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I see this sentiment a lot, and it is surprising for Linux users, who seem to like to think they're more aware of what "the good stuff is" than Windows or Mac users.

If you want to encourage companies to bring graphics products to Linux that offer more power than the GIMP, why don't you pick the companies that offer more power than Photoshop, too?

1. Better painting, by far: Paintshop Pro
2. Better layering, by far: WinImages
3. Better photo touchup, by far: Paintshop Pro
4. Better CMYK (and other) color separations, by far: WinImages

Both of those products are far less expensive than Photoshop (like, about 1/8th or less!), both offer tons of very useful features you can't get in Photoshop, both offer friendly, timely, human tech support, both have wide open developer programs without hoop jumping, and both of them are faster than Photoshop in key areas. There is very little that Photoshop offers that these programs don't, and a whole lot you can't get in Photoshop that you'll find in them. Both products make the GIMP look like a broken set of crayons, too.

It seems to me that some effort spent trying to get less known, but definitely more powerful apps than Photoshop to move to Linux might be very well spent. But that's just me, and I never was very impressed with how "popular" something was... that's why I run Linux in the first place. Because it is powerful, not popular.

I see this sentiment a lot, and it is surprising for Linux users, who seem to like to think they're more aware of what "the good stuff is" than Windows or Mac users.

If you want to encourage companies to bring graphics products to Linux that offer more power than the GIMP, why don't you pick the companies that offer more power than Photoshop, too?

1. Better painting, by far: Paintshop Pro
2. Better layering, by far: WinImages
3. Better photo touchup, by far: Paintshop Pro
4. Better CMYK (and other) color separations, by far: WinImages

Both of those products are far less expensive than Photoshop (like, about 1/8th or less!), both offer tons of very useful features you can't get in Photoshop, both offer friendly, timely, human tech support, both have wide open developer programs without hoop jumping, and both of them are faster than Photoshop in key areas. There is very little that Photoshop offers that these programs don't, and a whole lot you can't get in Photoshop that you'll find in them. Both products make the GIMP look like a broken set of crayons, too.

It seems to me that some effort spent trying to get less known, but definitely more powerful apps than Photoshop to move to Linux might be very well spent. But that's just me, and I never was very impressed with how "popular" something was... that's why I run Linux in the first place. Because it is powerful, not popular.

On the offchance this isn't a total troll..
~$100 PaintshopPro for editing, $0 Irfanview for simple viewing.

I can see it now:

"I was using PSP to create some graphics from my new PSP game. Of course I'm using the PSP to develop it. I just hope the PSP don't think I'm violating the DCMA."

There is already a PSP site, and that has been in existance for almost 10 years.

"If you pay an artist $200 for a couple of simple graphics, you'll save yourself tons of time, and your project will come out much, much better. So reduce the number of graphics you need, and get the best ones you can."

Great Advice and absolutely true, HOWEVER, for the "DIY" types, i would add:

1. AVOID THE HIGH-LEARNING CURVE TOOSLS, SUCH AS:
A. Photoshop
B. Dreamweaver
C. Flash
D. ALL THE 3D Products; Lightwave, Maya, 3dFX

i'm a programmer/developer, and i've been using some of the above for years in high end web design, and find that if i don't use them for a few months, i have to relearn big chunks of the program, sometimes ending up with a 3:1 ratio between learning and designing.

2. USE THE MORE "AUTOMATED DESIGN PRODUCTS, SUCH AS;

A. Ulead PaintShop Pro -- http://www.jasc.com/products/?
B. Macromedia Fireworks
C. Adobe Photoshop Elements
D. Cool Button Tool -- http://www.buttontool.com/
E. Cool FX Menu Tool -- http://www.buttontool.com/

These programs are substantially cheaper $$$$ to buy then the "Biggies", and are designed to take some of the load off some of the design choices that can drive even highly skilled designers (Choices such as; opacity, blends, masks and moires)....

STEAL, uh, i mean "homage" any image (OBEY ALL PERTINENT COPYRIGHT RULES, AND DON'T "HOMAGE" FROM MAJOR SITES THAT ARE KNOWN TO EMPLOY LOTS OF LAWYERS!!!!!!!!!)

you can be a good citizen and ask, or you can homage them and alter them enough to make them "yours"

3. LEARN HOW TO FIND HELP FROM PROS: there are a # of websites designed to provide such help, for example http://creativepro.com/ is used by pretty much every designer i've worked with or known. everyone of the major software provider has both developer programs and tutorials and community BBs, forums, etc..

some companies such as Adobe and Macromedia really push these developer forums and you can frequently get better/faster/smarter solutions from these forums, than from the companies' Tech Support programs!!!

