I'm quite aware of the religious war between RSS and Atom, thank you.
End of the day, Atom was and always has been on a track to be a by-Hoyle standard. RSS was and is not, and in fact one of -- if not the -- most influential people in the RSS world, Dave Winer, has specifically disavowed any such intent for RSS.
Dave has his reasons, to be sure. But none of them change the fact that Atom can be said to be a standard in a way RSS cannot.
And you might wish to read up on what, exactly, Blogger offers. You can indeed get RSS on Google blogs; you just have to sign up for Blogger Pro.
Oh, I see a Gecko- (or KHTML-) based browser as quite a likely alternative.
Firstly, art of Google's much-hyped corporate philosophy is 'don't be evil'. With that in mind, are they going to trust their brand to MSIE's security record? XPSP2 appears to be a major improvement, but it's still not in the same zip code as 'secure'. Gecko/KHTML seem to be much closer to the mark.
Second, the 'don't be evil' directive would seem to point towards wanting a standards-compliant solution, not a 'standards? what for?' solution.
Third, their history is pro-standards, pro-open APIs: Blogger is XHTML+CSS, and largely (if not entirely) valid. They also implemented the soon-to-be-standardized Atom as their primary syndication API, rather than the wilder-and-woolier RSS. Seems to me that history points more towards an OSS/standards-compliant solution rather than an MSIE shell.
Third, it isn't exactly a secret that MS sees Google as a threat. MS's history being what it is, would a company in their sights roll out a service/product based entirely on MS technology? With as many smart people as Google has, I'm not so sure they would.
Fourth, I don't think the cost of development personnel would have anything to do with it. Google's hiring practices are almost as famous as Microsoft's: they go for the very brightest available (one thing you can't say about Microsoft is that they hire dumbasses--or even just smart foks; they hire scary-smart folks). I don't see any reason they'd change that practice for a browser.
Finally, I don't know as the Google toolbar is evidence one way or another. The toolbar has been implemented (including PageRank) in a Mozilla extension already. I can see Google not much caring about other browsers previously as Moz's market share was teensy-to-non-existent when the Google Toolbar was released, Safari wasn't released yet, NN4 was a nightmare and IIRC neither it nor Opera were anywhere near as extensible as IE at the time. Gecko UAs are just now showing up in sufficient numbers to take seriously, but with a Google toolbar already available why bother?
The only strong counter-argument I see is compatibility: lots of 2nd-tier sites -- and a few 1st-tier sites -- are indifferent to hostile to non-IE/Win browsers and standards. I can see Google being loathe to tarnish their brand by releasing a browser that a whole lot of people would see as broken because it doesn't work with site X, Y or Z.
Still, I think the argument for a non-IE browser is stronger than the argument for an IE shell.
Not 'nuff said,' unless you're working for the Bush administration.
They break out Netscape 5(!)*, 6 and 7 which are all Gecko browsers, same as Moz/Fire__.
Some additional data points:
Browser news puts Gecko-based browsers around 5% for most sources as of 4 Sep.
The latest publicly-available stats from OneStat indicate just under 3%, but that was back in May.
WebSideStory/StatMarket's latest numbers are still the ones used in a July C|Net article putting Moz at 4.5%
Taken together, I would say the best-guess from available evidence puts Moz at the 5% mark in Aug 2004 and climbing.
* Netscape 5 doesn't exist. Netscape went straight from Navigator/Communicator 4.x to Netscape 6, skipping 5 altogether. The Gecko engine identifies as Mozilla 5, so I'm guessing that the Netscape 5 in TheCounter's stats is, in reality, various Gecko-based browsers like Chimera/Camino or some such.
Regardless, the fact that TheCounter includes hits by a non-existant browser indicates you should take their numbers with a grain of salt: however good or bad their sample is, their log parsing methodology is suspect: the Netscape versioning has been common knowledge for oh, 4+ years now but TheCounter still isn't accounting for it. Makes one wonder if they're bothering to filter Opera out of the IE results (Opera includes 'MSIE' in it's UA string by default to circumvent shoddy browser sniffers, so it's easy to overreport IE double-reporting Opera as both IE and Opera).
Nope. Check a map. It's an island (well, a few islands and part of another...) off the coast of Europe (and some other territories scattered about here and there).
Here in the UK people use 'Europe' to mean the continent proper, and most defintely do not generally think of themselves as part of it.
