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The GIMP Gets Ready for 2.2
An anonymous contributor writes "As promised, this time it didn't take another 3 years for a new stable GIMP version to be released. 8 months after GIMP 2.0 hit the road, GIMP 2.2 is almost done. The GIMP developers released 2.2-pre2 today and unless any major problems show up, the GIMP 2.2.0 release is going to follow later this month. The GIMP Wiki has a comprehensive list of new features in GIMP 2.2 and here are some screenshots of the development version."
I wonder if the GIMP is slightly more useable on Windows in its next incarnation? I have been raving about the GIMP to anyone who will listen, for most people I know it's a very worthy replacement for Photoshop.
;)) and put the GIMP on XP for her. When she complained it was unusable, I didn't believe her - I've found it very intuitive under Linux. But after trying it on XP, it really does feel like a crippled version of the package I know and love - it's clunky, ugly and restrictive.
:/
However I recently set up a dual boot laptop for my gf (the only way she will boot into Linux though is to play FreeCiv
Now of course, she is using a commercial package derived from a bittorrent source, and my OSS evangelism has fallen flat on its face
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
Gimp seems like a really good graphics package, but I still really struggle with the fact that it opens all these seperate boxes that I have to move around. I just want them snapped into a background.
I want the good old Photoshop/Illustrator/Dreamweaver layout, without having to shuffle 4 floating tool windows about that do different stuff. I'm sure that there is a really good reason to the layout, but I just can't get beyond this unusual interface, and just switch to windows graphics packages because of it.
Even if I make the image take up my whole screen, I don't like the fact that the tool window etc can wander around and aren't fixed - like every other graphics package that I've ever used. Why oh why does it have to be different?
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
Improved ability to copy and paste between GIMP and other applications, including OpenOffice and Abiword.
Yes! The number of times I've seen Linux newbies ask "Why can't I copy and paste from GIMP" is huge. Looks to be a great release
Yeah, fine, nice features but I wonder why there is nearly no interest in supporting more than 8bits per color. There is a lot of digital cameras out there, I scan my photos in 48bit mode. It's pretty annoying to to the basic color adjustments in (unstable and ugly) cinepaint which I have to restart after each load/save to avoid a crash and then to continue editing the image in gimp2. If more features are added it will be even harder to make everything properly work in a greater color depth.
Another thing that I miss for a long time is 'macro recording' similar to MS Office or Photoshop actions. Why do I have to write some weird script-fu skeletons and look up for functions and their parameters? It would be much easier if I could record my actions and then to parametrize them some way...
I asked about this at mailing list but the replies were a bit vague about those topics (or even angry)...
Anyone notice that the eyes on the GIMP icon move? That's the first time I noticed anything animated on slashdot other than the ads.
I looked in the feature list but i couldnt find this feature, its been aching to be in there for years and its one of the only major reasons i dont use GIMP: Non-destructive filters, i.e being able to apply a filter and then later go back and edit the parameters of that filter or take it away, much like photoshops adjustment layers and effects panel. Theres no excuse for not putting this in because it could fit in the existing structure and filters. As my final year project im writing something similar to that idea but a kind of hybrid with connectable blocks. I really wish they would put this in, they could easily do it better than photoshop and make GIMP serious competition. If they already have someone let me know?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
* ugly user interface, no matter of WiW is the way to go or not, currently I have to dig around for my palette or brush dialogs far to many times they really MUST be dockable to the image window to make Gimp painless to use. People saying that the current way is 'right' are just bloody ignorant, this issue is really poping up every time gimp is mentioned somewhere, yet still the developers failed to address it properly in the last 5 years
* lack of a proper fullscreen mode, while its there is quite limited in they way that one can scroll, dialog boxes cover the drawing area so that one constantly has to move stuff around, again proper docking to the image borders might help a lot
* lack of advanced brushes, currently all of gimps brushes are quite primitive, just the bare basics and there is no way to write new-ones as plug-ins, making it hard to actually create new ones. That said it was been tried to implement new cool stuff, but it never made its way into the Gimp:
http://www.levien.com/gimp/wetdream.html
* lack of macro recorder, my 1996 version of Corel Photopaint had already a kick-ass macro recorder, making it a joy to create scripts, you just recorde a macro, do what you want, go into the script editor add a few parameters to it, add a GUI dialog and you have a nice script in basically no time, Gimp today is still stuck with only Script-Fu and friends which are both a pain to write and debug, no macrorecorder there at all
* lack of power in the scripting, plug-ins and PDB interface lacks functions, there are a bunch of functions that are available in the GUI, but not available in the scripting, so that one has to manually build-them, making scripting even more a pain than it already is. The GUI should ideally be just a 'container' that connects scripts with each other, everything in the GUI should be available in the scripting and each part of Gimp should be modifiable via scripting/plug-ins, brushes, gui, whatever.
* tablet support, while its there it is not really that good, double-clicking is almost impossible on the Gtk components, with a tablet the clicks end up at different positions, Gtk+ seems to lack the tolerance to still register it as doubleclick, might be a Gimp, Gtk+, Xfree86 issue or whatever, however its causing quite huge throuble in Gimp (if there is some fix/hack/patch for it I would like to know)
* load/save dialog, these are really just the standard Gtk+ ones with a single thumbnail, however for a graphic application it would be quite usefull to have full thumbnail view of all images, like you get in Nautilus or any fileviewer
* very bad suport indexed images, one doesn't need them all that often these days, but still sometimes one need them and then Gimp is just a pain in the ass, a decade old version of DeluxPaint was way better at handling them
* no quick&easy way to create brushes, ie. I would like to use a layer click a 'to-brush' button and then paint with it, however thats more or less impossible todo today, I have to save the image as brush, tweak some parameters, then select it from the brush dialog, etc. cost by far to much time for an operation that should really be 'single-click', beside from that brush handling itself is quite a arkward, some brushes are resizable, some others not, while idealy all should be modifiable and it even shouldn't be that difficult to implement
* developers seem to be quite hostile against any suggestions from the outside, both on IRC and on the mailing list, other people seem to have made similar experiences so its not just me, other OSS projects seem to be quite a bit more friendly to their users
There are probally a lot of more issues I have forgotten, but well, that should be the more important ones. Last not least, yeah I know, many people will now say that its OSS so I have no f*** right to critic it and if I would like the features I should implement them myself and beside Gimp is of course doing everything right and I am the one that is just using it wrong (wondering how that can happen after 6 years of gimp usage...), but well, go start flame me now...