Improve UI discoverability

[superuser-does]

The current UI may be fine for experienced users of raster editors, but for I and many others drawn to Pinta for its simplicity, lacking experience, it can be difficult to navigate. I do not know what tools do before clicking on them.
This is compounded by the fact the UI is monochrome and the icons small, which makes it hard to remember what everything does.

I believe the root of these problems is that Pinta's icon-based interface features mystery meat navigation throughout the main view.

You could work around this without actually showing a label next to every single UI item, though that too is an option.

Some initial thoughts:

• Make it easier to see what each tool is and does
  • A quick win could be to make the tooltip appear immediately on hover without having to wait for a few seconds.
• Some grouping of elements would also help, ideally with a text description under each group. This is held up by the current lack of flexibility in the UI (related: [Suggestion] Option to change where the palette is located #1117).
  • You could take inspiration from Microsoft's Ribbon UI paradigm for how to group elements, as Pinta is a program of similar complexity. I strongly recommend the 2008 presentation that discusses the ideas behind the Ribbon. I believe it might be a good fit here - at least in some of its principles, if not in exact practice.

[cameronwhite]

I agree it would be nice to have tooltips appear sooner, but unfortunately GTK doesn't seem to allow that to be configured anymore (it used to be possible but was deprecated sometime in GTK3)

Grouping together some of the selection and shape tools is definitely a good idea to think about

[james-stevens]

TBH, I find the entire new interface just terrible, very hard to use, slow to respond and everything is different from the rest of my O/S. I would prefer to be able to have the option to switch to the UI I have chosen in my window manager so this program matches all the other programs I use, instead of having to use a completely different paradigm for this one program.

And I still can't find Dark Mode - is there even a "Preferences" option anywhere???

[badcel]

@james-stevens I think it is unrealistic to expect a cross platform app to look native to each platform it runs on. How many KDE apps look like adwaita apps? It's just another platform.

Apps from big company's have their distinct look which is independent of the platform. This is more like what you are experiencing.

[james-stevens]

Too used to MacOS I guess, but yeah Chrome still disobeys quite a bit, even on MacOS - but at least Google has the market share to justify doing their own thing. Pinta used to be far more inline with the O/S look-and-feel & all the other apps I have are, except Thunderbird & Chrome.

You can still stick with convention locations for menu items & conventions for icon design, which Pointa does not. A Cog icon normally means preferences & a burger means menus

The issue was when searching through lots of nested menus trying to find a feature with a VERY unobvious name, the new style menus are VERY much harder to scan through as there's ZERO indication where the current menu sits in the full hierarchy of menus, so keeping track of where you are and which ones you've already looked at is really hard, plus the click-in-click-out just makes it all so much slower than just running the mouse down a menu & the sub-menus popping out as you go.

Try going to every menu item using the menu bar, then using the new click-in-click-out - it takes easily twice as long. Then add to that trying to remember where you are in the menus & which menus you've already looked at.

The behaviour of nested menus isn't something we can do much about directly

Errr - you could default to showing the menu bar, like I just said.

I'm not a fan of the regression to flat monochrome icons, as its not the 1980s any more.

Menu items should be grouped by functional area. All the Show/Hide items have nothing in common, so hiding them all under one menu makes no logical sense - which makes them hard to find until you know they are there. I'd take the last four items from "View" and put them in an Edit->Preferences menu, then remove the show/hide sub-menu & expand all the show/hide items directly into the Preferences menu.

Generally if ppl want menus & options to take up less real estate they put them on pop-out side-tabs, like Google Maps search. Pretty much all the on-line flow-chart & network diagram s/w does this - it means you can have large meaningful icons with more help text, but not take up image space.

I just feels its a real shame that Pinta has gone from something anybody could pick-up and use right away, to something with a horrible & awkward learning curve, to the point that the learning curve between Pinta & Gimp just isn't so great any more & Gimp is a million times more functional.

[cameronwhite]

Defaulting to showing the menu bar may happen in the future for platforms like Windows or KDE where a menubar would be more expected by users (I'm not sure what platform you're using?)

This didn't happen for Pinta 3.0.1 because the GTK4 menubar changes did not have wide testing on various Linux distros after #781 was merged, so it would have been a risky change to make for a minor version

[james-stevens]

I use XFCE in Xubuntu - it can imitate various platforms, inc Mac - but I have it looking vaguely like Win7 🤣

I looked around a few apps yesterday. A lot use their own widget libraries (Thunderbird, Chrome), a lot use their platform's widgets (KDE, GTK), and a lot use my platform's ones. Mostly, the more popular the app, the most likely it is to NOT use the platform widgets.

Obv KDE & GTK platform specific apps, like Kdenlive, use the widgets from their native platform, but mostly that's fine cos they have a slightly different look & animation, but mostly they are much the same.

The GTK4 widgets are OK, but I do think they need to be careful to not deviate too far from accepted norms - and I think their menu implementation def falls into that category.

Kinda interesting that Pinta has gone for a VERY monochrome look, but the default GTK4 look is quite colourful with "OK" & "Cancel" noticeable different colours from the surrounding UI. In some ways similar to the github look & feel.

I use a mix of github & old twitter UI for this site -> https://nameshake.net (demo of a domain name registrar, I was working on) - obv no doubt it can be improved. Engineers dong UIs is always a problem area!!!

The thing about having a consistent look & feel is it reduces the learning curve & makes the app easier to just pick-up & use. This is prob more important for websites trying to sell stuff than apps, but its still nice to have.

[Ultrabenosaurus]

Show/Hide -> Menu Bar to show a menu bar

Oh, thank the gods. I don't do a lot of image editing, but Pinta has been my go-to since I moved to Linux full-time several years ago, and the menu system of the new UI has been driving me mad since it landed. It's horrendously slow, very unintuitive, and completely different from basically every other piece of software I have ever used across Windows and Linux so it's really jarring whenever I open Pinta. It's very anti-user-friendly.

The lack of a Preferences option lead me to believe I was stuck with it, having somehow never clicked on Show/Hide. Honestly, if I actually did image editing more than once or twice a week for quickly marking up screenshots, I would have abandoned Pinta within days of the new UI purely because of the menus being, essentially, broken.

Please, revert back to proper menus by default, and make this horrible newfangled design a user option instead.