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I'm definitely not a Mac 'fanboy' but the review seems undoubtedly slanted against Mac. He also claims:

... you'd think that it would know when 512MB of RAM isn't enough. ... only one corporation with blood on its hands ... we marvel at the fact that ... it would conscionably sell a computer that it knew would not perform up to par and would be virtually unusable under any kind of duress.

"Virtually unusable" with 512MB RAM? I have one of the first Mac Minis with only a meagre 256MB RAM, and I use it all the time for many kinds of tasks and actually pretty seldom run into any performance problems. Yet with horrendously over-dramatized hyperbole he states Apple has "blood on its hands" for releasing a machine with "only" 512MB RAM?

Either he is a serious power-user with intensive day-to-day tasks (in which case his criticism has no relevance for the man on the street), or he is outright lying.

He also criticizes that its X support is not great. But Windows comes with all of absolutely no X support!? He also points out that if you want to do serious photo-editing you need to pay for Photoshop - gee, I didn't know the Windows version of Photoshop was free. And there is GIMP for Mac so he can't complain that its because Photoshop is the only option or something.

Either the reviewer is trolling for ad-views for his website, or he is a corporate shill for MS, or he is biased and using different sets of standards to evaluate the Mac vs. (one can only presume) Windows.

You could try Open Office, it's an Open Source alternative to grapics-editing/word-processing. The Gimp is a powerful little graphics editor that FP notes will do CMYK. You can also check out audacity for audio editing.

Note: these afromentioned products are usually considered mediocre by some, but the good things are that these products are not owned by a vendor-lockin, DRM entrenched, royalty grubbing, patent whoring, corporation. They are freely available, free to copy, free to use, and free to be developed by anyone in the world. You can even write, or contribute to, the code yourself if you are so inclined. A model based on worldwide collaboration is simply better than one developed behind closed windows.

The management and pricing systems of proprietary software is unprincipled. The ethics and
support methods are abhorrent, un-reliable and un-reasonable. The entire system reeks of snake-oil. These things may not be relavant to you, and I would complain some more, but I've run out of retorts. If you don't like what I've said, maybe go do a bittorrent search for porn and your mom. It's there, trust me.

Photoshop --> GIMP http://gimp.org/
Illustrator --> Inkscape http://inkscape.org/
InDesign --> Scribus http://www.scribus.net/
GoLive --> Nvu http://www.nvu.com/

I'll let the others here argue/bash/whine/praise each app.

Free Alternatives:

Photoshop -> Gimp
Illustrator -> Inkscape
InDesign -> Scribus
Web Design -> Kompozer, which is a bugfix release of Nvu (there's actually a lot of these, I've also heard Microsoft Visual Web Dev Express, which has a lot of praise from various people)

Not sure of a good PDF editor, but it looks like this claims to do the trick (though i'm sure is nowhere near the level of Acrobat Pro): PDFEdit. Be warned it looks like it's a cygwin port to windows...

I can't guarantee that those will all live up to your expectations, but I am fairly familiar with most of that software, and it certainly gets the job done.

GIMP
and
CMYK support for The GIMP

The Gimp is one of the best image manipulators out there. It has drawbacks of not having the user-base of Photo$hop, but it is highly adjustable and modifiable to fit most needs. Plus it's free, and open-sourced.

Yeah, pirated software is really appropriate for education....

How 'bout GIMP?

I did look at her MySpace page, it seems that there was a petition asking Gov. Schwarzenegger to pardon her so she won't have to go to jail, and apparently Paris herself decided to thank the individual involved by posting a "thank-you" on her page. She misspelled "sign", when asking people to "sign" the petition.

It's gone now, the MySpace page is a horrible excuse for a web page, someone needs to clean up the page, perhaps by cutting off the public's right to post there, just leaving posts cleared by a kind and caring webmaster that can turn the page into something not so out-of-control.