The UK is part of the EU, but hasn't adopted the euro and maintains a profound ambivalence towards the EU.
So referring to the UK as distinct from 'Europe' is entirely proper.
'coherent' and 'increases the learning curve' are relative to Photoshop.
Not necessarily. He also mentions Paint Shop Pro and Fireworks in the article.
In your own words - Neither has anything to do with Photoshop--other than that Photoshop does things the better way, which is to say 'has everything to do with Photoshop'.
Nonsense. Coherent groupings help the user guess at--and remember--functionality of the different tools, and also improve a user's ability to guess at and remember where a given tool is located.
Whether I've used Photoshop or not, remembering where a group of functionally similar tools is located is easier than remembering the location of each tool seperately. More, having those tools grouped visually helps both in terms of guessing at what a tool does ('well, this widget here is grouped the fill and eyedropper tool, so it must have something to do with colors...').
This isn't a matter of 'it's good because it's the way Photoshop does it' as you insist. It's a matter of 'it's good because it gives the user more information to work from'.
The GIMP's tools palette does put similar tools next to one another, but there is no separation from dissimilar tools. That is, you might have the selection tools all on one row, or they might be split on a few rows depending on how wide the toolbox is. A better solution would be to add seperators to the toolbox to ensure that distinct groups stay distinct regardless of the width of the toolbox.
there are limits, feature-wise. It's slowly getting there, but there's still behind PS in some important domains (how far behind depends on whom you're asking)
Forget the features. Really. CMYK and (maybe) 16-bit image handling can stay on the list, sure, but otherwise the rest can go on the back burner. I still remember how to do things in P'shop without all the layer effects and whatnot, and am perfectly happy to give up a bit of that in exchange for a free-as-in-speech app, at least for the time being. Just get the output up to snuff, dammit. And get the UI cleaned up. It's really a screen-hog--worse even than Macromedia's apps, which I'd not thought possible.
the OSX packaging sucked. That was pointed out before several times, but you still seem to be missing it. In particular, the AA output for text and lines works fine on Linux (no win box to test around here now). So this is a separate issue with the OSX port, not with GIMP itself.
I'm running the GIMP on WinXP Pro here. The type is much better than what Joe got, but even with FreeType installed it's still nowhere near the standard set by Fireworks, Photoshop, etc.
Nor are the lines--and while I've read plenty about the FreeType issue, I've read nothing whatever that would indicate the poor rendering of lines Joe had was an aberration unique to OS X. My experience in futzing about with it on Windows (and as yet that's all I've done--futz about) idicates that the line quality is just sub-par in general, but further experimentation may change my opinion.
Now why do you think that iTunes is superior to Rhythmbox- could it perhaps be, at least partially, due to the fact that Apple can integrate iTunes perfectly to the rest of the aspects of the system because they themselves have exclusively written the system- and that this system is only available for very specific hardware constellation which they themselves dictate and design?
Maybe. Then again, iTunes started life as Cassady & Greene's SoundJam MP. Apple purchased it and slapped a bumofugly brushed-plastic UI on it. They've added features to it since, but the basic app was written by a 3rd party.
More, I'm using iTunes on Windows. I only use it as an MP3 player, so I don't really know whether it's comprarable to iTunes on OS X overall, but as an MP3 player it certainly is.
i wouldn't expect users to have common sense or make allowances, not at least in the general case.
Except this isn't the general case. Joe specifically recommends two non-Photoshop apps for image editing. One of those (Fireworks) is very different from Photoshop.
If he can cut Fireworks some slack for being different, I would expect him to cut the GIMP some slack as well.
I also would kill to be able to simply click on a text layer and change it by simply typing the new text... but it doesnt work that way, so I delete the layer and re-make it... an extra 3.7 seconds and 4 clicks... oh well..
3.7 sec * 20 text elements on a page * 5 edits each per day (conservatively) * 5 days per week * 50 work weeks = 92500 seconds/year or ~ 25.7 hours * US$ 50/hr. billed = US$ 1284.72.
'Boss, I just pissed $584.72 down the rat-hole using the GIMP instead of Photoshop. Oh well...'
what would you expect of a user of a certain program, that is proficient has used it for years when he/she tries another program with a different interface and workflow?
I'd expect he'd make allowances for the program being unfamiliar. Considering Joe recommended both Paint Shop Pro and Fireworks in the article, it looks to me like he did.