4. SELECT A "LOOK AND FEEL"; from a product/service/??? similar to what your product/service/??? and use that to extract GENERAL guidelines about how to present your design. Chances are these folk have paid good monety to learn lessons about to sell your similar product/service/??? -- go to school on them, BUT DON'T copy their design (Lawsuit City), extract their approach and see how you can apply it to your particular project...

Good Luck!

I wouldn't cry too much - piracy is going to hurt the publishers of weak games worst, 'cos everyone can find out that it sucks before it goes on sale ;-)

The problem is that this also hurts legitimate small, independent game developers as well. In non-game terms, every time someone gets the warez version of Photoshop, that's one less person buying the significantly cheaper yet high quality Paint Shop Pro.

There are a lot of great independent games out there that are really fun. (I highly recommend watching for the game "Zap" to come out soon, it was a real blast to play at the Indie Games Conference.) This is just one site out of many with quality indie games at a good price. Instead of spending time warezing a big-name commercial game, people should try looking into the alternatives. If people start supporting independent game developers, you'll start seeing a wider variety of games being developed independent of the restrictions imposed by publishers. It always boggles me how people can justify pirating games because "games suck these days" without putting any real effort into finding alternatives to play.

Have fun,

*laughs*

OK. The last time this came up, it consumed about twelve straight hours of hackery. You can go ahead and play with some of the black boxed code using the demo version of Paint Shop Pro (or the latest Photoshops). Let me tell you: This has nothing to do with the circles. I was actually quite saddened by this fact, as I was planning to print up a "secure t-shirt" that would be unphotographable and unprintable by modern image manipulators. (It'd be a great excuse to talk at Black Hat wearing a T-Shirt *laughs*).

Alas, such adventures were not to be had. Experimenting with copy/paste between an unprotected app and the demo PSP, it quickly became clear that while some old copiers might indeed trigger on the inter-circle distances, counterfeiters now had a vastly more difficult system to fight. What there seems to be is some sort of size and position invariant image fingerprint function, probably wavelet based, that receives the full image after every large scale image transform, executes a fingerprint matching vs. a confidence value, and returns true or false depending on what the confidence threshold is set to. It's not perfect -- Stirmark does seem to cause the algorithm to occasionally stumble, though not consistently (see this gallery for details) -- but it's very good work nonetheless.

Certainly, it does not appear possible to manipulate the watermarking system to create new and unique images that appear, computationally, to still be money. That's a very good thing. And while it's somewhat problematic to have code refusing to obey its controller, the integrity of the financial system really is an important thing. Remember the privacy case for cash -- if paper money becomes something we all distrust, what exactly are we left with? The fault with the RFID approach is that it forces us to carry a reader to validate funds. If we cannot self-validate, we cannot trust (notably, the biggest weakness with the metal strip approach is that we cannot quickly notice that the metal strip has been removed -- the wealth is actually thus represented not by the bill but by an invisible strip of iron and plastic!).

I do not think that image manipulation software is the right place to put this code, specifically because it's too easy to write an image editor from scratch (what are you going to do, ban compilers?). Scanners and printers are however sufficiently single sourced that they're far superior places to trust that anti-counterfeiting logic will be in place. But then, that's just IMHO.

--Dan

I do a lot of graphics work. I've also used a large number of the true graphics programs (3d, 2d, vector, etc... not MSPaint) out there at one point or another. In addition to this, I also do freelance development from time to time. It is the user interface alone that makes or breaks the program, in my opinion. Without a good interface, it doesn't matter what the rest of the code does.

Here are my remarks on a few of the ones I've used at one time or another:

Photoshop - Easy to use interface. Provides an easy introduction for those unfamiliar with the program and provides the power necessary for advanced users.

GraphicsConverter - Another easy to use interface. Though it lacks the power photoshop has, it makes up for it in the large number of image formats it can read and write.

Paint Shop Pro - I am not overly fond of this interface. For one, I think there are far too many icons used. Drowning out interface buttons and such with icons is very irritating for a novice user as they generally have to hover the mouse and wait for the tooltip to figure out what something is. Further, it has the "too much help" syndrome that seems a standard on windows. I much prefer that the help system be delegated to something else and not be built into the program.

