[unknownaccount]

I believe it is intentionally gimped because they are not allowed to make the UX too close to Photoshop(which, unfortunately happens to have the most intuitive / comfortable interface for photo editing) or else they would be sued by Adobe. Blame the horrendous interface on Adobe and their aggressive enforcement of software patents.

[omnimus]

Nonsense. You can 100% copy ux of a product. There are many mac apps that closely replicate Photoshop (affinity, pixelmator, acorn)and none of them were sued by Adobe.

Also i think Photoshop is intuitive mainly because everybody is so used to it. Gimp just has very bad ux because they cant colectivelly agree and unify the ux. If the ux was very different but very good it might be even advantage but now its lot worse PS.

[egypturnash]

Flash 4 had a very nice interface full of palettes. Flash 5 dropped them all in favor of a "smart" inspector that never showed me what I wanted to see without a couple of extra clicks and a half-second wait. This was about half of why I dropped out of the animation industry, it was a complete flow-killer.

This happened because Adobe sued Macromedia over palettes.

Annoyingly enough, the interface has not substantially changed in the intervening years despite Adobe eating MM.

[hiccuphippo]

As an occasional user of Gimp, Photoshop's ux is anything but intuitive. The same for Krita.

I guess they are only intuitive if you use a graphics tablet?

[Ygg2]

But what about other editors with similar UX? Do Krita/PaintShopPro ever got hit by spurious patent claim?

[trasz]

I seem to remember there was a 3D editor, Moonlight Atelier, allegedly killed by lawyers for similarity to... SoftImage?

[Ygg2]

Maybe. But I asked for proof that Photoshop has any patents for its UX. So far, no proofs.