GIMP's 10th Anniversary Splash Contest

Lalakis writes "Barely in time for GIMP's tenth birthday is the 10th Anniversary GIMP Splash Contest. This new contest requires a tutorial with the submissions, so get out your favorite text editor and show us all of the beautiful things you can make your GIMP do. Submit those entries and wait to see if there is a gimp-2.2.10 with your entry as the very special release splash. Here are all the current submissions. The contest will be open until Sunday the 27th of November, at which point the winner will be announced and committed to CVS. Happy Birthday GIMP!"

Comments

Splash the gimp

[0110011001110101]

But the gimps sleeping...

Well wake em up!

This can't be right

[J. T. MacLeod]

If the GIMP is ten years old, that says a lot about my own age.

I refuse to accept this arbitrary number!

Birthday Song!

[AntiDragon]

Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday to you!
You like tight black leathers...
And belong in a zoo! .... ... ...OK..I'm really sorry..don't know what came over me..I'll climb back in my box now...

Fancy text editor

[0110011001110101]

FTFA - so get out your favorite text editor and show us all of the beautiful things you can make your GIMP do.

I looked at those current submissions, and if I could get my text editor to do that, I wouldn't need any fancy competition to validate my skillz!

Re:Fancy text editor

[Lalakis]

Are you a journalist? Read the whole sentence:

This new contest requires a tutorial with the submissions, so get out your favorite text editor and show us all of the beautiful things you can make your GIMP do.

Is it ok

[commodoresloat]

to submit an entry I created with Photoshop?

Age shows

[Anonymous Coward]

GIMP's age shows. It has been improved and polished what it has but it has also in features fallen behind with the modern features the commercial professional photo editing and imagery applications have. I wouldn't myself even bother noticing GIMP's anniversaries nowadays, sadly.

No dynamic effect layers, the drawing tools are from CCCP, the color management still has got a lot to do, pdf importing isn't very good afaik, ... Bah. GIMP can imho just plain rot in hell and stay in the earlier 80s as a tool as the developers seem to be prioritizing.

Re:Age shows

[diegocgteleline.es]

No dynamic effect layers, the drawing tools are from CCCP, the color management still has got a lot to do, pdf importing isn't very good afaik

But they're adding a new splash screen!

Re:Age shows

[staticsage]

"the drawing tools are from CCCP"

The drawing tools are from the USSR?

Re:Age shows

[ozmanjusri]

The drawing tools are from the USSR?

In Soviet Russia, the drawing tool is you!

Redirect your efforts.

[Stumbles]

You know instead of worrying about some silly splash screen. How about making it support 16 bit tiffs and saving at that. AFAIK 2.2.9 don't.

Re:Redirect your efforts.

[dominator]

The developers don't need to do a lick of work for this splash screen contest. It's fun, something a non-hacker can do, and good advertising for the Gimp. It's not like the devs are all drawing splash screens instead of making 16-bit support work (not that you have a right to demand that they do *anything*, let alone a specific feature on a specific timeline). It's not the "either-or" situation you make it out to be...

Thank you for windows port

[CrazyJim1]

The free Gimp port to windows saved me money I would have had to use on a commercial Photoshop. Its nice to have another piece of free software that belongs on every person's computer.

Re:Thank you for windows port

[benbob]

I have saved money and also stayed on the right side of the law thanks to the GIMP.
In the "war on piracy", there is no better weapon than Open Source :-) Why steal it (Piracy IS theft remember!) when:
a. you can get it for free.
b. it does almost exactly what you want and,
c. you can even have a say in what it does next! if you're that way inclined ;-)

NO

[radicalskeptic]

In OS X, when you open the GIMP under X11, the spash screen is the most annoying part of the whole program. It's always on top, and it takes at least a minute to load all the fonts, extensions, scripts etc. Please, if you're going to have a splash screen, at least make sure other windows aren't stuck behind it! Maybe it is different in Windows or Linux, but it's a real peeve of mine on OS X.

Re:NO

[szo]

the linux version has --no-splash, I would guess the OSX has too.

Re:NO

[BigSven]

Now why is that the fault of GIMP? GIMP does set the appropriate window hint that is telling the window manager that this is a splash screen. It appears that Apple is to be blamed here for delivering a lousy X server.

On a related note, GIMP startup takes about 3 to 5 seconds here. See also http://svenfoo.geekheim.de/index.php/2005-11-05/gi mp-startup-time/

Tigert + Gimp == awesome

[Gopal.V]

tigert.gimp.org was the place to look for the coolest tricks with gimp. I used to just love the splash screen history there. And the Bugs Must Die was my bugzilla image replacing the traditional Ant for a long time.

All in all, without tigert's demos - I'd have relegated gimp to being a glorified paint application instead of the cool tool for web-desginer it has recently become (and I'm not a professional web-dev, but I still like to muck around with gimp). Jimmac is good, but Tigert was and is the gimp wizard I shall worship for ever.

