vision combined with the specific needs during interaction with the tool options. The vision follows below:

  • Tools in GIMP enable hands-on manipulation of the compostion, direct on the canvas.
  • The tool options enable the fine and precise configurations that make the tool fit the job.
  • Configuring tool parameters can happen anywhere from almost continuously during a work session - to once in a user's lifetime.
  • Changing tool set-ups will never break user’s workflows.

Functionality

A first step is to assess the current state of the GIMP tool options. Given the wide range of functionality provided by the tool options it was chosen to break down the tool options to their smallest building blocks and work from there.

On a toolkit level the smallest building blocks are the visual widgets that put together form a graphical user interface, however in the decomposition of GIMP tool options there were also large functional blocks of widgets and adapted widgets with specific functionality. The full break down can be found in Tool Options widgets.