Or maybe he just needs to 'get used to' the misshapen text generated by the GIMP.
I'm somewhat bored of hearing about users complaining about an application's interface not being like a competitor's.
I can't understand why. The article doesn't criticize the GIMP for being different than Photoshop; it criticizes the GIMP for being inferior to Photoshop--and to Fireworks and Paint Shop Pro to boot, both of which are different than Photoshop as well.
Also, if you don't like the interface, why don't you contribute and improve it? If the antialiasing isn't perfect, why don't you try to fix it?
Because I'm not a C++ programmer. Neither is Joe Gillespie. And while I can't speak for Joe, I don't have the mathematics chops to figure a better anti-aliasing algorithm--or a better one, for that matter.
If you have specific needs, just make them clear and stop complaining.
Exactly what do you call that review, then? He asked for less clutter in the menus, logical groupings of tools and better rendering of lines and type. He even provided an example of why the type rendering in the GIMP is crap. How much clearer does he need to be?
Really, if you don't like an open source application and you are not ready to contribute some efforts to improve it, just buy your software, I don't want to hear anything you have to say.
Then get the rest of the OSS/FS movement to shut the hell up about moving to OSS/FS programs.
Having hordes of evangelists running about telling everyone 'there's a better way' only to greet the folks who listen with 'I don't want to hear anything you have to say' when they point out that the way isn't necessarily better is pretty stupid, no?
Besides, who's forcing you to read the reviews/comments/whatever? If you don't give a rat's ass what non-programmers think of OSS/FS, then just don't read their opinions. Pretty simple.
All this article tells us is that the author is too inflexible to make an informed or useful comment.
Bullshit. The author povides at least two very specific criticisms:
The tools are not grouped in a coherent manner
The interface is littered with icons where none are necessary, making the application appear more complex than it is
Neither has anything to do with Photoshop--other than that Photoshop does things the better way. Both criticisms speak directly to why the GIMP puts off new users: the lack of coherent groupings makes it harder to learn and remember what each tool/function does and where to find it, and the cluttering of the interface puts off newbies by making them sort through more visual 'noise' to find whatever it is they're looking for.
In both cases, the GIMP interface increases the learning curve with no corresponding benefit to power users--a lose-lose tradeoff and just plain bad design.
Beyond that, he also makes some pretty painful observations about the quality of the GIMP's output--or is he perhaps just being closed-minded about he intrinsinc beauty of misshapend letterforms?
All your post tell us is that you're either not willing to read criticsms of the GIMP or are not interested in considering them on their merits.
However, the foundation of science is the idea that, given the same circumstances, any two humans will observe the same thing.
In a strict sense, they won't. Your eyesight may be 20/20, mine 20/30. You may suffer from a different sort of color blindness than I. And so on.
Science spends a lot of time and effort to eliminate subjective and social aspects to convert subjective perception to objective measurement.
Put another way, science spends a lot of time creating a common framework for interpreting and communicating observations--tuning their perceptions to be as coincident as possible, in other words. That is by definition a social process as there are multiple individuals involved.
And beyond a certain point, the labels that different cultures apply to various things, including the colors, are not relevant, because they can be easily translated back and forth, and be understood.
At the point where the observations rely on mathmatics or some other common form of expression, yes.
Once one gets past those language plays a role: it shapes the way we think. How many languages have you learned? Have you not experienced idioms or concepts which simply do not translate well between multiple languages? The German word 'Soergenkind', for example. Languages are full of those sorts of constructs, and one typically runs into them sooner rather than later.
Mathmatics serves as a universal language, a way of reducing or eliminating differences in conceptual framewowrks (though of course it has its own consequences). Likewise, the lingua franca of many fields is currently English, which also serves to mitigate differences.
Furthermore, scientific knowledge is not always taught as a social process.
If it is taught, it is social. Teaching involves communication, which is by definition social.
We cannot all be astronomers, so if we were taught (in a scenario from Orwell) that the stars were 5000 miles away, most people would accept it, and that would form part of their "reality". However, such assertions would not be internally consistent to a person who was capable of investigating them. So in that sense I believe there is an objective reality.
Except that we cannot know any objective reality except through the filters of our senses and our intellects, the latter being at least partly a result of social forces. We can model it, can test the models and can develop frameworks within the models and tests can be shared and repeated by others. But in the end, we're all sharing a construct.
