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GIMP 2.2 Splash Screen Contest Revisited
As reported here earlier, the GIMP team asked artists to submit their artwork to be used as the official splash screen for GIMP 2.2. The reaction was overwhelming. More than 666 splash screens have been submitted. You can look at the submissions in
the gallery or download the movies, grab some popcorn and enjoy...
Once you've seen all splashes, you may want to help the judges to pick the best splash by voting for your favorites.
Had to use 666 huh?
More than... how many?
That's weird. I mean, "more than 600" I could understand. "Nearly 700" would probably be more precise and less wordy. But more than 666? Why?
More than 666 splash screens have been submitted would that be a conservative estimate?
Hundreds of visitors
storming in to browse pictures sized >100kb.
Or the simpler way of telling it:
Slashdoted.
Someone seems to be obsessed with the mnumber 666.. why not say 670 or whatever number it really is, instead of "more than 666"...
666 submissions? The name "the gimp" in general. What are these developers up to?
adventure-today.com
... the number of The GIMP? :-S
Organic free-range music... yum!
Dijjer links to movies:
full set Day one Day two Day three Day four Day five
Personally, I really would prefer some status indicator in the users menu or in some kind of applet (KDE already does that, blinking mouse cursors and similar), but please, PLEASE do not use splash screens.
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
the most.
I'm from the UK, pretty much every tele vision show has some form of premium rate voting hotline number to see someone get evicted from a relaity tv show or vote for them based on credit for something like singing etc.
Why the hell do we need to vote for a splash screen? Whats wrong with just looking at the apache log and count the hits?
What anoys me further is that all the geeky looking artwork was just that, looking geeky, without any real throught to the production quality.
Why UNIX?
I really like the default one that you see when clicking the article link : a splashscreen that looks like slashdot, but with this funy little spinning cursor.
luvley !
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Maybe that is what Gimp is. The Beast to the pay-to-play competition.
Evolution or ID?
Sorted results by popularity are now available.
Is that a good way to do it?
"You might as well not bother voting for your favorite, since it only has 13 votes."
Just tell me `subject` than a web server flood done by unleashing a horde of geeks directly the server's CGI image-feeding script...
Apparently he's posted the last 10 stories or so. Never seen the name before. Or else I never noticed.
Interesting contest, however, why is there a need for a splash screen? Would not it be better to change the application, so the startup sequence will be very short and the application will be immediately useable?
What about lazy initialisation/lazy loading of modules? I doubt that for common tasks you are going to use all modules/scripts/filters whatever. I think that it would be sufficient just to load list of modules and necessary information (such as icons or descriptions...). Then load module on first use.
Same can be used for other applications (OpenOffice?).
I do not believe that a modular application with good design can not be changed to use lazy initialisation/lazy loading. Perhaps I am wrong...
What do others think?
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
What drives feature development with Open source isn't market demand or anticipated market demand, it's the whims of the individuals developing it, which may or may not be related to market wants/needs.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
What a troll this post is. Adding a different splash screen is almost zero effort from the programmer and this kind of competition is just made for two purposes:
1) Promote Gimp and get publicity
2) Make the non-programming community feel involved, by letting them make a splash screen.
What is so freaking wrong about this? 16-bit support will come eventually, but could be really hard work that none of the volunteers that make it, have gotten around to yet.
Only the gimp team would make a movie of splash screens. ROTF.
So many posts criticising the use of the number 666... Looks like noone on slashdot has a sense of humour. The only acceptable jokes are old, unoriginal, non-innovative, stereotypical ones like "netcraft confirms it" and "in korea only old people...".
Well, maybe they ment that Everyone can "read" and "write" GIMP's new splashscreens ? Or... maybe not
Youch, I think we broke that one.
I really like Gimp however splash screens are lovely but shouldn't they be concentrating on making it an effective commercial alternative to Photoshop.
This is just retarded. Do the GIMP developers actually want their software to gain wider acceptance? It does not need a new splash screen, it needs a NEW NAME! Imagine trying to get someone to try the GIMP:
User: Can you get me a copy of Photoshop?
Advocate: No, but I can give you a copy of The GIMP, its a free alternative to Photoshop, and its really good!
User: The GIMP? What kind of a name is that? I'll get hold of Photoshop thanks!
I mean come on, GIMP developers - we all know its a great piece of software but you have to admit that marketing matters. Look at FilmGIMP - they changed their name to CinePaint. Why? "This change will present a more professional name", it says on their site.
The GIMP team would be much better off holding a new name contest than a splash screen contest.
Splash screens are the work of Satan himself!
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Actually, I think the reason for a contest for designing the splash screen was so that the programmers didn't have to spend their time designing one.