Poser - This is definitely a unique interface, but it still provides simplicity for novice users and control for advanced users. The largest downside is that by not using default system-provided user interface widgets, some of the details you would expect are not there whereas they would be there if the system versions were used.

Bryce - Bryce is extremely easy to use. It was my first 3d program and is still one of my favorites due to its simplicity. I have yet to find another 3d program with an object placement system that I like more than bryce's.

Blender - Not a big fan. Though it is quite powerful, the learning curve is very steep. On Macs, the interface text is quite small in some places and hard to read. The interface is also a bit clunky. Sections are not as clearly divided as I would like.

Carrara - I have not used this one for some time (and as such, newer versions may be different than what I remember), but I found it quite user-friendly when I did. All tools were placed in a context-sensible place and it had the camera system that I liked from bryce.

The Gimp - I don't like it. The user interface is extremely clunky by my standards. Consolidating a number of the windows into one and reorganizing the tools would go a long way towards helping it. There is also the fact that I am used to my nice Aqua interface and it has the drab sharp bevels and general lack of detail that is natural to most x86 OS's under default configurations.

Illustrator - I do not use this program frequently, but being from adobe, it has a very similar interface to photoshop that makes it very easy to use.

Fireworks - I'm apathetic about this one. It provides no real functionality that I cannot get in a program whose interface I like better and has more stuff I can use.

Freehand - Pretty much the same as Fireworks. I've only mostly toyed with this one as I found Illustrator more appealing.

One other feature I like about photoshop is that it is extremely easy to do image versioning. When doing web designs, I will

My experience was, Gaim 0.75 worked fine with Gimp's GTK (20040124), but Gaim 0.76 wouldn't start because it couldn't find a "Procedure entry point".

I preferred the ability to chat than to use Gimp, so out goes the GTK+ 20040124 and in goes GTK 2.2.4 rev. C (the one recommended by Gaim). Besides, I'm more comfortable with Paint Shop Pro.

Apple didn't come up with the idea behind iTunes any more than the Rhythmbox developers, this Wikipedia article explains how it is based on SoundJam MP from another company and Apple just hired the people and bought the app. I would not be terribly surprised if there was something comparable even before that.

So you're saying that even though Apple bought iTunes off some other company, the last few versions haven't offered anything new? That the only differenc between version 2 and version 4.1 is a different set of colored notes on that photorealistic icon? Get real. Just because a company purchases code from some other company doesn't mean innovation stops completely.

The "GPL != theft" part makes you sound a lot like a troll. Where did you get the idea that writing a similar app to an existing one is anything even remotely comparable to theft? It happens all the time even in the non-free software industry. More on that a little later.

Because even if imitation's the most sincere form of flattery, it's still stagnation. Open source doesn't go places when all we do is copy other companies' ideas, package it in a cruddy RPM with a terrible UI, and post it on a brand-new, shiny SourceForge page. We go places when people come up with a way to do things better. Not that there's anything wrong with copying others' technology and recreating it to be better (Hello, Samba!)--but that's QA, not creativity.

People made Aqua GTK themes because they wanted them. It hasn't much to do with what direction GNOME, KDE or the free software desktop is taking. Why not rant about Windows XP which also has this Aqua theming craze and how Microsoft just doesn't get it?

You missed the point, too. Microsoft doesn't make and sell an Aqua theme because it'd land them a copyright infringement lawsuit. People like Aqua on OS X, so they copy the look and feel for their own themes. Which is fine and dandy, but when mere reproductions represent the majority of all theming work in open-source desktop development, there's something wrong.

... there's other proprietary software such as Paint Shop Pro that is even closer to Photoshop as far as the look and feel go.

Haven't used Paint Shop Pro in awhile, have you? Download the trial version of 8, install it. Then open it and Photoshop together, and notice that Photoshop doesn't have customizable toolbars. Or that PSP's material palette is a far cry from Photoshop's color picker. The menu orders are different. The layer palettes, though offering similar functionality, are designed totally differently because PSP works with layers in a different way. Oh, and see the icon on the toolbar labeled "Pen"? Think of 80% of Illustrator inside one button, and not just a half-assed solution like Photoshop's gimped shape masks. Then look at Photoshop's PANTONE support and vast printing options. Notice the file browser (that PSP's had since version 3, and PS just got in 7.) Notice, ultimately, the fact that companies will steal ideas from each other -- and do it constantly.

Sorry, but it really pisses me off when people label PSP as Just Another Photoshop Clone. JASC doesn't just sit on their heels and let Adobe do the R&D, and since version 6, that's really been apparent. Too bad it's not open source, but it's a great product, and one that I've found worth buying time and again.