More significantly, for the person who is unable to discover that the stars are more than 5000 miles away they may as well in fact be 5000 miles away. Whether there are others who know better is irrelevant; those believing the stars are 5000 miles away, or that a patch will grow one's sex organ, will behave as though that really were true whether it is or not. For them, that is reality--often even after making observations that indicate otherwise. That's how spammers stay in business.
If mathematics are not universal, then the mathematical reasoning that can be conducted to deduce the laws of nature is also not universal. Hence, if a different civilization has different mathematics, they have different physical laws as well.
Why would that necessarily be so? Could they not simply use a different model to describe those laws?
This is basically a postmodern viewpoint, that reality is socially constructed.
A very naive--and misleading--way of putting it.
A more accurate way would be to say that we cannot know anything in an objective (that is, absolute and unambiguous) sense: everything we learn comes through our senses, and so what we know is limited by what our senses can tell us and how we interpret the information our senses give us. What our senses tell us is in turn limited by our position (think relativity) and the limitations of our senses (we cannot perceive nearly so many colors as certain species of new world monkeys, for example). In fact, it has been demonstrated that just by the simple act of observing or measuring something we actually change the characteristics of that something (the unertainty principle).
What these limitations mean is that what each of us percieves as reality is not only inaccurate with respect to 'objective' reality, but also differs from what other human beings perceive.
More, those perceptions are meaningless until we interpret them. A particular frequency of electormagnetic radiation isn't 'blue light' unless the person perceiving that radiation interprets it as such. How we interpret our perceptions is socially determined. To use the light example, one could think of it as blue light, blaue Licht, lumiere bleu or perhaps even as shades of green light in some rainforest cultures.
At its most basic, postmodernism is the recognition that what we understand as reality is actually a construct of our minds based on our interpretations of what we perceive, and that those interpretations are in turn based both upon what we learn from others (e.g., from a college professor or an author). That learning, and the process of acquiring it, are both social processes. Ergo, our 'reality' is, in a real sense, a social construct.
catholics are responsible for all manner of evil in the world of the past
Really? All catholics? An interesting perspective. Are all non-native U.S. citizens, then, responsible for the evils visited upon Native Americans? Do all Germans share guilt for the holocaust? Are all muslims to blame for 9/11? Do all Irish citizens bear responsibility for the actions of the IRA? Do all Iraqis bear responsibility for the actions of Saddam Hussein? Do all Afghanis share blame for the actions of the Taliban? Do all Russians share guilt for the actions of the Soviet Union?
they rape little boys
Really? All Catholics again? Strange that I was never raped, then, as I was raised in a devout Catholic home, went to mass every Sunday and on Holy Days, was an altar boy for 6 years, went to chatechism and retreats and so on. Perhaps I was just too fat and ugly to have been desirable to any of the hundreds of pederasts with whom I associated throughout my youth.
they think they are better than everyone
And you know this from what sort of research? In chatechism we were taken to other churches (Presbyterian, Methodist and a Synogogue that I remember) to learn from the ministers there. Given that we all apparently thought ourselves superior to the adherents of those religions I'm puzzled as to why we did so. I wonder what we were supposed to learn from our inferiors? Perhaps just that they were, in fact, inferior? If so, they did a brilliant job of hiding that message within language that indicated we should learn about these religions in the interest of mutual respect and understanding.
every catholic person I've known has been a real buttface
I am humbled by the depth of your research and the rigor of your insight.
in my opinion, there's a lot of evil in the world, but when someone does evil, in the name of all that is good, that makes the evil that much worse.
Does that include penning hateful, bigoted rants disguised as righteous indignation?
Garamond isn't a single face, but rather any of a range of faces based (sometimes indirectly) on the roman types cut by Claude Garamond, usually paired with an italic derived from those cut by Robert Granjon.
While Garamonds are to varying degrees good print faces (not all are of decent quality), I'm not sure they make the best choice in an age of on-screen viewing and coarse output from cheap printers. They tend to have subtle curves and details which just don't reproduce well at low resolution.