The Gimp team was forced to file for bankruptcy and cease development after its main supporters decided to cause a DDoS attack on their web site by simultaneously downloading a massive number of pictures and movies from their site.
SCO commented: "This attack is further proof that the Open Source community is largely a terrorist organization that cannot be trusted. They seem to be even as we speak cannabalizing their own allies. This behavior proves that we own linux."
Can I use Photoshop to draw the splashscreen?
Gimop isn;t going to be faster, or more fully featured, and will never be as user friendly as its closed source rivals.
But when it comes to splash screens, we will see the Open Source software outclasses even the best closed source application.
And that comes from crowd that usually trashes Microsoft for it's "bloatware" and ridicules Windows users who install cute/stupid add-ons and desktop themes and whatnot.
"More than 666 splash screens have been submitted."
Is Satan into design now?
--
Logically, then, they would be most applicable to applications such as graphical editors, games, or other graphically intense applications. Similarly, audio players (I'm thinking of WinAmp) benefit from "audio" splash screens.
An ancillary benefit of splash screens is to identify the version, build, available plug-ins, etc. of the application. And of course, show the progress of loading the application.
Nevertheless, it seems steps should be done to make them less annoying and more useful as applications and splash screens mature. I might suggest a list:
- No always on top splash screens
- Option to turn in off
- Dynamic content (perhaps downloaded periodically)
- Especially for editors, a "How did they do that" tutorial.
Steps such as these might make splash screene worth the resources they consume.Topic first: I say take a random sample of about 23.41 pictures and then use them randomly every time the GIMP starts up, a bit like Jext.
OT: Interestingly 666 is also the number of man and was also code for Caesar Nero. There wasn't much free speech at the time. 666 is also 3/4 of 888 which is the number of Jesus in Greek [Iesous = iota (10) + eta (8) + sigma (200) + omicron (70) + upsilon (400) + sigma (200) = 888]. Hence man cannot save himself because 8 is the number of completion in the Bible, but Jesus Christ can save all men if they choose him. Remember, John 3:17, Christ came not into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. I think there's plenty of evidence that we don't need anyone to condemn us, we can do it on our own pretty easily.
There should be choice then. Lets put an option to disable the splash screen!
\m/
99% of these are really horrible. Just because you know how to use GIMP doesn't make you an artist or a designer. As a matter of fact, I'd say the exact opposite is true: geeks use one side of their brain while artists use the other. Chances are, if you're a geek, you really suck at art and you should really just stop it. Why else was the internet butt ugly until the past couple of years? Because the graphic artists stepped up and stopped the programmers from designing.
To help distribute the load, I have mirrored the full movie on my website. Please go here to view it.
... or 37x18 pixel thumbnails. :-))
(No, the numbers are not arbitrary
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Interesting. "All my images are created by gimp" then probably isn't something which indicates high quality pictures either ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Another one?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Let me guess... a free copy of The Gimp! :)
Jiggity
No. I skipped Pulp Fiction because when I was old enough to understand R movies, I had already learned about the problems with The Walt Disney Company, its distributor. I see "bring out the GIMP" and think only "click the icon to launch a bitmap image editor".
PIMP is taken, twice: as an older name for NSIS, and as part of the name of a Usenet UA for the GNOME desktop.
Pulp Fiction is published by a division of The Walt Disney Company, one of the major advocates against the public domain. Do you want to associate yourself with people who immediately associate "gimp" with a Disney movie?
I'm thinking that, while a nice picture, an upside-down phallic mushroom with mud on the end of its stem is...well let's just say there are less subliminal options presented.
So what? I don't need color management or 16bit support, and I couldn't care less about pre-press printing features.
There should be choice then. Lets put an option to disable the splash screen!
oror
or
It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.
There you go.... nothing to worry about!
\m/
What is even worse is how programs with splash screens tend to be Java, meaning this splash screen stays on top for many seconds, perhaps up to 30 seconds while the program loads.
Eh, not really. While not attempting to deny you the fun of yanking random opinions from your ass and stating such as facts, I would have to disagree; splash screens cover the spectrum of apps out there.
As to sucking, I generally disapprove of gratuitous splash screens but I really dig the apps that incorporate progress indicators such as naming modules being loaded or the ever-ubiquitous progress meter. Oh, and since the Gimp is a tool primarily for artistic endeavors, it would seem reasonable to show off a little work that can be done with the tool while said tool loads. I always look forward to Gimp's new splash screens.
You can be an atheist and still not want to succumb to some weird cross-over sheep disease -- AC
I saw on the Simpsons the other night a joke about Family Guy that mentioned the South Park show where the old Koreans were the new overlords interested in profit from implementing a Beowulf cluster.
But then I'm new around here.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
With a bar at the top/left/right/bottom of the screen that displays the status of loading applications.
It's enough to tell people whats going on without getting in their way.