But then again, I wouldn't expect you to let small things like factual information to get in the way of making your point. We need to be thinking independently. Slicker's great, but it represents the exception rather than the rule. We need to change the rules, and start thinking on our own.

There is also Jasc WebDraw ($179), if you're of a mind to use windows.

"The only one I am aware of at the moment is a Corel Product. It costs about 15 grand (USD), or it did the last time I checked."

Check again.
Webdraw

And a lot of Adobe products support it as well.

BTW Adobe does have a SVG plugin-in that works with mozilla-firefox

What do normal users need with a compiler? If you want one you can get one here.

2) It had no INTENDED remote access services such as FTPD or SSHD.

of course it didn't, that's what Windows Server 2003 is for.

3) I was unable to manipulate graphics.

*gasp* welcome to the world of closed source! Companies actually make MONEY here. You can do basic graphics manipulation using Paint, or you can download The Gimp of course, otherwise you should spring for a copy of Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop

4) I was unable to use my Network Card.

5) I was unable to optimally use my graphics card.

6) I was unable to optimally use any piece of hardware that didn't have Microsoft written on it.

What kind of bizarre obscure hardware where you using? Windows XP properly detects alot more hardware then linux does currently.

It takes for ever to do anything in Notepad as compared to Vi.

Then by all means, download vi and use it. Some people like working with this little thing called a Graphical User Interface.

8) I had practically no system logging to speak of.

Windows XP is a desktop OS, you can find all the logging you should ever care for at Start->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Event viewer.

9) I was unable to use multiple desktops.

10) I was unable to entirely change the appearance of the GUI.

most display drivers come with desktop management software, or you can use Windows XP's quicklogin features to have multiple login sessions. Part of the reason Windows is so successful is that you CAN'T entirely change the GUI. Windows, at it's core, always looks like Windows, even with a skin applied.

11) I was unable to simply download much of the software needed to render Windows somewhat useful. Even though Gimp and OpenOffice run on Windows and GVIM, refer to number 4.

See my answer to number 4.

12) I kept getting "Access Denied" or something along the lines of insufficient permissions even though I believe I gave myself full rights over the system. On Windows 2000 this can be seen even if you are logged in as Administrator.

Wow, Microsoft prevents you from killing critical system processes! What a shock! Oh no! what ever shall we do?!? Seriously though, the only time i've ever gotten access denied is when a file is in use, or you try to kill a critical system process (except XP, which lets you)

13) I had to reboot fifteen times, and four hours later while windowsupdate.microsoft.com told me I needed nearly a GB of updates. Many of which could only be installed one at a time. 14) Then another two hours and multiple reboots becuase of installing device drivers (refer to number 6) and then updating those from the old drivers that were on old disgarded discs in the closet.

with the default install of XP, there are 50 mb worth of updates + sp1, which is another 30 or so, a far cry from the 1 gb you speak of.

15) I had next to nothing in regards to software and production....

Compared to what you get with the average Linux ISO image.... Windows, out of the box, is a pathetic quadriplegic whose wheel chair is missing a wheel.

Then, Microsoft goes and strips so much "functionality" from Windows XP to publicly admit it's "crippled"? What more can you take from it?

They never stripped functionality, it was never there to begin with. Windows XP is a desktop OS for every day users, not for supergeeks.

Disclaimer: I am not pro microsoft nor am i in any way being paid by microsoft for this comment. (On the contrary, i'm working on an open source Microsoft Windows NT Compatible Operating System called ReactOS The parent was a blatant troll and i was simply shedding some light on the truths.

Webdraw. And no it's not Flash MX caliber, but it's a nice start. Also software like Adobe Photoshop outputs SVG.

"The community really needs free, powerful, robust SVG renderers and authoring tools using public standards to become popular, or else Microsoft will own yet another "standard"."

Well either pull a "Blender" and purchase this product from the company. Or merge the code that Real Networks released and SodiPodi (It still has a ways to go, feature and stability).

Well that's why I said a bit of this, and a bit of that. Besides XHTML isn't the only thing an aspiring web author needs to know. MathML, SVG, SMIL, etc. The Web is growing up. IMHO I think that tools like Quanta, Screem, etc are the best compromise. An ease-of-use that doesn't protect an author from the things he needs to know, while giving him the kick to the memory needed, and imposing the discipline the web sorely lacks. SodiPodi is important for the SVG part.