With so many talented webmaster types here at Slashdot, I'm sure some of you would like to somehow contact Ms. Hilton, offering your help in her time of need.

I probably could work the assignment in somehow, but I'll go ahead and let some of you cut in line ahead of me, being the nice fellow that I am.

I do play with GIMP, and I have a "Wallpaper Control Center" application in my Knoppix remaster that has a section where one can, at the touch of a button, download and install a desktop wallpaper directly from my rapidweather.com/images directory. One of them is a nice picture of Paris Hilton. I do it that way so I can change the "downloadable" wallpapers, all the others are in the CD, and are fixed.
Check the "screenshots" link, below for a screenshot of the "Wallpaper Control Center".

The application is basically for managing right clicked web images for wallpaper purposes, sizing them to a particular desktop, and saving them for future use, within a "livecd linux" environment. If the user downloads too many images and tries to apply one, the application will take notice and guide the user through a fix, where extra images are easily moved from the active "desktop wallpaper" area, where they can be managed. Almost impossible to fowl it up without the application asking questions, and arranging for fixes. Very easy to do, so if one comes across a batch of web images that you want for your desktop, download all you want, then start the control center by clicking on the IceWM toolbar icon. Much faster processing of these downloaded images than with KDE, for instance.
Here is the url for the Paris wallpaper image:

http://www.rapidweather.com/images/sample6.jpg

I can't link to it here, you'll get a Forbidden error, but you may copy the link and go there directly in your browser. To see the others, enter "sample1.jpg, etc. (There are six 1024x768 images, all produced using GIMP)

       

Not only necessary for lawsuit avoidance, but also necessary for choice. The more we paid in license fees, the more I began to advocate free software.
Example: Everybody(small 25user office) wanted to be able to make PDFs. Instead of buying Acrobat Standard(300x25=$7500), I installed PDFCreator or CutePDF writer or PDF Split-and-merge. When they asked for Photoshop(650x25=$16,250), I installed The GIMP. I'm not saying these free products are better in EVERY way, but they got the job done and made me look good. It's an eye-opener for end-users when they realize that there is so much good free software out there. Standing there and spouting off about how great Linux is won't get you anywhere - delivering results like this will.

This really paves the way for desktop Linux. I'm always hearing horror-stories about the BSA marching in with a search warrant and seizing your servers and half your desktops, as evidence. That could ruin your whole day.

gtk+ runs on win32 and Mac OS X quartz.
so it's really as simple as: QT, or gtk+ . If you like c++ then gtkmm or qt. There are also java and c# bindings.

I have not actually seen what is on their CD, but there are some examples of free programs, most of which, have already been mentioned, that are available for both Windows and Linux.

• Firefox Web browser
• Thunderbird full-featured email program
• GIMP Image Manipulation Program
• ImageMagick software suite for creating, editing, and composing bitmap images
• Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor
• ClamWin free antivirus scanner for Windows
• 7-Zip file archiver
• Celestia space simulater that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions
• OpenOffice office suite
• Scribus professional page layout program
• AbiWord word processing program
• Gnumeric spreadsheet
• LyX Document Processor
• Gaim multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client
• Audacity Sound Editor
• Blender the advanced 3D modeling program capable of producing high quality animations
• VLC - the cross-platform media player and streaming server
• Nvu complete Web Authoring System

My stepson is a dyed in the wool, and school trained PSer, and I TOTALY blew him away by doing everything he could do in phototshop faster in GIMP; then for an encore I did everything faster than he could in photoshop. The real secret to both is learning the keyboard shortcuts, not the click-streams, the shortcuts are the same, the click-streams are different.

Oh, GIMP can do 24 bit colour channels? If not it can't do everything Photoshop can do. And last I heard it couldn't even do 16 bit colour channels. Oh, it's 24 bits total not 24 bits per channel.

For many people (maybe even for you), Open Office is more than good enough for what they do.

For others (maybe even for you), the fact that Open<->MS office translations not being perfect can ruin your day -- but whether or not that's the case, is going to be something that you're gonna have to figure out on your own.

