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Mozilla 1.1 Hits The Street
asa writes: "Mozilla 1.1 has arrived!. This release has many new features including full-screen mode for Linux, Mac MathML support, a redesigned JavaScript Debugger, new window icons for the different Mozilla applications, view selection source, display HTML mail as plaintext, and much more. Along with all the new features, Mozilla 1.1 also contains many improvements to performance, stability, standards support, and web site compatibility. You can get Mozilla 1.1 by visiting the mozilla.org releases page or directly from ftp at ftp.mozilla.org. Now that 1.1 is out the door, the focus moves to 1.2 alpha, and beyond. If you're confused as to how all of these releases relate to each other, be sure to check out the Mozilla Roadmap and the community hub over at mozillaZine.org."
goatzilla :)
Now, what made that post "+1: Informative"?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
But where is the *love*?
I used a combination of Paint Shop Pro and the Gimp.
I like the GIMP -- beautiful piece of software. But that being said, there are definitely things that it doesn't do that would be nice to have. There's a reason the parent poster had to use Paint Shop Pro as well.
The GIMP was modeled heavily after Photoshop -- as a photo retouching tool, though less work was put into for-print output features (like fancy color matching, duotons, color separations) and more into for-computer output (solid image compression and many file formats supported).
It does not, however, fit into the genre of program that existed during the 80s and the early 90s -- the "raster paint program". MacPaint or the Windows Paint program are good examples of this. They tend to emphasize per-pixel operations -- it's easy to, say, draw a single-pixel-thick line or polygon. It's usually not possible to do fine color adjustments. You usually used these things to make synthetic-looking art, diagrams, or game/UI art.
I'm kind of sad to see these things go. If I want to make a rectangle in the GIMP, yes, I can draw a rectangular selection and then fill it. I can simulate the MacPaint polygon tool by using non-smooth Bezier selections and then filling the area...but the old MacPaint style operations made many common computer graphics operations easier.
I wish the GIMP did have something like this -- it'd be easy to add, even if it led to a bit of feature duplication.
The GIMP also isn't much of a natural-media creation program. Anyone that's used MetaCreation's (now procreate's) Painter with a tablet, artist or not, realizes the kind of incredible, easy to make, natural-media output you can get from a computer. I've never painted with real oil paints in my life, but I can do decent-looking oil paintings with Painter and a tablet. The features to support this take some work (at the arcitectural level, unfortunately), but not tons of complex work. I think there are three major things that need to be added to the GIMP to support this. Layers support the image, and an alpha mask. They need a paper map, a dampness map, and a bump map. Layers must have bump maps attached (a la layer maps in the GIMP) which are used to recompute the bump map in real time. This allows paint accumulation (the "streaks" of paint buildup you see in real paintings. Various tools (chisels, scrapers) depress the bump map, and others (paint brushes, crayons) build up the bump map. The dampness map is used to determine bleeding in paper -- if a sponge is passed over paper and then a felt-tip pen drawn over the paper, the ink bleeds much more. Finally, the paper map determines amount of paint/crayon/whatever that comes off of the brush at any point -- it's used to give the paper "texture" and look like canvas, rough paper, wood, whatever.
The GIMP will probably never do this, and I think it's a bit of a shame.
The GIMP is not, despite admirable moves in that direction, a vector graphics program. The Bezier features are very nice, and enterprising artists can do really amazing things with them. Misery has some very good examples of what pseudo-3d work one can do with Bezier curves in a raster graphics program. For the GIMP to be able to compete with, say, Illustrator (which I think *is* possible without architectural changes -- programs like SuperPaint have combined vector and raster elements before), it needs objects, fitting to paths, and better numerical control over elements. You need to be able to say "set a constraint that this object is three inches to the left of this object" and be able to say that object A is two inches big and 300x200 pixels down from the top of the canvas.
It's possible to "stroke" a path -- make a brush draw along a path, but not possible to make text follow a path. This would be a really nice feature, and crucial for a vector graphics program.
Finally, the paths are the closest things to objects the GIMP has -- they are no more than outlines, however, and cannot contain color information, and do not have dependencies. For example, I cannot set a path to contain a gradient (and reshaping the path thus produce a mutated object with the same gradient). The GIMP also has no concept of dependencies -- I can't say "stroke along this path" or "make a drop shadow of the selection contained by this path", update the path, and then have the generated graphics automatically update, though this would be a *tremendous* boon to a graphic artist. The closest I've seen to this is using Illustrator in conjunction with Photoshop with Illustrator's few raster features (letting one, say, create an glass object that distorts objects behind it-- and has an updated distorted area if I reshape the glass object).
Anyway, those are my wish list for the GIMP. I'd like to see an end to statements like "I made this with Paint Shop Pro and the GIMP" or "I made this with Photoshop and the GIMP" and just see "I made this with the GIMP".
May we never see th
Troll? What the hell? What are the moderators smoking today?