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GIMP And OS X
mblase writes: "A MacCentral article talks about progress being made on the MacOS X conversion of GIMP; they hope to have the installer ready by the MacHack conference at the end of June. This is great news for this open-source graphics editor; making it available under MacOS X puts it in front of thousands of Mac-based graphic designers who have only had access to Photoshop for years." There are some things PhotoShop can do which The GIMP so far cannot (color separation stuff, for instance), but for online publishing and correcting amateur digital photos before burning to CD-R, it's a great tool. Cross-OS, cross-platform is a nice trick, too.
It should be good for innovation, though the results of the competition between the three may surprise some GIMP advocates.
(Hint: User-centered design is paramount on the Macintosh. Focus on what users want and need and how they work with their tools if you want to gain any share.)
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Chris Hanson
bDistributed.com, Inc.
Gimp is quite impressive, but, aside from lack of color matching and color separation features, there's one big problem with using Gimp for professional non-web graphics.
:) and FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE.
Here's a way to see for yourself. Open Gimp and Photoshop on 2 boxes with identical hardware (Gimp in any OS it works on, Photoshop in NT or Win2k). Now open a 3000x3000 image in each program and observe the performance differences. Gimp's tile cache and memory management code just isn't optimized for large images, while Photoshop's is. Photoshop doesn't perform noticeably differently when editing a 300x300 image or a 3000x3000 image, while Gimp slowly cranks and grinds through the larger one (and a 3000x3000 image isn't exactly huge... think a 300dpi for-print image at 10"x10"). For reference, my box is a 350mhz P2, 384MB of RAM. Photoshop tested in Win2k Pro, Gimp in Linux 2.2.19 and 2.4.0-test5 (this was awhile ago
I heard a few months back that Gimp's tiling cache and memory management code were in line for a complete rewrite, but I don't know if this has happened yet. I haven't heard anything about it, so I'm going to assume that the situation is still the same. If anybody knows differently, please correct me.
Heh, while I'm on the subject... will somebody please write an Adobe Illustrator-type program for Linux that doesn't suck? Or at least make KIllustrator suck a bit less...
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Kinda nice to have the OS come to you, dontcha think? If Apple had maintained reliance on OS9.x, then Gimp wouldn't have any opportunity for placement in front of "thousands of Mac-based graphic designers".
Just trying to give credit where credit's due. Apple had some forethought in migrating their OS and OSX is (going to be, real soon now) hot stuff, IMHO.
It will be interesting to see what sort of inroads this "new" software makes into traditional Mac software markets. I work at a publishing company (though I don't manage the macs), and I can tell you that first of all, no one wants to switch to OS X, and no one wants to try anything but Photoshop.
:) An interesting comparison nonetheless.
The reasons for this aren't fear of the new and uncertain or what not, but simply that they Photoshop,Illustrator,Quark, and a couple other high-end publishing tools are simply so standard that switching would be foolish. Supportwise, they can't be beat. And then of course comes the deal of having to learn new software.
Of course, pricewise, there's no fight (licensing for some of these products = $$$!!!)
My personal bet would be that very, VERY few mac users who had previously used photoshop or other Adobe tools switch. Especially once Adobe releases native versions of their software.
Scott