Things that I can suggest (in no particular order):

• If you mostly generate and use documents internally then OO is likely to be just fine for you.
• If you have a boatload of specialized (VB) macros that are critical to your workload, you might have to have to (at the least) hire someone for a bit to do the translation for you. This may also be a reason to use the Novell extensions.
• If you have really precise needs for formatting and spacing, and do your document formatting in the 'dumb' way (hard-code line ends, and page ends, and use spaces where you should be using tab stops, etc., etc., etc., then moving to OO might hurt your brain.
• If your documents are done relatively sanely, and you're not going to have a fit if one page has 3 words that spill over to the next page in OO where it didn't in MSO then OO is probably a great fit for you.
• Convincing your normal correspondents to install a copy of OO, rather than always bouncing back and forth between OO and MSO formats will make your life easier.
• For the previous point, you might want to burn yourself a handful (or a crate full, depending on the size of your business) of OO install CDs.
  ... While you're at it, you might also want to includes copies of things like Gimp and Firefox, and any other Free software you'd like to see other people use.
• Given that OO is more OS agnostic than it's MS alternate, and it's easier to get mission critical fixes done (i.e. you can hire someone to do them for you) you might find that OO is your better choice in the long term, even if you determine that you could have some short-term problems with it.

Since Gimp is an image manipulation program and not a painting program it doesn't include tools to draw shapes like squares and circles.

GIMP is great until you need to, say, draw a straight line. Then you get bounced around their website to a highly sarcastic tutorial that makes it sound like ANY moron should know their weird shift-clicking technique with no explanation. And then OSS people say it's unfair that they have a rep for not being "user-friendly." /rant

I don't know what project the parent post was refering to, but it is not only GIMP (with some interesting ideas) that got rejected.

Other projects that were not selected include interesting improvements to the desktop infrastructure, such as GStreamer (list of ideas) or Avahi (list of ideas).

I don't know what project the parent post was refering to, but it is not only GIMP (with some interesting ideas) that got rejected.

Other projects that were not selected include interesting improvements to the desktop infrastructure, such as GStreamer (list of ideas) or Avahi (list of ideas).

The author states that batch scripting for repetitive tasks which is available in Photoshop is not present in the GIMP. That's just not true. There's a aimple batch mode and a whole lot more with the ability to use Perl and Scheme for scripting. Photoshop's batchmode pales by comparison for power users.

The author states that batch scripting for repetitive tasks which is available in Photoshop is not present in the GIMP. That's just not true. There's a aimple batch mode and a whole lot more with the ability to use Perl and Scheme for scripting. Photoshop's batchmode pales by comparison for power users.

Seems like it will be an interesting experiment in software as a service, but media editing seems to be a bad fit for the "software as an online service" model due to the high bandwidth & processing demands. The math has to be done either on the user's end (which would be bad for folks with low spec systems, who i see as the primary target for this business model) or on Adobe's systems (which will cost them money, decreasing their bottom line). Anyone with experience in the field have any compelling reasons why one would chose to use adobe's online photoshop rather than just using picasa or gimp?

Some thoughts from a parent of two children. One, that child should be in a bed, not a crib. Two, just the thought of one's child picking up a set of car keys is chilling on to many levels to discus here. Three, who ever GIMP'ed or Blender'ed the surfing scene should look at surfers surfing, and do that part of the commercial over. Overall, coooooooooool surfing commercial; But I will stay with my Discovery Series II.

Cheers Mate

"I LOVE, MY CAR" - A. Schwarzenegger

But still, the $100 laptop isn't out yet, and won't be priced at $100 for years. For now, maybe schools could hand out USB sticks with, say, SLAX (bonus: modular = easily expandable, without having to re-burn a whole CD) on them, maybe along with FireFox 2 (nobody would care if they used IceWeasel instead), GAIM 2 beta, amaroK 1.4.5, etc... I could help. My school's IT staff will listen to me. I tried getting them to switch to the GIMP (unsuccessfully), maybe I could bounce that idea off them. SLAX has a future. Not that other USB-based distros (i.e. MCNLive) don't...