BTW WebDraw appears to be a good program for those getting into SVG. Shame it's only windows.

BTW-II Don't forget the server-side technologies. One can do some impressive things. Throw in XUL and LOOK OUT!.

Digital Photos are certainly now one of the top ten uses for family PCs.

I highly recommend using some Digiphoto Organization software, it's just leaps and bounds over storing photos as files in folders.

These packages help organize, view, and browse your digiphoto collection, then actually do something with the photos: format them for email, printing, web galleries, calendars, greeting cards, etc.

There are plenty of choices in Windows, but I don't know of any usable packages for Linux. Of course, for OSX there's iPhoto (free!)

I've been using Photoshop Album since it was released in February, and I've been very happy with it. Version 2 was released on Monday, and there's now a free Starter Edition - so there's no excuse not to try it!

Some other digital photo management software:

• ACD Systems ACDSee
• Jasc Photo Album
• Lifescape Picasa
• Ulead Photo Explorer

Mozilla, powerful and free web browser/mail suite.
OpenOffice, powerful office suite.
Ad-Aware for keeping spyware (Gator etc) out.
BitTorrent for all your P2P needs.
ZomeAlarm a good firewall.
Avast! Antivirus good AV app, free for home use.
TextPad powerful and easy-to-use text editor.
SmartFTP powerful and free FTP client.

On top of these, I always install these non-free apps (non-development related):
Paint Shop Pro all the relevant functionality from Photoshop at a much better price.
Klient the best IRC client. Ever.

Some people have mentioned:
CygWin - a home, non-dev PC doesn't need it
VNC - a home, non-dev PC doesn't need it, and it has security issues
Dev-C++ - not needed on a home PC, it's for development.
NetHack - huh!?
Boingo - the article submitter didn't mention anything about having a WLAN card, so why would he need to find hotspots?
Winamp - redundant since Microsoft released WMP9, which I've found to be just as fast, more stable than WA3, and better at playing movies. Of course, YMMV, and some people prefer to stay away from MS stuff for ideological reasons.

I've tried to figure a way to do both Vector and Raster editing in one program before, and had some ideas, but nothing that would truly make it easy. The reason Illustrator and Photoshop are separate is not for the chance to sell two products (although I suspect that influences the idea a bit) but because there isn't a way to do vector and raster editing in a well mixed manner. At best, you end up with something that changes back and forth between being a vector editor and a raster editor depending on what is selected.

PaintShopPro can do this! Layers are either bitmap or vector, and you do have to use different tools with each, but it does work fairly well. I've not use Adobe Illustrator so I can't compare, although I suspect it is lacking a lot of the functionality, it is still very feature complete and usable/useful.

So a version of Gimp that can do vectors would rather piss on PaintShopPro's cornflakes wouldn't it?!

Kind of shame actually, as PSP does have a huge number of features, works very well and (okay its not OSS) only costs 90. [I don't work for the BTW - I just think its always been a sensibly priced product as opposed to Adobe products!]

• There is a beta of Mozilla that has native support for SVG.
• GNOME 2.2 can use SVG images not only for icons or desktop backgrounds, but also for the GUI widgets themselves and the graphics of the window manager
• Adobe certainly endorses it
• Corel
• Webdraw
• SVG Map Maker
• and the list goes on

It can be changed, but they still could've copied and pasted their whois result as plain-text! What, are they afraid it's not original enough? Haven't they heard of Photoshop?

Incidentally, I find Photoshop over-hyped. has more features and is easier to use.

Oh and the name... PSP?

I hate to say that this guy [classicgaming.com] is already using the name....

Organization Stuff

Stuff the pictures into folders like this:
\yyyy\yyyymmdd
This allows the directory size to be managable, and since you're not likely to cause the camera to roll over, filenames aren't an issue.

Use a program such as Thumbs Plus to view the photos, and prune (if you must). The "slide show" mode lets you rip through images for review like a dream. For editing, I use Paint Shop Pro.

These programs have served me well for the 82,000 I've accumulated so far.

Gear

If you can, get an old laptop that burns CDs. It doesn't have to be fast, or pretty, it just has to run at least 2 hours on a charge. If that can't be done, try to get a pair of old Toshiba Librettos (they look like old PDAs, and are less likely to be stolen).

Get power adapters, cables, etc, for all the countries you plan to visit. If you're technical at all, take some alligator clips, and a small multimeter for use in rigging up power. (They make them small and cheap at Radio Shack)

Figure out some way to back the stuff up (via CD if possible, or cloning the Librettos)

--Mike--

i hope jasc sues the pants of them. heheh

and we spent several thousand dollars to placate them, instead of a few hundred for Paint Shop Pro.

