antonjw

I see what you mean Rick about causality, the program would have to be pretty clever to remember what else has been done to the portion of the image that you are trying to undo individually... (possibly it goes back to the object model idea.... if the program is aware that an object has been removed, then it can re-apply everything else that has been done afterwards, to the remaining objects in the image - would be very clever and probably processor-intensive though!) As for my third paragraph, I was really thinking as I typed at that point, but being new to the program, hadn't realised that the other two buttons you have on the History are already called Rewind & Fast Forward! I was thinking that you might be able to highlight a set of history items and either rewind from the last selected to the first selected, or vice versa, fast forward from the first selected to the last selected (rather than simply to the end of the list). I was also proposing two new 'radio' buttons to differentiate between the current ones. But, anyway, this encounters the same issue with causality that you highlighted. Thanks for your explanation.

I see what you're saying Dan about memory usage, I can see how it may affect the performance of the program, which, at present, is definitely one of its strong points. It would be great to see the feature implemented for text, however; as you say, I think the need is more apparent.

I was wondering what you'd think to the idea of being able to undo, and/or, remove individual or groups of items from the history? You do have a very comprehensive history system there; I wanted to take it further by removing a box and the colour fills that I had done from my image, after doing lots more to it since, so I wanted to highlight only those items in the history and just hit the Undo button, but found that I couldn't do this, as when i click on an item in the History it automatically steps back to that point. I think it should not do that - if the user wants to do that, perhaps you should add 2 new 'radio' buttons to the history box - a 'rewind' & 'fast forward' - and use these for 'Rewind (Step back to this point)' and 'Fast Forward (Step forward to this point)'. This would allow for even more control of the history than I have actually described above, as you;d be able to 'rewind' to a specified point and then fast forward not to the end, but to another specified point.... You could even implement Rewind & Fast Forward in such a way that if the user selected multiple items in the list, then you could rewind between the last selected item and first, or fast forward in the opposite manner.

I see what the original poster is getting at. I have encountered a similar issue with text. I seem to be unable to click on a text 'object' after placing it in my image and moving on to something else - I guess because in fact, it is not remembered by the program as being an 'object', it is now just part of the layer that it was placed on. What I would like to be able to do is to click into an existing text field with the text tool, and edit the existing text - delete individual characters, change the font, etc... as if i were adding the object in the first instance. I think the original poster was imagining the same scenario with all objects - so each object created would remember the fact that, in the first instance, it is a separate object rather than just part of the overall layer, it would remember its dimensions and any other properties that are editable for that type (e.g. font size for text). Also, after placing an object onto the layer, such as a rectangle, there would be a 'select' ot 'lassoo' type line around the object - communicating to the designer that the object is still editable - so it could be stretched, for example, or its colour changed simply by changing the primary colour with the object still highlighted. Using the Move tool (or the original tool, or a new Edit Object tool?), you would be able to select that object at a later point in time and alter it in the same way as described above. Mostly for me at present, the issue is with text, it is fairly time consuming to have to keep re-doing text, especially if you have moved on to using different colours. Just a couple of cents worth. May I just say at this point that the above are just suggestions, not criticisms, and after only downloading the program this morning I think it is fantastic, very easy to use, and in some ways better than Photoshop, certainly in terms of performance. It's a joy to use, thankyou for creating it.

I'd second this one as well. Very useful if you have aligned a couple of images / text items and you then have to move them somehwere else in the image - ideally, what you want to do is merge the layers together and then move the unified layer. Also simplifies your image by reducing an unnecessary layer.

I'd back this idea. I've just used Paint.Net for the first time, excellent program and much more immediate than the GIMP (I guess especially if you are used to Photoshop in a Windows environment..). Anyway, the first thing I tried to do was to load several images at once, and found that I couldn't. It wasn't a huge problem as I figured out how to add a layer from a file, but I would have preferred to open them individually initially and re-size them. I guess the colour palette, history, layer boxes etc.. should change depending on which image you currently have active. I'm not really sure that you need tabs, not sure if it suits the interface. Maybe just another (optional) floating box to select which image you wish to work on; + the ability to switch images using the Window menu; + the abililty to just click to activate the window surrounding another image that you wish to edit.