I'm a big fan of http://plone.org/ which is a CMS that sits on top of the http://www.zope.org/ application server. All of which is OSS. I can't speak to OSS CRM but others here have. There are plenty of fantastic server side developer productivity boosting OSS software out there.

• Try http://jakarta.apache.org/ for lots of Java libraries.
• I find http://www.springframework.org/ is a great framework extension for Java.
• I like spring better, but http://www.hibernate.org/ provides an ORM for both Java and .NET developers.
• If you are working in Perl, then http://www.cpan.org/ is the place for you.

When it comes to client side software there is a huge amount of great OSS apps.

• I believe that http://sourceforge.net/projects/ganttproject/ is great for project management.
• I have used http://sourceforge.net/projects/freemind/ for years and know it to be a great mind mapping tool.
• I believe that http://live.gnome.org/Dia/ is a great diagramming tool.
• I'm a big fan of http://www.umlet.com/ and find it to be very useful for creating UML diagrams.
• I switched from sodipodi to http://www.inkscape.org/ which is fantastic for drawing vector images.
• I am also a big fan of http://www.gimp.org/ which is used to draw raster images.

I have used all of these projects for years and would most definitely label them as quality, winner OSS.

• flpsed
• PDF Edit
• KWord
• Scribus
• Inkscape
• GIMP
• pdftk
• Jarnal
• Multivalent

If the comics that Microsoft comes out with are not funny enough perhaps other people should try to create their own more amusing alternative comic advertisements. They could be done in a style that is somewhat similar to the comics that Microsoft hands out. They could be a spoof of the Microsoft comics. Of course when doing a spoof they should probably check how to best do that legally.

The comic might start out with an employee of some unmentioned software company lecturing some children about how using pirated software is stealing. He would then ask the children what they would do if they owned a computer and WGA discovered discovered that their were not using a genuine version of Windows Vista and would only let them connect to the Internet for one hour at a time. A young boy might then raise his hand, and say "one hour would be just enough time to download a free copy of Ubuntu Linux. I could stay legal by using free GPL licensed software instead." A young girl might then raise her hand and say something like this. "There are hundreds of properly licenced free Linux programs that you could then easily dowload and easily installed using Synaptic (with a screenshot of Synaptic in the background). It is a complete alternative ecosystem of free GPL software." The first boy might then add that "their is also tons of properly licensed free GPL software for Windows users too. In the final frame of the comic another resposible adult might give this final moral advice (as the disapproving exasperated software company employee looks on). "Don't be a software pirate, if you can't afford to pay for commercial software use the free properly licensed GPL software instead."

Underneath the comic strip it might metion that this comic strip was created with the following properly licensed free software:

• Gimp
• Inkscape
• Scribus

Near the bottom of the comic strip there might also be something about this comic strip having been released under the Creative Commons license. "So feel free copy make copies of this comic stip and share them with your friends at school."

Don't be a software pirate, stay legal and properly licensed by using the various free open source GPL licensed programs instead that are also available in Windows versions. Many of the best free GPL licensed open source programs which have been developed for Linux users have also been released in Windows versions. Not everyone is ready yet to move from Windows to a free GPL licensed alternative such as Ubuntu Linux. For them, a first step to freedom would be to keep on using a properly licensed copy of Windows, but to start using the various free GPL licensed alternatives to their various favorite programs. Someday, if they decide to move to a totally free operating system such as Linux they will then be able to use the Linux versions of those same programs. There is now an amazingly large complete alternative free software ecosystem of free GPL licenced software legally available for free to everyone.