Times New Roman, a face designed by Stanley Morrison for the London Times, is likewise a poor choice for an all-purpose face. It was originally designed for newspaper work, meaning it was to be legible at small sizes (specifically 8 pt., IIRC). It is a transitional face, meaning there is moderate difference in weight between thick strokes (the 'stem' of the upper-case 'P' for example) and thin strokes (e.g. the crossbar on the 'H') and the type is generally more geometric than the old style faces like Garamond, but less so than 'modern' faces like Bodoni. While it was intended to be used with newsprint, and so isn't as vulnerable to coarse printing as, say, a Didot type, the rather thin bits of Times New Roman make it ill-suited to on-screen display, and it has never been a terribly great face for larger sizes (including 14 point).
A better choice would have been a type specifically designed to work well on screen or when printed on low-quality printers, like Microsoft's Georgia by Matthew Carter. It's really a much more legible face on-screen, and in my experience prints acceptably as well. It's also among Microsoft's Core Fonts and distributed alongside Times New Roman so it is likely to be installed anywhere Times New Roman is available.
The designer hardcoded a fontface because CSS doesn't automatically resize columns like tables do.
Er, 'fontface'? WTF is a 'fontface'?
As for CSS resizing automagically, resize in relation to what, pray tell? A box with width: 30%; resizes in relation to the viewport, a box with width: 15em; resizes in relation to font size, as of CSS 2.1 a box with float: left or float: right and no width resizes in relation to content (most browsers--including IE/Win--do this anyway) and table-layout will get you table-style layout with whatever tags you like. MS just didn't feel the need to support it in IE 5/Win or IE/Mac so people don't use it much. That's Microsoft's fault, not the W3C's
Because CSS was designed by doofus eggheads and not experts in solving real world web design problems.
Ian Hickson edited the CSS2.1 spec, and he's been 'solving real world web design problems' since at least 1998 when I worked with him at the Web Stanards Project. Hakon Wium Lie edited CSS 1, 2 and 2.1 and has been working on Opera since 1999, earned an MS in Visual Studies from MIT and wrote his thesis on electronic display of newspapers. TantekCelik is responsible for the widely-lauded Tasman rendering engine used in IE 5.x/Mac. These people do use this stuff in the real world, and if you don't like the directions they're taking your'e free to join the www-style discussion list and let them know.
Which then forces me to do a bunch of work
One line of CSS is 'a bunch of work'? I suppose you find tying your own shoes a pretty onerous task as well?
or accept undesirable browser settings
Let me get this straight: you're hacked because the site doesn't use your settings for font size and face, but setting your browser to override the site's settings with your choices is 'undesirable'? Huh?
I don't feel like writing a my own stylesheet just because some webgoon wants to hardcode a bunch of pixel sizes.
Apparently you don't feel like looking at the style rules before you criticize them either, as they text sizes are set with keywords and ems, not pixels.
Regardless, you don't have to write an entire stylesheet to get your favorite face and size. Just a simple style rule:
If even that's too much trouble, the link in my previous post also tells you how to set your preferences to override whatever the site specifies for face and size. A couple of mouse clicks and you can have whatever font size and weight you want.
It overrides my default font with something they presumably thought was better. Why? Was there any good reason for this? Or was it just another example of CSS overdesign?
Just going out on a limb here, but they probably figured they'd provide a nicer default than the Times New Roman most browsers use out-of-the-box. Visitors who don't like the default can override it with via user stylesheets or browser preferences.
I propose we redesign Slashdot in HTML 3.2 - better yet, let's rewrite it for Gopher. At least I could view a Gopher page in my choice of font!
I propose you stop whining and RTFM on your browser; if you haven't taken the time to learn how to use that software, what makes you think you'll take the time to learn a Gopher client?
Slashdot Mirror
It is?
Slashdot? I thought this was Little Green Footballs.
I'm quite aware of the religious war between RSS and Atom, thank you.
End of the day, Atom was and always has been on a track to be a by-Hoyle standard. RSS was and is not, and in fact one of -- if not the -- most influential people in the RSS world, Dave Winer, has specifically disavowed any such intent for RSS.
Dave has his reasons, to be sure. But none of them change the fact that Atom can be said to be a standard in a way RSS cannot.
And you might wish to read up on what, exactly, Blogger offers. You can indeed get RSS on Google blogs; you just have to sign up for Blogger Pro.
Oh, I see a Gecko- (or KHTML-) based browser as quite a likely alternative.
