I've been using Photoshop since 1995 and Linux since 1994 and I've tried really really hard to like GIMP during the years - and failed every single time. It's just one of those programs I wish I had on floppy so I could break the disk in two.
Anyway, this is more of a Photoshop Elements alternative than CS but if you're on a Windows box I'd recommend the free software Paint.NET ( http://www.getpaint.net/ ), it's completely free and way more intuitive than GIMP, obviously influenced by Photoshop instead of trying to go its own way. It's spartan - no CMYK that I know of - but enough for all basic photo/image editing tasks (unless your profession mostly involve pixels Photoshop is probably overkill anyway).
As the name implies you need.NET installed, but that's easier than telling users to install the Windows port of GTK.
Does the play count for each song in iTunes also reflect the number of times the song has been played on the iPod?
In that case, can't someone just replace the mp3's on his/hers iPod with 1-second versions and then have the iPod play away for a while. I own an iPod and the thought of it liking some songs/artists more than others has struck me as well, but I've just assumed it's because I react to some songs more than others.
If the playcount shows up as even this discussion could be ended once and for all.:)
For those of us who understand the Swedish language there's always http://www.ichigo.se/ (it's been around for a couple of years now).
It does the same thing as SiliconNews but along with feeds from Slashdot/OSNews/Digg/Del.icio.us and such there's quite a bunch of Swedish feeds. And it looks pretty too.
Really? The only Linux users I've met has been extremely computer-savvy. To this day I've never (afaik) met a regular Joe (as in "Internet explorer? Ah, you mean the blue internet button!") who's using Linux at home or at work so I have to say stories like these are still news to me. Keeps the hope up you know.
I don't know about the states but I have a feeling Linux is still just as a) unknown b) scaring c) looked at as a server OS to the general population as here in Sweden.
I'm setting up a webstore with osCommerce right now - I'm sorry to say that the annoyances you found are still around.
Not only is all the HTML deeply baked into the PHP code, it's quite crappy HTML as well. To be honest, the standard layout looks like utter crap and I pity anyone who uses it. Well, atleast if you don't have a fondness for the worst freeware clipart this planet has to offer. If you add plugins to the code you'll find yourself in a world of pain when a new version of osCommerce is released since you've modified some of the core files.
I've spent some serious time with the current version though, I've made it easier to implement different frameworks and to make it spit out better HTML, so as of now I'm pretty pleased with it. The next major release of it will actually have theme-support, finally!
Anyway, once you have osCommerce looking the way you want it it's actually quite nice, especially considering the price. There's some seriously nice plugins available to extend its capabilities aswell (modify quantity behavior, add support for payment solutions etc).
I'm a pretty advanced Photoshop user - I use it for both print and digital purposes and I've been doing so for over 10 years now. I like Linux and I'd really like to be able to switch to a Linux desktop completely one day. That said I'm giving GIMP a try every once in a while. People say it rocks once you clear the Photoshop mist and once you get familiar with the somewhat weird GUI you'll find it, well, awesome.
My conclusion so far is that while GIMP has a Photoshop resembling toolset it's really not a Photoshop competitor. Really. While Photoshop is overkill for John Doe, especially regarding the price (yeah, most people pirate it, I know), GIMP is quite sufficient. It's an awesome tool for removing red eyes in photos, fixing resolutions, brightness/contrast and stuff like that - but it's not competing with Photoshop. It's obviously not made for print due to the lack of CMYK-support, and for web production.. well, compare Photoshops "Save for web"-module vs GIMP's "Select a JPEG compression percentage please"-prompt.
I've seen work by one or two people who do some seriously impressing stuff with GIMP - and that's it. Those two people also seem to have been involved in the GIMP project since the dawn of mankind, might be a good indicator on how much time you need to spend before being able to use it fluently enough.
Some people who doesn't work with graphics professionally (or claim GIMPs awesomeness without even using it) will probably disagree with me and claim that I'm wrong. But hey, at least I've TRIED to use it. It's just completely pointless for me to even spend time with it when I have access to a (legal) Photoshop license. I don't think the GIMP project is useless though, as I said - it's good enough for the average guy, even though I think the UI could improve tremendeously.
This looks weird. Ok, so Luke Skywalker's dad is Darth Vader, hence his Skywalker last name - but Google says:
"As a company that tries to do no evil, we were quite pleased to see that [the force] outdraws [the dark side] in search queries."
And then "Skywalker" is represented by one of the colors, "Yoda" the other one. Yoda seems to win, according to the graphs.