Here are just a few examples of free (mostly GPL licensed) programs which are also available in Windows versions:

• OpenOffice the free office suite
• Mozilla Firefox web browser
• Thunderbird email program
• Clamwin free antivirus
• Gimp image mainpulation program for photo retouching and image composition
• ImageMagick software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images
• Inkscape open source scalable vector graphics editor
• PuTTY: A Free Telnet/SSH Client
• FTP client and server
• 7-Zip file archiver which can handle compression formats such as 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
• Scribus open source page layout application
• AbiWord the free word processing program
• Gnumeric the free spreadsheet program
• Stellarium free open source planetarium
• Celestia free space simulation and space exploration program

First we'll toss in one some people will kick and scream about: Graphic Design. Yes, I know all about the Gimp.

I disagree.

Not about the GIMP; for production work on raster images it doesn't make sense to leave the known comforts of PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro for a FOSS equivalent that might do the job as well, but offers no significant improvements. Yet tomorrow's graphics designers are currently on student budgets and are learning The GIMP because of that— something that should be making Adobe nervous about tomorrow's profits.

But Blender and POV-Ray are major presences in animation and ray tracing work: many of the younger people working in the field cut their teeth on these, and still use them for exploring some concepts. Inkscape has compatibility benefits over Illustrator and is beginning to attract commercial use for that reason, even though it is a long way from its v1.0. Scribus is poised to shoulder its way into first tier desk top publishing.

FOSS has become majorily important in the graphics sector.

I don't know anything about audio mixers. Maybe the value of 1 kazillion is closer to 10 than to 8. Maybe FOSS products like Audacity are making significant inroads among the independent bands. I've no idea.

I know nothing about games, either. I know a lot of tomorrow's animators and game designers are developing their techniques with Blender and POV-Ray— I expect that they will continue to use these to some degree when they get paying jobs.

1. Download GIMP
2. ???
3. Profit!!

There is no longer a necessity to use photoshop or other commercial/proprietary programs. I switched to using only Free Software in my webdesign company almost two years ago, and though I spent some weeks in transition learning the new software, I now work a lot more efficiently. This is partly thanks to CLI applications like ImageMagick, but I also find that for most work, the FOSS counterparts of Adobe's applications are much more efficient to use; they are a lot faster, handles larger files, are not cluttered up with un-needed functionality, and are more easily customized. Another advantage of using FOSS is that a lot of proprietary software tends to lead the user towards a more or less predefined goal as to how the final output should look, resulting in, amongst other things, a lot of templatish pages on the web.

My recommended line of design tools are:

GIMP (Who needs Photoshop?)
Krita (For those rare moments when CMYK are required)
Inkscape (For vector graphics and experimenting with layout)
Quanta (For making the actual webpages)
Scribus (For making professional PDF's)

Unfortunately, there are no FOSS applications able to make flash files like Flash does, but my needs have been well served by SWF Tools and OpenOffice.org's ability to export presentations to swf, and I expect to see some great development in this area now that Adobe has opened its action script engine.

What else would I use to edit, crop and save screen shots when I'm writing documentation?

The Gimp

Define "good". gaim does a fine job for me with AOL, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, and Google IM services (as well as IRC and non-Google Jabber servers). I believe the video/audio support is still not present, but for text purposes, it's fine.

5) Greeting card software (anything good on the linux end?)

Doubtful for straight up specialized software. However, one with an artistic bent might appreciate trying out the suite of GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, and Scribus. If all he wants to do is fill in templates, though, it will be inadequate. If he's feeling really generous, though, he could potentially develop a template and submit it for inclusion at Inkscape or Scribus, and maybe add some more stuff to Open ClipArt to help others as well.

Best of all, you can get him hooked prior to hitting Linux, because everything I just named has a Windows version.

I'm gonna go back to coding my own Final Fantasy VI clone

Got it posted anywhere? :-)

If you think that commercial renderers are amazing, what I've found is that the free software world is even more-so. For example, projects such as Blender and Cinelerra are amazing in their capabilities. Even with such software as the GIMP you can do rather wicked things.