Really? Jasc Paint Shop Pro starts at $82 for one seat. Adobe Photoshop Elements (Photoshop minus prepress) starts at $100 for one seat. Thus, unless you have a bunch of people working in prepress, Photoshop isn't much more expensive than PSP.

It's obvious that what these guys were doing is illegal. Still I feel sorry for them, with their multi-year prison sentences, because they really weren't costing the software industry that much money in lost sales, and because they are scapegoats.

As many others have said, most people wouldn't have bought the very expensive applications anyhow. When someone makes a pirated copy of Photoshop to do web graphics, at worst, they are depriving The GIMP community of a new user, or depriving Jasc of $99 -- usually not depriving Adobe of $600. There is some financial impact on the industry, but the numbers are lower. Also, there are plenty of software copiers. Software "theft" won't be reduced one iota by locking these guys up.

The reason for that is, they were just functioning as a completely essential part of a healthy information economy -- the underground. Why is it essential? One reason is that, espescially near the turning points in society and revolution, information occasionally must transcend barriers created by law. If these underground data networks -- very small ones, if you believe the numbers in the NYT article -- are maintained, hidden, and keep working based on an economy of commercially available pilfered information, and if more citizens are trained in how to communicate covertly, and people are indoctrinated to know that storing or exchanging illegal information may not actually be wrong, then our surveillance-laden society has paid a fair price.

The loosely hierarchical distribution network used by warez kidz is analogous in form and function to those used in China and other repressive regimes by political dissidents. Capable of passing only information, peer-organized, and with a medium level of identity isolation -- bring down one and you bring down a few others, but not the whole group. Personally, I feel more secure knowing that there exist these sophisticated illegal networks, capable only of traffic in information, that would be rather difficult for any authority to completely shut down. Who knows when they may be needed...

-=Ivan (actually not very paranoid at all)

"Here are a few notes from the underground / load them at your pleasure / These are the dusty pictures that I found / while on my search for treasure" -- Information Society: Mirrorshades

I keep them with the name the camera gave them, unaltered, in year\yyyymmdd folders. The camera will wrap at 10k pictures, but I haven't taken that many in a single day, yet.

I used to try to give them good names, but it falls apart rapidly, and there are better tools available, such as ThumbsPlus from Cerious Software. It uses an Access97/ODBC compatible database, allows for the tagging of multiple keywords per photo. The slideshow mode is VERY handy.

For editing the photos, use Paint Shop Pro from JASC, it's good, cheap, and has a good thumbnail system as well.

I made two sets of geographically dispersed backups to guard against system failure, with CDs as low as $0.23 each (a sale at Target), it seems silly not to.

All of this works very well for me, as before your milage may vary.

--Mike--

Ad-Aware may be successful as an unprofitable entity but so far their business model is not one that any sane businessman would follow.

...

So I'm particularly aware of the fact that this guy's advice is completely worthless to anyone who wants to make a living off of their open source software (would you prefer I just not open source it?) and I was a bit offended by the fact that he stated his worthless advice in a somewhat arrogant fashion.

To be sure, these success stories are dwarfed by the number of shareware and commercial operations who fail in the software business. But then, that's business. Most fail in any industry. Its a tough game.

If a small software developer hopes to survive it, they must have a community. It might be within an Open Source community. It might be created from fans of their commercial offerings. But there must be a support base somewhere.

Lavasoft and Ad-Aware have proven one lesson to any developers willing to pay attention. End users do not like the current methods used by spy-ware. As education spreads, more and more users will take efforts to disable this software. And that is a dire message to anyone who's business model depends on it.

They have a great paint program that's maybe one version behind photoshop, for a fraction of the price. They let you download a fully functional (for 60 days) evaluation version of their software.
I used their paint shop pro for the full 60 days for incidental work i had to do- and when the day came I really needed Photo software, I found the evaluation had expired.

I'm sure I could have found a hack, but by that time I had decided it was worth the money, so I went down to staples and bought the well-documented retail box version. Had they implented any "features" along the way that had interefered with a good, long eval period, I probably would have looked elsewhere.

SO here's jascs formula:
1. Make good software.
2. Make a fully featured but Generously time limited evaluation version available for No-Hassle download.
3. Wait and get the money from hooked & happy customers.

