Old Software or Open Source?

Pakled writes "I teach a high school multimedia course. We were scheduled to get new software this year but due to several pointy haired bosses, no software was ordered. The software I have to teach is Flash 5, Dreamweaver 2000, Photoshop 7 and (god help me) Movie Maker. The question is: is it better to teach old commercial software or their open source counterparts (Komposer, Gimp, etc.)? Is the steep learning curve and slightly less uniform design worth a little student frustration to teach them software written in the past 5 years?"

Comments

Teaching Graphic Design

[king-manic]

Although Gimp resembles Photoshop it isn't the same. Some skills are transferable but if you are teaching graphic design it's silly to teach anything other then what industry uses. It means they must relearn many skills once they enter the job market. If your teaching at a higher more theoretical level then it might be acceptable because more of it transfers. But if it's a trades school or technical college you're better off teaching the actual industry tools regardless of cost.

With Gimp and Photoshop, there is little question.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gimp clearly cannot compare with Photoshop, and you'd be hard pressed to find Gimp in any professional office. If these students intend to find work with their skills, then Photoshop by far is the best option of the two.

Re:Throw in a little school-angst...

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a fucking job and you'll instantly understand why all these *idiotic* "just refuse" comments that invariably pop up like stinkweed whenever a professional conundrum is posed to Slashdot make the adults laugh bitterly. Refuse for a stupid reason (like this one) and you're likely gone. If you're not gone, you're pegged as being "difficult," and your future with the company is limited. The only situation in which you can refuse to do anything at work and *usually* come out unscathed is if it's due to immediate physical danger. That's all there is to it. Some day, you'll understand.

product specific?

[Anonymous Coward]

Teach them the concepts, not the specific software itself. You're not an adobe or macromedia trainer, why pigeon-hole their education to a particular vendor's products? The software industry is always changing but many of the concepts in the software stay the same..

Re:Wake up

[compro01]

If the UI were fed into a chipper-shredder and some good human interface designers stepped in that's being done for 2.6. they've hired a UI design company called MMIWorks to redesign the GUI.

and the switch to GEGL will take care of the 8-bits-per-channel limit.

then again, this all could be excessive optimism and nothing will really change in 2.6.

Re:Wake up

[krog]

No problem; I don't run Linux.

Concrete examples of GIMPS flaws

[BcNexus]

I can't easily draw outlines of geometric shapes such as circles and squares. Right click menus aren't very context sensitive.

Re:Wake up

[Em Adespoton]

Again, perhaps I'm out in left field here, but why is clicking a window, as a user does with any other application, cause such strife when it's a fact of life for users who don't use focus follows mouse? Seems like you're damning a specific application because of a personal usability bias; which can be observed in every other application the user runs on that system. What am I missing?

As someone who uses a number of graphics design and retouching programs, I'll tell you:

First off, I rarely use the mouse, except as a selection/manipulation tool. All actual transformations and tool selections I do from the keyboard. With the Gimp, this is almost impossible, as your keybindings keep changing as your mouse focus changes.

Second, when working on polishing up a graphic, having a cluttered screen is an anathema. This is why people maximize windows to full screen: so they can concentrate on the image at hand. This doesn't mean they don't multitask; it's easy to use alt-tab, Expose (on Macs), virtual desktops, etc. to switch tasks/windows; this doesn't mean that all those little toolbars always have to be visible on the screen.

I rarely click windows when I multitask; it is all done from the keyboard, which is much faster and more efficient. I don't use focus follows mouse for one significant reason: usually when I'm moving the mouse, I'm moving it to get it out of the way of what I'm working on. If focus and keybindings changed because of this, this would be VERY frustrating. As a result, every time I've attempted to switch to FFM, I've turned it off after a couple of days of getting very frustrated with it.

Re:Wow shortest Ask Slashdot ever.

[gbulmash]

For what it's worth, I recently upgraded from Illustrator 7 to Illustrator CS2. I found the interface to be nearly, if not exactly, identical.

That's because the main differences are things that Adobe has added, like LivePaint and LiveTrace. The main difference between Illustrator 7 and CS2 is that 7's menus are shorter and its dialogues have fewer options.

OTOH, aside from the fact that it handles fewer file formats (open, import, export), I like Inkscape's drawing tools a lot better than Illustrator's, especially some of their path intersection handlers. They're adding cool new stuff almost every month, it seems, but you're sort of taking your life in your hands by trying to do real work with the latest development build, because it can crash on you unexpectedly, like when you're trying to save an hour's worth of work. Still, even 0.45.1 (the most recent stable build) is a great program.

- Greg