Now stepping into the arena of game creation, I'm becoming increasingly impressed with projects such as OGRE 3d, which unfortunately lacks somewhat in samples/documentation (it's a little hard to get started as the documentation IMHO starts off in a little after the starting line), but otherwise is very powerful and seems to a very good building-block for big things.

"I find your lack of vision disturbing."

FTA:
Incidentally, few Cathedral-style projects suffer from lack of vision: those that do simply die off and are never heard from again. Bazaar-style development allows projects to be in a zombie state for long periods of time, where it is vastly expensive for a Cathedral-style project to do the same.

Reminds me of the Gegls project to re-invent the internals of the Gimp. Lots of hot air^H^H^H^H design initially, goes dead for X years, then just recently Kolas starts hacking on it.

By the way I just found this on the web.. a little outdated, but fairly interesting and promising:

OpenUsability Sponsored Student Project: GIMP

OpenUsability is proud to announce the offering of a series of sponsored student projects. As the first project, the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) has been chosen. We are looking for a student in usability or interaction architecture who wants to work on designing the user interface for the next generation of GIMP.

If you are a student of usability, user-interface or interaction design and want to enrich your education with a hands-on experience don't hesistate to apply:

http://www.openusability.org/studentprojects
http://openusability.org/projects/gimp/
http://www.gimp.org/announcements/open-usability-g imp.html

The Gimp can also display (instructions) images to simulate the various forms of colorblindness (though in that case you would have to do a static screen capture of your stuff). For much more ./ style prattling on developing for colorblindness, an ask ./ item was posted on this topic a while back.

If you're really good, hack your xorg.conf to simulate colorblindness. But don't ask me how to do it.

it's not really 'a video', but here:
http://pippin.gimp.org/tmp/search-menu.gif

Probably. There's been a GTK+ for Windows that doesn't depend on X11 for several years, so it's not like it isn't possible.

Please mod parent up. Please use the right tool for the right job. If all you want to do is create circles stick with MSPaint or MSOffice/OpenOffice or Inkscape (highly recommended). If you want to do Photoshop stuff, use GIMP. If you want to disagree - fine. If you want to understand see http://gimp.org/about/ and read the threads about what the developers were trying to accomplish. Drawing circles was never on the list. Peace

Moving multiple arbitrarily named and arbitrarily chosen files from one folder to the next (or other similar action).

xtree managed that in the 1980s

Altering the arrangement of a screen.

And that.

Anything having to do with graphic design.

I already addressed that

I use photoshop.

You have my sympathies. Perhaps you're not aware that you don't need a gui to use a solid graphics tool. See GIMP's scripting where you can do everything you'd normally do from a GUI, without the overhead.

The GNU project adopted Scheme (with the Guile interpreter) as its official scripting language. Applications are not meant to be written in Scheme, but applications can expose functionality to the user through a Scheme interface. That is to say, plugins for extensible applications could be written in Scheme. The Gimp is one of the most noteworthy applications with a Scheme interface, and much of the lower-level functionality of GNU Lilypond is reached with Scheme.

Linux can never be properly marketed until their open source team consists of more than one personality type. Right now it's a technical marvel with no usability and no support, and any attempts at such are driven entirely by extreme-left-brained people who think they can do the usability and marketing themselves. I've never seen an open source standalone program that looks good enough to be mass-marketed, and really doubt I ever will.

If you have any questions, download GIMP.

So far I haven't found a suitable replacement for Dreamweaver or Photoshop. If it weren't for those 2 I could, and would, switch tomorrow. If they could be purchased for use on Linux I'd buy them and switch.

• HTML Tidy
• A text editor (I like vim and gedit)
• The GIMP (image editor)
• ImageMagick
• W3C validator
• Various docs and tips such as Checklist of Checkpoints for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines from W3C
• CSS Cheat Sheet

You know, the best method I've used to come up with what you're looking for is to just use a search engine and either blow up what you find or post it as normal size or put it in a binder that's always available. You can find some nice PDFs here if you want to take that route or you can look all over the place and mix/match. I personally only print out those I find myself using over and over again.