Firstly, art of Google's much-hyped corporate philosophy is 'don't be evil'. With that in mind, are they going to trust their brand to MSIE's security record? XPSP2 appears to be a major improvement, but it's still not in the same zip code as 'secure'. Gecko/KHTML seem to be much closer to the mark.
Second, the 'don't be evil' directive would seem to point towards wanting a standards-compliant solution, not a 'standards? what for?' solution.
Third, their history is pro-standards, pro-open APIs: Blogger is XHTML+CSS, and largely (if not entirely) valid. They also implemented the soon-to-be-standardized Atom as their primary syndication API, rather than the wilder-and-woolier RSS. Seems to me that history points more towards an OSS/standards-compliant solution rather than an MSIE shell.
Third, it isn't exactly a secret that MS sees Google as a threat. MS's history being what it is, would a company in their sights roll out a service/product based entirely on MS technology? With as many smart people as Google has, I'm not so sure they would.
Fourth, I don't think the cost of development personnel would have anything to do with it. Google's hiring practices are almost as famous as Microsoft's: they go for the very brightest available (one thing you can't say about Microsoft is that they hire dumbasses--or even just smart foks; they hire scary-smart folks). I don't see any reason they'd change that practice for a browser.
Finally, I don't know as the Google toolbar is evidence one way or another. The toolbar has been implemented (including PageRank) in a Mozilla extension already. I can see Google not much caring about other browsers previously as Moz's market share was teensy-to-non-existent when the Google Toolbar was released, Safari wasn't released yet, NN4 was a nightmare and IIRC neither it nor Opera were anywhere near as extensible as IE at the time. Gecko UAs are just now showing up in sufficient numbers to take seriously, but with a Google toolbar already available why bother?
The only strong counter-argument I see is compatibility: lots of 2nd-tier sites -- and a few 1st-tier sites -- are indifferent to hostile to non-IE/Win browsers and standards. I can see Google being loathe to tarnish their brand by releasing a browser that a whole lot of people would see as broken because it doesn't work with site X, Y or Z.
Still, I think the argument for a non-IE browser is stronger than the argument for an IE shell.
They break out Netscape 5(!)*, 6 and 7 which are all Gecko browsers, same as Moz/Fire__.
Some additional data points:
- Browser news puts Gecko-based browsers around 5% for most sources as of 4 Sep.
- The latest publicly-available stats from OneStat indicate just under 3%, but that was back in May.
- WebSideStory/StatMarket's latest numbers are still the ones used in a July C|Net article putting Moz at 4.5%
Taken together, I would say the best-guess from available evidence puts Moz at the 5% mark in Aug 2004 and climbing.* Netscape 5 doesn't exist. Netscape went straight from Navigator/Communicator 4.x to Netscape 6, skipping 5 altogether. The Gecko engine identifies as Mozilla 5, so I'm guessing that the Netscape 5 in TheCounter's stats is, in reality, various Gecko-based browsers like Chimera/Camino or some such.
Regardless, the fact that TheCounter includes hits by a non-existant browser indicates you should take their numbers with a grain of salt: however good or bad their sample is, their log parsing methodology is suspect: the Netscape versioning has been common knowledge for oh, 4+ years now but TheCounter still isn't accounting for it. Makes one wonder if they're bothering to filter Opera out of the IE results (Opera includes 'MSIE' in it's UA string by default to circumvent shoddy browser sniffers, so it's easy to overreport IE double-reporting Opera as both IE and Opera).
Here in the UK people use 'Europe' to mean the continent proper, and most defintely do not generally think of themselves as part of it.
The UK is part of the EU, but hasn't adopted the euro and maintains a profound ambivalence towards the EU.
So referring to the UK as distinct from 'Europe' is entirely proper.
Nonsense. Coherent groupings help the user guess at--and remember--functionality of the different tools, and also improve a user's ability to guess at and remember where a given tool is located.
Whether I've used Photoshop or not, remembering where a group of functionally similar tools is located is easier than remembering the location of each tool seperately. More, having those tools grouped visually helps both in terms of guessing at what a tool does ('well, this widget here is grouped the fill and eyedropper tool, so it must have something to do with colors...').
This isn't a matter of 'it's good because it's the way Photoshop does it' as you insist. It's a matter of 'it's good because it gives the user more information to work from'.
The GIMP's tools palette does put similar tools next to one another, but there is no separation from dissimilar tools. That is, you might have the selection tools all on one row, or they might be split on a few rows depending on how wide the toolbox is. A better solution would be to add seperators to the toolbox to ensure that distinct groups stay distinct regardless of the width of the toolbox.