Time flies

[gnarlin]

10 years and still no CMYK support, which incidentally is the key feature which is holding the GIMP back from becoming a serious contender with photoshop. One would think that someone or some group would see the value of such a feature in a free software graphics program and have it implemented. If for nothing else then to save money and have a better bargaining position when dealing with vendors of propriatery notoriety.

Re:Time flies

[FooBarWidget]

Why are everybody so obsessed with CMYK? Face it: most people are not professional graphics designers and don't need CMYK. If I want to touch up some photos for my homepage, I couldn't care less what CMYK is. If Joe Average wants to create a few drop shadows for his photo gallery, he doesn't need CMYK.

Besides, professionals wouldn't use Gimp even if it supports CMYK. They'd still use Photoshop because that's what they were thaught at school. Implementing CMYK wouldn't solve anything at all - the peopel who complain would just move on to new things to complain about.

No splash screen

[crow]

The best splash screen would be not having one at all. Fortunately, there's a command-line option to turn it off, but I would rather not have to set an alias for every application.

At least it doesn't steal the keyboard focus like OpenOffice does.

I would submit for the contest...

[Apostata]

...but the number of steps involved to create a simple drop-shadow would depress anyone who read the tutorial.

Re:I would submit for the contest...

[BigSven]

One step is too depressing? Yes, there's a script that does it all in one step and it has been part of the GIMP distribution for like 8 years.

Needed features

[Orrin Bloquy]

1. CMYK support. RGB is for screen, CMYK is for print, and Aldus/Adobe never had trouble with this concept.
2. Contiguous fill. When pestered about this the answer from GIMP developers was that the paintbucket code was "too optimized" (i.e. obfuscated, undocumented) to modify. If I select a region and pour paint inside it, the paint shouldn't leave the margins of the selection.
3. Less crappy documentation on creating plugins.
4. For shits&giggles, an LSS import/export filter for those of us who like to make our own ISOLINUX splash screens (the converter's in Perl, how tough could it be)?

I know webcomic artists whose refusal to use the GIMP is completely based on #2. In Photoshop, it's a checkable option. In Fireworks, it isn't.

5. At least one major feature that is missing from Photoshop (like, say, selective region compression in JPEG, which has been part of the spec from the beginning and would allow you to set a different lossy for a region containing text).

Re:Needed features

[slavemowgli]

There's a GIMP fork called CinePaint (formerly known as Film Gimp, as it focused on features needed by the movie/special effects industry) that has CMYK support, IIRC. The features it adds were originally supposed to get merged into GIMP 2.0, but the GIMP developers later told the Film Gimp guys that they didn't want these things in the main branch after all.

For me, this is one of the biggest mistakes the GIMP developers ever made, but it also shows a fundamental problem in their attitude: instead of welcoming additions and new users scratching their own itches, they locked them out and told them they weren't welcome. Of course, you do have to focus on what you want to accomplish in a project and avoid feeping creaturism, but rejecting features that are clearly useful and within the scope of a project... that's arrogance.

As someone else said, it actually shows that GIMP is 10 years old by now. It's still a useful tool, and I actually use GIMP 1.2 almost daily (I also have GIMP 2.2 installed, but I always found it slower and more clumsy than the earlier versions), but the idea to produce a free Photoshop replacement... that was missed long ago, and without some radical changes on both the code and the project management level, I doubt it's ever going to happen.

I hate to say it, but GIMP is looking old, and considering that it's still considering a kind of flagship among open source application, it's making us all look bad. Is this really the best we can come up with?

Re:Needed features

[tialaramex]

"If I select a region and pour paint inside it, the paint shouldn't leave the margins of the selection."

Hold down SHIFT, or select the radio button for this kind of fill (which is labelled and has an annotation indicating that it can be activated with SHIFT).

Re:Needed features

[BigSven]

Actually, it wasn't quite like you put it. The FilmGimp developers told the GIMP developers that they don't think their code should be merged into the main trunk. It wasn't ready for it and would have broken things all over the place. FilmGimp was after all a very reduced version of GIMP. Noone has ever been locked out of GIMP development. I wonder where you picked that up.

And no, neither FilmGimp nor CinePaint have CMYK support. That has never been the intention behind this project. Instead it was about adding support for 16bit color depth. That is of course an important feature and at some point it is going to be added to GIMP as well. I can't tell you when because it simply depends on when someone will finish the remaining bits that are needed to bring GEGL into shape so that GIMP can start to use it.

If you think that GIMP is looking old, perhaps you should really consider to replace that old copy of GIMP 1.2 you are using.

Re:Needed features

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a GIMP fork called CinePaint (formerly known as Film Gimp, as it focused on features needed by the movie/special effects industry) that has CMYK support, IIRC. The features it adds were originally supposed to get merged into GIMP 2.0, but the GIMP developers later told the Film Gimp guys that they didn't want these things in the main branch after all.