If you absolutely just want high quality print and don't have time to do this yourself, just visit Learn & Thrive which, to my recollection, has some decent sized posters available. They don't have the very particular kinds of posters you're asking for but then again, I don't know anybody who would do Oracle 10 specifically.

My suggestion is to get a high quality PDF from those first two links and just blow it up and have it laminated at Kinkos. Cost? Probably a lot less then buying something online.

If you really really want to do it yourself, I would suggest using The Gimp (or your favorite image editor) to capture images and text and make your own 'cheat sheet' with everything specific to where you work that would be pertinent. Share it with everyone else if you do and make sure to export as a high quality file format. Have it printed and keep it updated and specific to your workplace. If it's worth that much for productivity, you can probably convince your boss that the ROI is there for your time and money to get them printed.

I guess it's technically true to say that general blending is a type of layer effect (insofar as it's an effect that can be applied to layers!), but unfortunately it doesn't cover all of the layer effects I use. Blending options aside (of which the 'general blending' that GIMP lists under 'mode' is only part), Photoshop has 10 dynamic layer effects built into it (stroke, bevel, etc.) There are no filter files or other external files to support these effects, they are part of the application. I just double checked in Windows.

Rather than using destructive filters, I always turn to layer effects because they're dynamically rendered (change with layer changes), non-destructive, and can easily be tweaked. The closest GIMP plugin I found, which is missing the essential dynamic rendering, was this: http://registry.gimp.org/plugin?id=6988

PSPI says it is for 3rd party filters. Photoshop's layer effects are built right into the app. They aren't the same as filters (which are destructive and most of which GIMP already supports). "Styles" (grouped layer effects) can be saved to downloadable files, but unless GIMP supports the underlying layer effect enging, the style files will be useless.

I tried using GIMP with Inkscape for a while, but gave up out of frustration when I realized how much it was disturbing my workflow because of this one missing feature! When I was asked to "make this box a little smaller and shift its drop shadow to the left", I had to delete several layers generated by the above plugin, select the remaining effect layers and the one containing the box, move and resize them all, then reapply the plugin with a different angle on the drop shadow. All I had to do in Photoshop was move and resize the box and change the drop-shadow angle - dynamic rendering took care of the rest for me.

It's a fantastic feature, and I'm sure GIMP's developers will adopt it when they get around to it. When they do, I'll give serious thought to switching my main development environment to Linux.

First, they have X11 listed incorrectly as a PPC app. If you have an Intel based Mac then the installation CDs includes a pkg of X11 as a Universal app.

Once you have X11 installed then you can also get ...

1) Inkscape (Universal) ... for all of your SVG editing needs.

2) Gimp (Universal) ... for all of your raster image editing needs.

... and I am surprised that they left Eclipse off of the list. While Xcode is preferred for doing OS X development, it is still worth a mention :-)

I'm sure there are others, but these are the ones I use most.

GIMP includes the 'core' layer effects in the layers dialog under the dubiously-labelled 'Mode:' selection. All the standard ones, Multiply, divide, dissolve, colors, etc. are there. With the 'Opacity' slider, you can control alpha blending.

If you need to use some of the third party plugins for Photoshop, there's a GIMP plugin that will let you use Photoshop plugins in gimp called pspi that will let you use just about any third-party Photoshop plugins, even on Linux.

I've always seen it (rightly or wrongly) as a tool made by programmers for programmers who want to make/modify and image here and there, but I'd like to be shown to be wrong about this.

What do you have to lose by downloading The GIMP for yourself and posting a followup answer to your own question? Yes, it's a copout answer, on the other hand, I can't directly answer your question without asking the opposite question first: What can Photoshop do that GIMP supposedly can't, and is it really worth spending around a paycheck on it when the GIMP is free?