(In reply to comment #0)
> TrakEM2 in the current form is not usable at all.  You have to study the manual
> and get introductions for as basic functions as "get a bunch of images and
> register them".
> 

It's fair enough to require users to read the the manual to understand how things work.  Take a random piece of software and try to use it the way you did, without knowing it, ignoring any documentation and using the most alien platform available (e.g. vim on an iPhone).  Anyway---I totally agree that there is room for improvement on both sides, TrakEM2 as well as the user in front of it.  Take into account that the manual is comprehensive and very detailed.
 
> TrakEM2 needs its own menubar.  It is not acceptable that you need to open a
> context menu, especially when that might not be trivial on certain platforms
> due to the overuse of magic modifier/mouse button combinations.  Requiring a
> 3-button mouse is really asking for this link:
> http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?BlameTheRightThing.
> 

3-button mouses are cheap and available for any platform.  The standard user has five fingers and should be able to make use of them.

> The menu needs to be reworked in a major way.  For example, it is not good that
> there are >5 options how to import one or more images, but the one single
> operation most new users are going to need is missing: "just import these
> images, will you?".
> 

Drag the images from a graphical file browser into the display canvas, select them (CTRL+A) and right click "montage".  For this very neat experience, a graphical file browser is required which is the default situation for all major OS distributions.

> Another example where the menu is severely broken is that it is not organized
> at all.  Some functions are in submenus, some are not, and the structure and
> naming is not intuitive.  For example, it took me(!) a while to understand that
> what I want is called "Montage", not "Align>Selected images".  I would have
> understood "Register>Selected images", too.  But "Montage"?  I thought I'd have
> to specify the coordinates for that myself.
> 

This is not completely wrong, but `montage' is a natural choice too and, for you, is just overloaded by your ImageJ/ImageMagick experience.

> Doing a montage should automatically enlarge the canvas, it is not nice at all
> to require the user to know to go to the context menu, submenu Display, and do
> the "automatic" enlarging.
> 

True.

> Clicking on "Montage" without any selected images should automatically assume
> all images to be selected.
> 

True.

> This is just a first quick impression of a _developer_.  So I must assume that
> many, many more changes are necessary before TrakEM2 is usable for people who
> do not happen to develop TrakEM2 themselves.
> 

It seems to be usable already for many people who did read the respective parts of the manual.  Typically, I found that end-users seem to be much more comfortable with it than developers like you or me.

It is correct that the user-experience of TrakEM2 needs improvement but this goal is hard to achieve with currently only 1.5 people looking at this topic in their spare time.  There are many extremely neat usability features available in the tool that you just do not know about.  It's a bit like blender in that perspective...

And now, let's get less emotional about things that should be discussed in pragmatic rational tone and collect some good suggestions :)

What you said about manuals is true for very complicated software.  But not for the first steps of TrakEM2.  If I know that TrakEM2 is meant to register a lot of images it should not be made that hard to do exactly that.  Because that is what most users look for in TrakEM2.

So, as for reading the manual, and for that matter, the 3-button mouse, and the emotional side, let me post that important link again, as I fear it has been lost in my too-long bug report: http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?BlameTheRightThing

Added "Align / Montage.*" menu entries to the right-click menu.

For non-computer-scientists, "register" means "to sign up in a class" or if southern european, then to "inspect and search" something. So "Align" and "Montage" are less meaning-overloaded words.
Adding the prefix word "automatic" to align or montage doesn't add much information.
I concur with Saalfeld in his observation that biologists tend to understand and to like TrakEM2 a lot more than computer scientists. Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering my own background.