Single window, ok cool. But after ages, still no tool to draw some boxes and circles? This is proof that Gimp's goal is not designer's productivity. Pass.
I knew someone would bring that up. Drawing boxes and circles is easy, first make selection, then fill it. That's hardly a blocker for designer productivity.
Sure there's an extra selection and a tool change but this way it's a lot more versatile than having a simple single purpose draw-me-a-box tool. Learn the keyboard shortcuts and get over it.
Need a pattern filled box? Do the selection and use pattern fill.
Need a box with a circular hole in the middle, with fill and outline stroke. Select a box, then select a circle with difference selection. Then fill with outline color, shrink selection by few pixels and fill with pattern. Or first fill with pattern fill and do an outset/inset selection.
I'm sure Photoshop has a super versatile tool for doing boxes and circles. A real swiss army knife that rounds your corners and does drop shadows. And that's fine. But it's a different design choice than GIMP did.
In my opinion, GIMP is nice because it has simple tools that are composable, repeatable and scriptable. Kinda like the unix philosophy gone GUI.
If you don't grok it, it may be difficult. If you do and don't like it, that's your choice. But don't be impolite about it then.
Photoshop implements these features using vector masks, which mean you can scale your shapes after creating them without any resampling/pixelation. How many steps would it take to do the same in GIMP? It's not just about not grokking it, it's about having tools to get shit done.
I'm pretty sure GP was talking about being productive as a designer, which means being able to do things really, really fast, with next to no effort, while retaining as much flexibility as possible. I think it's great that GIMP exists and is free and open source, but for people who actually have deadlines the GIMP workflow just doesn't cut it a lot of the time.
If you take a GIMPdesigner and give them a weeks training in Photoshop will they still be faster in GIMP? Will the additional speed offset the cost of a weeks course? Are there many professional designers who aren't already familiar with Photoshop?
Farmers who plough there land with an ox may initially be faster then when they get their first tractor but that won't last long.
This is extremely discouraging. For a moment I thought that I should give Gimp a try, but not being able to draw vector shapes is a deal breaker.
The PS shape tool provides the building blocks for designing interfaces. Shapes can be scaled and merged; you can edit the vector paths and use them as masks; and much more.
Interface design requires only a fraction of Photoshop's functionality, but that is what is missing from Gimp. For image editing it might be a decent choice, but not this.
For instance Gimp also doesn't have "smart sharpening", a very useful filter that Photoshop users will recognize immediately.
Applying this filter in Gimp is more complicated, involving several steps (do a search on Google for tutorials), but in the process of applying such filters you'll learn a lot about image composition and about various tricks you can mix and match for other effects.
And the nice thing about it is that Gimp is so extensible that you can write a plugin for it, so you don't have to repeat those steps every time. You can do so with Python or Scheme. Heck, if you search around, somebody else probably wrote a good one.
So when using Gimp, don't expect a Photoshop clone, because it isn't.
Inkscape is excellent for drawing shapes though. You can add bitmaps and using non-destructive filters too.
Edit: downvotes, huzzah ... it's what I use for website design, only really turn to Gimp for more complex bitmap changes, cutouts and photo touchup. I cant imagine trying to do web UI in Gimp alone, hence the suggestion.
Form a "designer productivity", nothing beats a Bitmap+Vector hybrid app like Fireworks... Even Photoshop seems like a productivity nightmare and a user hostile monster by comparison... I'd say GIMP and Photoshop are on par on this "boxes and circles drawing UX", and this speaks BADLY of both of them!
Note: the first comment in the blog post you liked has the exact same complaint as in this thread. It's amazing how people start complaining before consulting the manual. As if all software in the world should be obvious by looking at icons and buttons. And yet it isn't. I am looking at you, Microsoft Ribbon.
This is a very old argument. However, there are only so many hours in a day. I use Gimp occasionally but I bought Photoshop because there are more tutorials, blogs, and resources in general. I'm a developer and weekend warrior with graphics. If the apps are too different, I only have time to learn one.
For Gimp to really hit the main stream, it should make it trivial to switch between it and Photoshop.
Sure there's an extra selection and a tool change but this way it's a lot more versatile than having a simple single purpose draw-me-a-box tool. Learn the keyboard shortcuts and get over it.
Need a pattern filled box? Do the selection and use pattern fill.
Need a box with a circular hole in the middle, with fill and outline stroke. Select a box, then select a circle with difference selection. Then fill with outline color, shrink selection by few pixels and fill with pattern. Or first fill with pattern fill and do an outset/inset selection.
I'm sure Photoshop has a super versatile tool for doing boxes and circles. A real swiss army knife that rounds your corners and does drop shadows. And that's fine. But it's a different design choice than GIMP did.
In my opinion, GIMP is nice because it has simple tools that are composable, repeatable and scriptable. Kinda like the unix philosophy gone GUI.
If you don't grok it, it may be difficult. If you do and don't like it, that's your choice. But don't be impolite about it then.