Kieran Senior

• Published:May 8th, 2008
• Comments:2 Comments
• Category:Pages

Now that my university year is coming to a close there are many doors opening in the future of my software development. Fortunately I have a handful of people who are very eager to work together on solo-driven, yet team-oriented software projects. As a part of this we’re setting up our old team, and reviving old projects that have been left for dust to settle on them, and hopefully with enough time to get something decent developed. As part of all this setting up, I’m having to develop a unique website, as some of the projects will be for sale (although none of my own will be, only some that I will work on).

I’ve started to use GIMP instead of Adobe’s Photoshop for developing graphics for a number of reasons which I won’t go into now. I’m a big fan of Open Source Software (OSS), though occasionally I do have certain “issues” with their usability features. There are a few projects lurking around the Internet that are almost synonymous with that of commercially-released products, for example, Splashup being similar to Photoshop, and Canvas being similar to Microsoft’s Paint. Both of these are very good, especially on a usability level being extremely similar to that of the commercial counterparts that they mimic.

The problem that I find with GIMP is that its default behaviour is quite different, particularly in the areas of keyboard shortcuts. Now from the outset it is quite obvious that the user interface is different from that of commercial competition, yet I don’t see the need to switch around all of the keyboard shortcuts. I have seen scripts which allow an exact replica of Photoshop’s interface to be used in GIMP, but then many people may disagree with that.

My main issue - after all of this - is that some projects attempt to be different from big projects quite simply to “be different”. Some of the things I learnt in HCI theory was to mimic other products because it’s obvious that users will be familiar with their key usability. Sure, you can extend this to a certain degree, but completely changing every single shortcut just isn’t right. I sure won’t be doing that in some of the applications I’m working on.

In addition to this, however, I can’t see why the GIMP isn’t suitable for much development. It sure is going to take me a while to get used to all of the shortcuts, and I’m going to try to learn using the default ones as every time I reinstall it I won’t want to be applying scripts to the application just so I can use it.