Exactly, brainstorming is healthy as long as the discussion stays healthy.
1 Like
Just in case you didn’t know about it, take a look to this PR https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/3648
I think that they did a great job, (really great!) and address some of your annoyances, there are also some common points with your proposal, but with different approach.
1 Like
You haven’t said one word about a design.
If you are taking a position against it which you obviously are and that’s perfectly ok, then by all means explain the issues you see with it objectively.
You keep saying that I that I don’t know what I’m talking about but I’ve done my best to explain the problem and present a potential solution as clearly as possible. Keep in mind that English is only my second language too.
On the other hand you have done nothing to point out the flaws in my proposal or to defend the current workflow.
Instead you are focusing on me personally. I don’t know why are you doing that. Please attack my proposal or idea, not me. What have I done wrong?
I could go into how many images I shoot in a year and what kind of work I do and quote bigger or smaller numbers than you did but how is that gonna help my idea? I’m not trying to argue it into existence. I’m seeing a problem, I’m offering a design, I’m checking with the community and in the end it may come up to being nothing. And that’s fine, I’ve would have given it my best to contribute and who is to say someone else won’t get inspired by it later and create even better proposal then this?
At the moment that’s not an option for me. I can do many things including code but C is not one of them. But who is to say I won’t do that in the future.
Until then I’m doing my best this way. I’ll gladly share all my ideas publicly and provide many more mockups or create a standard svg components for mockups as these ones are just modified screenshots.
Don’t see my proposals and posts as some sort of attack or disrespect towards currently implemented UI and workflows. I’m very grateful for those and those work fine. I’m just offering my personal opinions on how I personally think it could be improved. And in order to not be just my personal opinion, I’m sharing it with the community so everyone can have their say and then my personal opinions have a potential to become community opinions.
That’s why I will never have a perfectly described feature proposal on my first post like you want. Because it can never be. Because in order to get to that point I feel like the right way is to share it early and consider opinions of others. Without that, my proposal has no chance anyway.
Provide feedback on the mockups here, I’d value that very much. However, for film roll measuring contest I’d rather you DM me 
I mean, that’s a fair point but you already know I don’t have the abilities to do that. I mean I could do it as an interactive web based mockup but what good would that do?
That’s a great story, it may inspire me to really commit to darktable instead of just looking for “flaws”. But like I said, until I’m able to do code contributions I’m happy to look for anything that might be “flawed” and offer my suggestions, not that my suggestions should be considered valuable. I’m not some world famous photographer. But maybe some dev or community member will find it useful.
That’s the entire point of sharing something. It’s not a corporate environment where I have to stay up 3 nights in row to tailor a proposal for the board or a client. Mind you, there is a limited number of people there. In this case that kind of approach would be very difficult.
3 Likes
I haven’t seen a design. I’ve seen a couple of ideas and a couple of pictures.
I’ve already stated my position.
Never said that. I don’t know if you know what you are talking about or not. Several posts ago I asked if someone could tell me what the purpose of this thread was, but didn’t get an answer. So now I’m trying to figure out if you’re a new user that doesn’t understand the interface, an intermediate user that understands some of the interface but not all, an experienced user that understands the ins and outs of the interface and has found a problem or just some random person that wants change for the sake of change.
I described my workflow, giving examples, and stating how simple it was. On the other hand:
Because I’m trying to figure out how to answer you. I try and tailor my responses to your darktable experience level. For example it serves no purpose for me to talk about the pipelilne if you have no idea what it is.
I don’t know that. I don’t know anything about you. As I said, I’m trying to figure out who you are so that I can respond appropriately.
So now we’re back to is your perception of a “flaw” a misunderstanding of darktable and how it works or a defect with the code and/or design?
The point of my story and Aurelien’s was that you are the only one that can implement what’s in your head. Even if you clearly state your ideas and provide a design document whoever implements it would do it differently than what you have imagined. The other point is that if you’re not willing to put some of your time into implementing an idea then nobody else may think it’s worthwhile.