Forget the features. Really. CMYK and (maybe) 16-bit image handling can stay on the list, sure, but otherwise the rest can go on the back burner. I still remember how to do things in P'shop without all the layer effects and whatnot, and am perfectly happy to give up a bit of that in exchange for a free-as-in-speech app, at least for the time being. Just get the output up to snuff, dammit. And get the UI cleaned up. It's really a screen-hog--worse even than Macromedia's apps, which I'd not thought possible.
I'm running the GIMP on WinXP Pro here. The type is much better than what Joe got, but even with FreeType installed it's still nowhere near the standard set by Fireworks, Photoshop, etc.
Nor are the lines--and while I've read plenty about the FreeType issue, I've read nothing whatever that would indicate the poor rendering of lines Joe had was an aberration unique to OS X. My experience in futzing about with it on Windows (and as yet that's all I've done--futz about) idicates that the line quality is just sub-par in general, but further experimentation may change my opinion.
More, I'm using iTunes on Windows. I only use it as an MP3 player, so I don't really know whether it's comprarable to iTunes on OS X overall, but as an MP3 player it certainly is.
If he can cut Fireworks some slack for being different, I would expect him to cut the GIMP some slack as well.
'Boss, I just pissed $584.72 down the rat-hole using the GIMP instead of Photoshop. Oh well...'
Or maybe he just needs to 'get used to' the misshapen text generated by the GIMP.
Because I'm not a C++ programmer. Neither is Joe Gillespie. And while I can't speak for Joe, I don't have the mathematics chops to figure a better anti-aliasing algorithm--or a better one, for that matter.
Exactly what do you call that review, then? He asked for less clutter in the menus, logical groupings of tools and better rendering of lines and type. He even provided an example of why the type rendering in the GIMP is crap. How much clearer does he need to be?
Then get the rest of the OSS/FS movement to shut the hell up about moving to OSS/FS programs.
Having hordes of evangelists running about telling everyone 'there's a better way' only to greet the folks who listen with 'I don't want to hear anything you have to say' when they point out that the way isn't necessarily better is pretty stupid, no?
Besides, who's forcing you to read the reviews/comments/whatever? If you don't give a rat's ass what non-programmers think of OSS/FS, then just don't read their opinions. Pretty simple.
- The tools are not grouped in a coherent manner
- The interface is littered with icons where none are necessary, making the application appear more complex than it is
Neither has anything to do with Photoshop--other than that Photoshop does things the better way. Both criticisms speak directly to why the GIMP puts off new users: the lack of coherent groupings makes it harder to learn and remember what each tool/function does and where to find it, and the cluttering of the interface puts off newbies by making them sort through more visual 'noise' to find whatever it is they're looking for.In both cases, the GIMP interface increases the learning curve with no corresponding benefit to power users--a lose-lose tradeoff and just plain bad design.
Beyond that, he also makes some pretty painful observations about the quality of the GIMP's output--or is he perhaps just being closed-minded about he intrinsinc beauty of misshapend letterforms?
All your post tell us is that you're either not willing to read criticsms of the GIMP or are not interested in considering them on their merits.
Reminds me of GM in the early '80s: stick a bunch of chrome and a vinyl roof on a cavalier and say it's a 'luxury sedan'.
Sadly, I fear they'll have more success with their warmed-over IE than GM did with the Cimarron.
Why would that necessarily be so? Could they not simply use a different model to describe those laws?
A very naive--and misleading--way of putting it.
A more accurate way would be to say that we cannot know anything in an objective (that is, absolute and unambiguous) sense: everything we learn comes through our senses, and so what we know is limited by what our senses can tell us and how we interpret the information our senses give us. What our senses tell us is in turn limited by our position (think relativity) and the limitations of our senses (we cannot perceive nearly so many colors as certain species of new world monkeys, for example). In fact, it has been demonstrated that just by the simple act of observing or measuring something we actually change the characteristics of that something (the unertainty principle).
What these limitations mean is that what each of us percieves as reality is not only inaccurate with respect to 'objective' reality, but also differs from what other human beings perceive.