You could even put a few bars under the mouse pointer if you wanted something a little more in your face.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Bring out the GIMP. ...... the GIMP's sleeping.
Well I guess you'll just have to wake him up now, won't you!
Queue surfer music.
Lindsay Blanton
RadioReference.com
Namely, putting all 666+ splash images ON A SINGLE PAGE! http://www.mukund.org/temp/gimp/judge/all.php
Even if 1/10th of them were worth displaying (which they're not), that's still too many to put on a single page. And people wonder why The GIMP is still looked down upon...
"This? I can make a hat, I can make a brooch, I can make a pterodactyl..."
All I'm getting is a blank screen.
YES! We have a winner!
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
I'm never going to install quicktime.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Exactly. And professional users who dare pipe up about these things when discussing why GIMP is not yet better than Photoshop, and why GIMP is not ready to replace Photoshop in a professional setting, get flamed to Hell.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
sigh... Once again people need to look "redundant" up in the dictionary.
In other news, following GIMP tradition, all 666 splash screens were accepted by the developers and will appear in 666 separate splash windows when GIMP is started.
1) Most prosumer/professional digital cameras, scanners, and frame grabbers have at least 10-bit, and sometimes 12-bit channels. These are usually cast into 16-bit values in various compatible file formats (i.e. TIFF).
2) More importantly, it is critical that any blending or intensity mapping operations are computed (and have intermediate results stored) in 16-bit to avoid unnecessary banding and clipping. You cast down to 8-bit when exporting to an 8-bit-only file format. Otherwise it's better to keep the precision around to avoid artifacts.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
What is this "more than 666"? Do you mean 667? Why make such a random and meaningless statement?
If it was 666 at the time you wrote, why not say "so far 666 have been submitted". If you wanted to just indicate a large general number, why not say "more than 650" or "almost 700".
It was suposed to be a joke in the first place... nevermind ;D
\m/
- Force all plugins and extensions to implement an interface that self describes the modules... perhaps a special ELF segment naming the interface functions.
- Have a script that uses ld to link a special dynamic link library made up of all the individual plugin's initialization functions. (Since the names have to be unique, it'd need to examine the ELF segments in each DLL for the requisite functions to link, and to create the initialization order, serialiazing the function names to a text file)
- When GIMP loads, rather than scanning each plugin directly, it'd open the plugin-cache.so, then call a built-in function that reads the plugin-cache text file. It'd call each of the listed functions in turn from the plugin cache, and populate it's menus and toolbars with stubs that actually demand-load the plugins.
You'd probably need a system-wide and ~/.gimp specific plugin-cache.so/.txt.
The exception would be any plugins that directly render to the GIMP's UI or that require acquiring resources before the GIMP does.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I work with a lot of web designers and they would never consider a switch to Linux because there is no sensible alternative to Photoshop. This is the gap where I, maybe mistakenly, thought the gimp was trying to fill.
As they are a primarily Linux based project I don't see how they could be a 'too cheap to buy photoshop alternative' they don't even compete on the same platform. Should we be pertitioning adobe to supply a Linux version of Photoshop? Surely it wouldn't be too big a port from the OSX version.
As for the remarks regarding windows and my cohorts, I don't know why you're directing them at me. I am a strong supporter of OSS which is exactly why I'd like to see the Gimp and Photoshop compete as it might attract more people to Linux.
Once you've seen all splashes, you may want to help the judges to pick the best splash by voting for your favorites.
I have to look at all of them before I can vote? Really?
So many splash screens to choose from, yet the program still has a name that offends many to the point of not using it only because of its name. Perhaps the project should find new priorities.
What kind of system are you running OpenOffice that it is rendering the system useless until the application is loaded? Must be something crappy.
The Farewell Tour II
Is it just me? It seems to be encoded with DIVX, but VLC does not show a single frame of video.
Is this a Windows-only solution?
But the thing about the re-link is still important; this way you only dlopen one file at startup that does everything, and you still haven't touched any of the other plugins.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
1) Multiple virtual desktops
.). Most users are stupid. "The program didn't start in 2 seconds *CLICK CLICK* *CLICK CLICK* *CLICK CLICK* WHY THE HELL ARE THERE 4 OF THEM NOW?!!!?11111113
:)
2) NOT always on top (AOT splashes suck)
Some programs take unruly amounts of time to load (gimp being one of them, it loads ~800 plug-ins, brushes, patterns, tools, script engines, scripts. .
Splash screens are important: They represent a small portion of the program which loads quickly and shows the user that it is indeed loaded. Linux desktop environments as a courteousy flash an hourglass or a watch or bounce an icon; but they don't really track if the program is actually running or not.