2 Likes
Im also lost and cant you just click a second time on a tab to see all the modules now as it stands so why all this complexity??
1 Like
How about this. A good step already would be to not make module order be affected by the pipeline in other groups except currently available active modules group.
The rest should be sorted alphabetically because you don’t see all the modules there anyway so you’ll note change the module order there.
This already would be a small feature but a great usability improvement.
With that statement, you just show that you really don’t understand how modules in darktable really works. This good step is just not possible or that will just break how darktable pipeline works, so will break darktable. No more! I suggest you here to learn better pipeline and module order in darktable, for example to check related part in the manual and 3.0 article in darktable.org blog.
You propose to sort alphabetically and that just what the new module manager does for adding modules in tabs, and also what you can have by just made a right click in any tab modules to quickly add a module. We can’t sort alphabetically modules elsewhere as the order in tab is and could be nothing else than pipeline order. Here that works like layers in software like Gimp or Photoshop. And changing layers order change how the image is processed.
So your small feature would just be a major regression and not a great usability improvement.
2 Likes
I disagree, for me it would be anything but an improvement.
As it is now, I basically work my way up from the bottom when processing an image. Having the modules in alphabetical order would disrupt that and force me to move up and down in the list all the time. Not my preferred way. (Note that I have the modules I commonly available in the base group). Even if I wanted a different order, it would most certainly not be alphabetically.
Modules I use less often are either not visible in any of the standard groups, or the list is short enough that the order isn’t really important (especially when I rely on recognising what a module does from the name, as opposed to knowing the name when looking for the wanted effect).
Alphabetical order is fine for quickly finding an item in a long list (log complexity vs linear), in a short list the advantage is negligable, and the disadvantage (for me) would be rather large.
3 Likes
I don’t see the point of having a bunch of unactive modules being sorted in the order by which they appear in the pipeline. I’m sorry but I really don’t. Show me any other software that does that. And with pipeline being flexible, I see even lesser point to have the current order of the unactive modules.
Once you activate the module it should appear in the correct place in the pipeline (with the pipeline in the active modules tab still being flexible). But for browsing, this is just ridiculous imho.
UI should conform to the users not to the app, that would be API. A user needs to browse those modules etc, not an app and then we make it easier for the app.
it doesn’t help to point on other software that doesn’t follow darktables internal design. If you need the way other software does the stuff darktable does its way, then you’d better use these.
of course you can use a green pen with red ink to paint a red line, but don’t expect a green pen with green ink to do the same …
Don’t blame @Nilvus . What he is doing here may not be the 1 to 1 comparison, since Gimp layers aren’t DT modules and like you said “don’t follow darktable’s internal design”, but it is proper nonetheless. For the purpose of comparison imo you can and even should always be looking at other comparable software (when developing/designing software).
It should be a personal obligation to do the research and take advantage of looking at how somebody else did it before one begins the implementation. If one leaves that step out then one robs himself of that knowledge and can potentially develop a feature just to find out later that another software has had a more elegant solution all along but one couldn’t be bothered to take a look at it before starting the implementation.
Always have a look at what others are doing first. It absolutely helps.
It’s all about prioritizing: other hides internal processing sequences from the user, darktable doesn’t. You get maximum transparency on the sequence the modules are applied, you even can change this. There aren’t a lot of comparable tools around giving the same amount of control.
So the result of looking at other software ist to do it in a different way.
4 Likes
This makes much more sense to your point and it is a thing to keep in mind. That said, nowhere did I ever wanted to sacrifice any part of that transparency, flexibility or power.
What I’m “advocating” is for the removal of the unneeded and confusing, redundant, repeating and slow UI.
Redundancy and repetition in itself arent a problem, if it means that a module is available where you need it and look for it.
And yes, the dt interface is concfusing when you just start using the program. But that goes for a lot of complicated software (I never managed to make sense of rawtherapee, but I didn’t spend time on it either).