More, those perceptions are meaningless until we interpret them. A particular frequency of electormagnetic radiation isn't 'blue light' unless the person perceiving that radiation interprets it as such. How we interpret our perceptions is socially determined. To use the light example, one could think of it as blue light, blaue Licht, lumiere bleu or perhaps even as shades of green light in some rainforest cultures.
At its most basic, postmodernism is the recognition that what we understand as reality is actually a construct of our minds based on our interpretations of what we perceive, and that those interpretations are in turn based both upon what we learn from others (e.g., from a college professor or an author). That learning, and the process of acquiring it, are both social processes. Ergo, our 'reality' is, in a real sense, a social construct.
But which Garamond? Garamond 3, Adobe Garamond, ITC Garamond, Simoncini Garamond? To say nothing of the various Garamond types from other foundries, like URW++.
Garamond isn't a single face, but rather any of a range of faces based (sometimes indirectly) on the roman types cut by Claude Garamond, usually paired with an italic derived from those cut by Robert Granjon.
While Garamonds are to varying degrees good print faces (not all are of decent quality), I'm not sure they make the best choice in an age of on-screen viewing and coarse output from cheap printers. They tend to have subtle curves and details which just don't reproduce well at low resolution.
Times New Roman, a face designed by Stanley Morrison for the London Times, is likewise a poor choice for an all-purpose face. It was originally designed for newspaper work, meaning it was to be legible at small sizes (specifically 8 pt., IIRC). It is a transitional face, meaning there is moderate difference in weight between thick strokes (the 'stem' of the upper-case 'P' for example) and thin strokes (e.g. the crossbar on the 'H') and the type is generally more geometric than the old style faces like Garamond, but less so than 'modern' faces like Bodoni. While it was intended to be used with newsprint, and so isn't as vulnerable to coarse printing as, say, a Didot type, the rather thin bits of Times New Roman make it ill-suited to on-screen display, and it has never been a terribly great face for larger sizes (including 14 point).
A better choice would have been a type specifically designed to work well on screen or when printed on low-quality printers, like Microsoft's Georgia by Matthew Carter. It's really a much more legible face on-screen, and in my experience prints acceptably as well. It's also among Microsoft's Core Fonts and distributed alongside Times New Roman so it is likely to be installed anywhere Times New Roman is available.
Er, 'fontface'? WTF is a 'fontface'?
As for CSS resizing automagically, resize in relation to what, pray tell? A box with width: 30%; resizes in relation to the viewport, a box with width: 15em; resizes in relation to font size, as of CSS 2.1 a box with float: left or float: right and no width resizes in relation to content (most browsers--including IE/Win--do this anyway) and table-layout will get you table-style layout with whatever tags you like. MS just didn't feel the need to support it in IE 5/Win or IE/Mac so people don't use it much. That's Microsoft's fault, not the W3C's
Ian Hickson edited the CSS2.1 spec, and he's been 'solving real world web design problems' since at least 1998 when I worked with him at the Web Stanards Project. Hakon Wium Lie edited CSS 1, 2 and 2.1 and has been working on Opera since 1999, earned an MS in Visual Studies from MIT and wrote his thesis on electronic display of newspapers. TantekCelik is responsible for the widely-lauded Tasman rendering engine used in IE 5.x/Mac. These people do use this stuff in the real world, and if you don't like the directions they're taking your'e free to join the www-style discussion list and let them know.
One line of CSS is 'a bunch of work'? I suppose you find tying your own shoes a pretty onerous task as well?
Let me get this straight: you're hacked because the site doesn't use your settings for font size and face, but setting your browser to override the site's settings with your choices is 'undesirable'? Huh?
Apparently you don't feel like looking at the style rules before you criticize them either, as they text sizes are set with keywords and ems, not pixels.
Regardless, you don't have to write an entire stylesheet to get your favorite face and size. Just a simple style rule:
If even that's too much trouble, the link in my previous post also tells you how to set your preferences to override whatever the site specifies for face and size. A couple of mouse clicks and you can have whatever font size and weight you want.
Just going out on a limb here, but they probably figured they'd provide a nicer default than the Times New Roman most browsers use out-of-the-box. Visitors who don't like the default can override it with via user stylesheets or browser preferences.
I propose you stop whining and RTFM on your browser; if you haven't taken the time to learn how to use that software, what makes you think you'll take the time to learn a Gopher client?
It also helps if you can express simple concepts in impenetrable marketese so you sound really, really important and insightful.