KDE, for example, will bounce the icon and show a "Starting XXX" in the taskbar for a full 30 seconds if the started program exits (ps -A shows it's not there). I've had this happen when Firefox segfaults on start-up, multiple times. If Firefox had a splash screen, I wouldn't have stared at my background for a whole minute or two waiting
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I think you meant daemons... right?
16bit support isn't a prepress feature, its a feature that everybody who ever does a little brightness correction or blur would love. 16bit isn't usefull for the final image, but it reduces clipping artefacts that you get with 8bit color in the editng process a lot. There simply is no way to get some effects when you work with just 8bit integer.
Look for example at http://www.debevec.org/Research/HDR/ the second image is what Gimp can give you, the fourth is what the reality looks like, the third is what Gimp would be able to do with support for higher color ranges. Quite a different, isn't it?
Let's just have a /usr/share/gimp-2.2/splash/ subdirectory where gimp will choose one at random each time it's started. Give some of its arteest users some eyecandy to enjoy whenever they boot up.
All the screens kinda sucked, but that's not an invitation to slashdot this site TOO.
love slashdot. populate it. use it. abuse it. hate it. kill it. miss it. stop following links, they only kill servers.
Done entirely in MS Paint.
Vote for mine here.
All your Sybase are belong to us.
If you want to help with this effort you can join the development mailing lists.
A typically stupid remark. I am not a C / C++ application developer, and so will not be assisting in GIMP development. That does not mean I have no insight or right to comment on the usability of GIMP in the fields that I do know about, thank you.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Splash screens perform the job of making you think that the app takes less time to load than it does. It doesn matter how much it actually takes, because a couple more seconds doesn hurt productivity, but perceived delays are important, they are demotivational (is that a word?).
Splash screens are good at that, and that is one of the reason why they are so common, they add to a more pleasant user experience. Of course, eclipse and gnome sttyle splashes are nicer than others, noone likes always-on-top splash screens, but that's no reason to get rid of all of them.
"As reported here earlier"
I just thought of something. If every Slashdot story was prefixed with "As reported earlier" , then (technically) we wouldn't have any more dupes!
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
My point, Mr. Coward , is that people who say that GIMP is ready to replace Photoshop are factually wrong.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Any guesses as to how many of those images were really made with Photoshop?
... the stupid looking fox or whatever on it... otherwise people will think GIMP is some sort of insult to the mentally disabled. With the wilbur-fox thing, then at least people go "hmmm, i guess that's the gimp". Maybe they should consider changind the name. But then again, the open source movement seems to have problems with naming, as seen with phoenix->firebird->firefox. Maybe gimp will go something like gimp->handi->tard
Meh.
Pick one randomly at startup.
For those who don't want splash screen enable
gimp --nosplash
I haven't seen that many professional designer who want (or can't?) discuss anything.
I wouldn't want to come in the way of your wallowing in shame, but the only time I use openoffice is when someone sends me a .doc file that I need to ope so I don't want to waste resources on oooqs, and I don't have and non-local printers.
Anyhow, if there's a splash screen, loading it should be the very first thing a program does so it should show up almost instantly, not half way through the program loading. And if openoffice is doing things like initializing printers and suck while loading, thats just terrible design.
Slashdot posters complaining about the UI are trolling, nothing else. I've even stated here on slashdot that we would accept a patch that abstracts window handling in a way that allows to implement different backends. The default backend would be the current behaviour, another backend could implement a windows-in-windows UI. Everyone who keeps claiming that the GIMP developers wouldn't care or would refuse to accept any changes is either badly misinformed or a troll. Anyone who really cares should shut and start coding.
I recently posted a comment about OOo's infamous always-on-top splash screen.= 10920011
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=130816&cid
Your window manager might let you get rid of the splash screen. I use KDE 3.2, which lets me drag the screen away if I hold down Alt while dragging. More recently, I learned how to sink the splash screen beneath all the other windows:
KDE Control Center > LookNFeel > Window Behaviour > Actions > Inner Window-Title Bar & Frame > Modifier Key + Middle Mouse Button: set this to "Lower" (or "Toggle Raise and Lower")
Now when you middle-click the splash screen while holding down the Alt key (or whatever the "Modifier" key is set to), the splash screen is covered by all the other windows. Talk about retribution! Still, it bugs me that it doesn't automatically do this.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
A splash screen should be more than just a pretty picture; it should serve as a representation of what the program is about. Too many people think "Oooh, I took such a pretty photo once, this is my chance to be famous." Sorry, no.
Some of the stuff uploaded is wonderful (I remember one that had an artist's palette...simple yet evocative). I just wish someone had the time to reduce those 666+ submissions to a small subset chosen with the following rules:
- No unmanipulated photographs.
- If multiple minor variants on the same image are uploaded, only the first (or last--I don't really care how you break the tie) will be used.
That would be a huge public service.