By the way, the boxed set was cheaper to buy at $80 (Staples) than to download from Jasc ($99) or order from jasc ($109)

The W3C SVG page may be found here. Probably the most popular browser plug-in is made by Adobe and you can get it here (RedHat 7.1 and Solaris 8 versions of the plug-in are somewhat hard to find but are still available).

You might also wish to check out some of Adobe's demos. Jasc has a Win32 app called WebDraw that can come in handy, too.

The W3C SVG page may be found here. Probably the most popular browser plug-in is made by Adobe and you can get it here (RedHat 7.1 and Solaris 8 versions of the plug-in are somewhat hard to find but are still available).

You might also wish to check out some of Adobe's demos. Jasc has a Win32 app called WebDraw that can come in handy, too.

> (just what is the non-proprietary vector animation standard, anyway?)

SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics, which also includes a mobile version and also caters for disabled users and non standard display devices.

There are tools to author it such as Jasc WebDraw, and it can be displayed on a significant proportion of browsers (IE is the only browser I know supports it, Mozilla probably does too).

check native SVG editor WebDraw , tell them what you need in their newsgroup, ask browser makers to support SVG

The only product that I have ever seen produce SVG files is Illustrator. Show me some other tools (Windows based, please) and I might think about it.

The SVG format does everything Flash does and more. Adobe SVG Viewer and Illustrator, JASC Webdraw have moved to support it and Mozilla already displays it. And because it's XML, browsers that can't display it won't croak when trying to display the propriety format. AND it can be dynamically updated in web servers such as Apache w/ Perl.

Vector graphics are good. It's clear that Macromedia is attempting to secure a monopoly here.

Computers now are generating more and more "pure" art. From the use of software like Paint Shop Pro, more and more people can produce artowrk of relatively high quality. I speak from experience, being one who got sympathy high marks in my art classes in high school.

Even more dependent on technology is fractal design, which is facilitated by the high processing power of modern computers.

In this way, technology is providing a fresh, new canvas for many who couldn't or afraid to use earlier kinds of canvas.

If you need a graphics program for a Windows or Mac, may I recommend that you look into Deneba Canvas. It's what I use on that side, and I'm quite pleased with it.

Personnally, I find Jasc Paint Shop Pro to be another excellent graphics program for Windows. It has most of the features of Photoshop (and probably some Photoshop doesn't have), and supports Photoshop plugins, and is way less expensive.

Would any of you use Dreamweaver without being able to view and edit the source? So why would anyone create vector animations in Flash without being able to view and edit the source?
SVG code is a little verbose, but very human readable. Check out a preview version of WebDraw: http://www.jasc.com/webdraw.asp One can also view source of online SVGs; fun.

It's XML, so parse/manipulate/generate it with any of your favourite XML tools in any of your favourite programming languages. XML content can be transformed to visual versions for different environments.
(how fast can you say "QuickJugglingMarkupLanguageViaXSLTtoSVGAnimation" or
"myOwnSlideshowMarkupLanguageViaRubyOrPythonToVect orAnimations" in the Flash/SWF world?)

Since dynamic generation is so convenient, and SVG is a truly high quality format, you can internationalize and personalize content without too much fuss, using all the open source technologies that don't even have to know about SVG. It has Unicode, it's own font format, is searchable and indexable, and works well with CSS, XSLT, RDF, later SMIL and XForms. I'm trying to avoid the word "professional", but don't succeed.

Give it a try, check the spec (not to say RT*M)), and basically have great fun.

The spec: (pretty readable)
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/
W3's SVG page:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
More links: (mine)
http://www.pinkjuice.com/SVG/SVGlinks.htm

Would any of you use Dreamweaver without being able to view and edit the source? So why would anyone create vector animations in Flash without being able to view and edit the source?
SVG code is a little verbose, but very human readable. Check out a preview version of WebDraw: http://www.jasc.com/webdraw.asp One can also view source of online SVGs; fun.

It's XML, so parse/manipulate/generate it with any of your favourite XML tools in any of your favourite programming languages. XML content can be transformed to visual versions for different environments.
(how fast can you say "QuickJugglingMarkupLanguageViaXSLTtoSVGAnimation" or
"myOwnSlideshowMarkupLanguageViaRubyOrPythonToVect orAnimations" in the Flassh/SWF world?)

Since dynamic generation is so convenient, and SVG is a truly high quality format, you can internationalize and personalize content without too much fuss, using all the open source technologies that don't even have to know about SVG. It has Unicode, it's own font format, is searchable and indexable, and works well with CSS, XSLT, RDF, later SMIL and XForms. I'm trying to avoid the word "professional", but don't succeed.