That's a rather biased view of how things happened. I suppose that some CinePaint developers would like to describe the history like that. But looking at the archives of the GIMP mailing lists reveals a different story: Film Gimp started from a fork of an old version of the GIMP 1.x (based on GTK1), while the main development was taking place on what would eventually become GIMP 2.x (based on GTK2). Film Gimp development stagnated for a couple of years, until a new guy (Robin Rowe) appeared and decided to revive it.

When he brought this up on the developer's list, the consensus was that it would be much better to take the best bits of the old Film Gimp codebase and merge them into the new architecture that was developed for GIMP 2.x instead of continuing to work on the old Film Gimp and making the fork diverge even further from the GIMP. There were also some arguments why the design of the old Film Gimp and the way it was storing image data was not appropriate for the GIMP and would have to be adapted instead of being merged directly, but I'm not sure that I understand the details of that. Anyway, it looks like he decided to go ahead and work on the old fork despite the suggestion from the GIMP developers. Later, that code was renamed CinePaint. Also, CinePaint distanced itself from the GIMP in very obvious ways (check some old versions of the CinePaint home pages in the web archive). So although the GIMP developers could have handled this in a better way, a lot of issues could have been solved if the features needed for the movie industry had been integrated in the then-current GIMP instead of reviving an old fork like Robin did.

Just check the archives of the GIMP mailing lists and you will see a different story than the simplistic view that you just described. Also, this statement on the CinePaint home page is just a (bad) joke: "Later the film industry was told no, that GIMP wasn't interested in meeting the film industry's requirements because it wasn't what existing GIMP users cared about." This is very different from what I understand after browsing the archives of the mailing lists (although I can never know if some other discussions took place behind the scenes). Anyway, if you are interested in checking this for yourself, the GIMP list archives are linked from http://www.gimp.org/mail_lists.html and you can just browse through the discussions around the times when Robin posted something on the developers lists (check mail-archive for search, or manual browse through the old XCF lists). There were a few personal attacks from both sides, though. So these guys should learn to get together in a better way. But still, it looks like Robin is as much (if not more) to blame as the GIMP developers.

Re:Needed features

[Raphael]

you can just browse through the discussions around the times when Robin posted something on the developers lists (check mail-archive for search, or manual browse through the old XCF lists).

Browsing through these archives is not so easy, given their limited search features. But anyway, as I was (unfortunately) involved in some of these discussions, I can confirm that the story is very different from what is presented on the CinePaint home page. My opinion may be biased in this case, but I think that it is unfair to blame the GIMP developers for the CinePaint fork (or more exactly, for the lack of a merge between Film Gimp and GIMP).

Inkscape's cool too + SVG

[Forget4it]

Don't forget the beauty of Inkscape - the latest version v0.42.2 made it even cooler to use to create web-savy SVG that Firefox 1.5 now renders out of the box. I love those Calligraphic pen tools!

Exactly

[cca93014]

Real geeks don't win prizes; the merely have them committed to CVS.

Re: Submissions

[Urusai]

OK, now the gimp is seeking submissives...er, I mean...

Is it OK to submit Photoshopped entries?

Re:10 years of Innovation

[KiloByte]

In fact, the user interface differs so much that a photoshop user has a very hard time using Gimp -- and someone used to the Gimp finds Photoshop cumbersome.

Another archive of splash screens.

[antdude]

Here on the official Web site.

Re:Not funny

[temojen]

Come far? only if you want to limit yourself to cartoon drawing (better done vector anyways). Still no 16 bit support. Still no colour management. Both are must haves for photograph editing.

What about lazy initialisation?

[stivi]

First, let me congratulate the Gimp for its 10 years.

Second, the splash screen is really annoying as well as slow application loading. What abou lazy initialisation of everything that is not needed at the moment and is not essential for basic application run? Just load information about plug-ins, such as name, description, menu entries or tool icons at app startup. Then load tools/plug-ins/scripts when the user first needs them.

When I launch an application I want to use it immediately. I am fine with half or whole second when I am going to use a tool once or twice for the very first time.

On the other hand, why should not application learn something about me and my habits? For this simple task, at the beginning, you do not need anything fancy, just collect statistics about tool/feature usage. With this, application can optimallise the lazy initialisation...for example, loading when idle, or preloading only frequently used, or ... (imagine).

I wish all splashcreens go away and applications start learning something about their users...

Frankly, they should change the name

[Dirtside]

I love the GIMP, I use it every day (yes, for real work), but the name is beginning to bug me more and more. It may seem harmless, but 1) it could be a lot more appealing with a better name, and 2) yes, there are some people who find the name offensive. We wouldn't want it named New Image Gnu Graphics Editing Routine, would we?