Why don’t you start working with the interface (including customising it to your needs), instead of assuming the devs just pulled something out of their hats with no reference to what has been done by others? I’m pretty sure the devs use or have used other photo editing software before starting on dt.
I know I’m going to annoy you now. But, probably not intentionally, you come across as very opinionated and arrogant, in this thread and in others; both in your assumptions and in how you react to questions/criticism.
And wrt the “bunch of unactive modules” in your earlier reply, I don’t have that: my base tab has the modules I use very regularly, so most of these are active for every image. That’s the beauty of customisation: the devs cannot predict which modules you want or need to use for your images, but give you an easy way to adapt the interface to your needs (of course within the basic philosophy of the program. If you cannot work within that, perhaps you need a different program).
3 Likes
Not to me he doesn’t. Not at all.
6 Likes
Well, a little bit. And just because you are reviewing my personality instead of my proposal. Which makes no sense to me. Then again, I might be wrong. Maybe you only like proposals from certain kinds of people and I might need to present myself differently in order for the proposal to be judged objectively. It’s a sad truth but we’re all human and I understand that.
We’ll ofc course I’m opinionated. All I’m doing here is literally presenting my opinions based on my experience and observations. Do you expect anything else in this kind of thread?
I think what you are construing as being very arrogant is just me presenting a design opinion that you don’t like. And if you don’t agree with me, you’d like me to agree with you to be polite. The thing is, I can’t do that if I’m not convinced, just like you can’t and shouldn’t.
That said, I might be wrong in my assessment and if you really consider me arrogant or rude, I’d love for you to elaborate more on that to me via DMs in order to not stray off topic here. I’d love for you to prove it to me or explain it to me so that I might consider changing some of my behavior. Also be honest, you don’t have to sugar coat it, but do it respectfully. We are all gentleman here, aren’t we?
Like, I’m not saying that my communication is perfect, but try to understand that I’m doing the best I can (or I know how) to convey my thoughts, ideas etc. to you in a concise and respectful manner. I don’t know how else to do it. How can I be more polite then this? Help me understand that particular point if you’d like. You might be surprised by this but I’m very interested in what my flaws are and I’m always, always willing to change after a person gives me an argument that just destroys me haha.
3 Likes
Nope, quite a few woman around too 
I think this discussion could improve quite a bit, if everyone just assumed the best possible intentions from all participants - regardless of the quality and alignement with ones own opinions of the different statements.
2 Likes
Maybe I misunderstood @KristijanZic in his original proposal (a mockup or work-in-progress thing), but he doesn’t want to get rid of control, he wants to have a different approach to accessing that control.
First I don’t think this is true, he suggested a certain UI-behaviour which could be distinct from the actual pipeline behavior as he referred to ‘other groups’. I read that as a list of inactive modules could be in alphabetical order. Second: in order to suggest a ‘better UI’ you do not have to know how and why the UI that he wants to improve came to be. Why? If the logic in which the modules are presented to an uninformed user is important, but doesn’t get communicated…that already qualifies as something that could be improved upon. Or am I missing something?
In general I don’t know what to think of this discussion. It started out quite openminded and turned an interesting direction at some point. Improving the UI will be a constant endeavour with many many contributions. Hearing suggestions and talking about them should not be met with…this. On top of that, people were actually not just talking about stuff, they made quite good mockups to convey their ideas. And still someone pulled out the good old ‘learn to code it yourself then we can talk about it’, which is, well, i really understand where this ‘‘argument’’ comes from, but it’s just not good enough to be an argument.
I really like @Soupy mockup with pipeline-adjust-mask and a search bar for modules.
I will probably be able to adapt to any user-interface, no matter what, but my personal usage can adapt is not the reference.
4 Likes
I know, I’m sorry. It was just such a “cinematic” thing to say
This kind of constructive brainstorming is what I expect every time I do a discussion like this.