Give it a try, check the spec (not to say RT*M)), and basically have great fun.

The spec: (pretty readable)
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/
W3's SVG page:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
More links: (mine)
http://www.pinkjuice.com/SVG/SVGlinks.htm

Browsing SVG

The only browser plug-in for SVG right now is Adobe's, and it only works in NS4 and IE5 for Mac and Win32. However, there is a rapidly-developing Win32 SVG-savy branch of Moz by Alex Fritz. No text support yet, alas, but the author suggests that it should be easy to port to other platforms.

Generating SVG

Sodipodi is a Win/Linux vector graphics program with SVG at its heart -- well worth a look. Sketch runs in Python and includes SVG in its import/export set. I've had good luck transforming complex Illustrator diagrams into SVG using Sketch.

On the Win platform, I'm quite fond of Jasc WebDraw; it's in beta and a fully functional demo is provided.

Finally, the versitility of the Batiklibrary is staggering. Written in Java, it includes a viewer, transcoders to png and jpg and a very cool Graphics2D implementation. The latter allows anything graphics that can be drawn to a java G2D panel to be instead output as SVG. This is a great way to get font dimension info for precision layout of SVG, as we've done building dynamic timelines at the Historical Event Markup Project.

So, let me get this straight...

An individual developing a piece of software in his free time for free distribution is encroaching on Adobe's naming system, but Jasc can sell a piece of software with the words paint! and shop! in the name for a profit!, and no one at adobe cares?


-Chris Canter

Save $600 (100%) off the retail price of Photoshop by giving up prepress capabilities (which are not necessary for web or game graphics).

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Anyone who pays $500 for PhotoPaint is getting rooked big-time. The suggested price for the full CorelDraw suite is $695, and I don't think anyone sells it at full retail. The CorelDRAW suite is worth spending money on, but PhotoPaint is not. For far less money one can buy Paint Shop Pro which takes care of almost everything PhotoPaint can do, and if you're looking for full Photoshop compatibility for your service bureau, Photoshop is only $114 more through Adobe and cheaper on the street.

Prices for many of these programs seem steep for home use, but the main market for these programs is professional users, who can write off the cost of the program as a business expense (saving 28% or more in the US), and who will use the program to make money. $700 is a lot of money, but if the program saves you 7 to 14 hours over time, it's paid for itself.

If the GIMP's real competition is Photo-Paint, then the GIMP has already won. Photo-Paint has all the ease of learning and use of Photoshop, with all the features of older versions of Paint Shop Pro. Even in the Windows World, Photo-Paint is almost always acquired with CorelDRAW. It's just not worth getting separately. Someone doing only web graphics, or editing and printing their digital photos, can do quite well with Paint Shop Pro or Ulead's PhotoImpact, and anyone doing serious pre-press work will still want Photoshop.

"They've all either got appropriately licensed software or else are too big for Unisys to bother, and they don't want to alienate even the (small?) fraction of customers still using non-PNG-supporting browsers (3.x or earlier)," Roelofs wrote in an email interview.

To me, newspapers are just souvenirs. If something that I think is special happens, I'll buy a newspaper and store it away in my drawers or attic somewhere. Often I won't even bother reading past the front page. I'll have probably read the story a dozen times from a bunch of different sources already.

Even our local newspaper has a website now. I just don't see the point in newspapers as news. Even the classifieds are online. Newspapers are ornaments.

Newspapers are like any original physical media- software, films, albums, whatever- I only buy the originals when I want to celebrate ownership of an original item. For instance, if there's some commercial software I really like (Paint Shop Pro springs to mind), I'll buy the original as an ornament on my shelf (usually I actually install the warez version anyway). I buy original CDs of bands I really, really like, but tend to listen to the MP3s. I'll buy videos of films that really move me (Aliens, Bladerunner etc), even though I might prefer a different foreign/censored/director's cut that I've taped from somebody else.

And then there is the media which is mediocre, which is okay for a while, which does a job that doesn't need repeating. The stuff I wouldn't endorse if I were a celebrity, but hey, it fills a need, until something better comes along. One hit wonder bands. This morning's news on another dull day. Some software which crashes a lot or isn't really as flexible as I want it to be. An okay film that my wife might want to watch later. These are destined to spend their lifetime in my collection of MP3s, websites, warez and VHS tapes.

How to sell more newspapers? See Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age".

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