I'm not a Star Wars fanboy or anything, but wouldn't you assume people were looking for Luke "I'm on the good side" Skywalker, and not his dad? As I see it, the "do no evil" company has a win-win situation in this graph! Where's the dark side searches?:)
(Oh, and this comment contains spoilers. Please don't read it if you haven't seen the Star Wars movies yet. It would spoil the ending completely.)
Ah, the future of the computer desktop. I was waiting to read some interesting comments by all those who claim that FVWM or Blackbox/Fluxbox is the ultimate desktop environment - and that if you think putting rounded corners, animations or other visually appealing elements into the mix you're an idiot who shouldn't be using computers in the first place. Maybe this applies to people-of-the-future as well.
Haven't found any yet though, they're usually there:(
Can't help to think that many of the "do the switch now dammit, it's easy!"-persons sound like either people running their own small scale businesses, and/or people with no experience with working in a big company at all. With that I'm not saying it's not important for smaller businesses to run Linux, but it's the big dogs that counts here, at least for PR purposes.
I can understand that the switch to a Linux desktop environment seems trivial for the generic and experienced Linux user;
"Why would a switch be difficult? It comes with a Mac OS theme! It comes with a Windows theme! It comes with an Outlook-ish mail client and a browser that kicks MSIE's ass!"
It shouldn't take more than a few seconds of pondering though to realize there's more to the story, and it's really not that simple at all.
I agree with you. Unfortunately I work at a Mac based office, and I have a hard time seeing Mac based companies switching to Linux (giving they've payed for Apple hardware and gotten what, in my opinion is, the best desktop OS available as of today). KDE and Gnome will have a harder time beating OS X than Windows when it comes to usability and general prettiness. Having said that I think my renegade PC will be the only Linux desktop machine around here, but it would sure be sweet to see it more actively used at Windows based companies. And hey - it's actually happening.
People have stated This is the year of Desktop Linux! since when, 1997? But I don't think either of the popular DE's were good enough to seriously compete with anything (other that they came with a nicer license model) up until today. KDE and Gnome are seriously usable and John "I've gotta mail my Word documents now!" Doe would do just fine using it. Some time to adjust is needed, indeed, but it would work. And that's pretty amazing.
I'm not meaning to flame the free desktop environments (Gnome, KDE), I'm using them myself all the time to see how far they've progressed. But am I the only one who spends his Linux Desktop-time getting excited (and amazed) over the fact that it actually works as it should, like "Whoa, i drag&dropped this file and it actually did what it was supposed to, it didn't make my desktop go fubar for no apparent reason!", things that you would expect an OS to do (as in Windows and Mac OS).
I mean, Gnome and KDE are great. I think they've come a far way and they're "nearly there". Typical office-websurf-email-persons would probably do fine with a KDE-desktop today, but I still have this nagging feeling of uncertainty when I use it, and I'm not even a complete newbie.
But when i come to think of it, this feeling might not exist among people who haven't spent time with older and unstable versions of the DE's though.
For example, the browser, Konqueror will go everywhere, even below the "unseen line" of OSX and yes, you can tweak finder to go there to but not without non-free software and even then, you'r stuck with finder's interface.
Non-free software? Try entering "shift-apple-g" (as in "go") in a Finder window. A neat little box will fall down, asking you where to go. Here you can enter any path at all on your file system. (/etc/ etc).
Still, if you despise the Finder you probably should've gotten something else than a Mac. Lots of dollars could've been spent on better things if you just want to spend your days using Konqueror.
Don't get me wrong, i use Linux every day, but I'm always amused when people criticize it.
Alternative #1: Negative criticism -"Man, Linux SUCKS. NOTHING WORKS!!!" -"Shut up you ignorant Redmond-loving fool. Noone ever said Linux was anything but a kernel."
Alternative #2: Positive criticism -"Man, your desktop looks awesome. Can i get my machine to behave like that?"
-"No. This is Linux. You should try it. Best. OS. Ever."
I work at a rather large company and we had an incident with an employee a while ago who used his company laptop for illegal activities, and then i don't mean that he used the wonderful multitasking possibilities of his OS to download GTA San Andreas in the background while making some Powerpoint presentations or whatever he did to earn his wages. It was actually quite disgusting, but i won't go into details there.
He got detected from the outside, people from the outside could tell it was a company box causing this traffic, but not which one. After several (and apparently quite heavy) discussions about the employee's personal integrity they moved the filter behind our firewall to detect which computer it was and ta-daaa, they could identify him and the cops took him.
The point here was the speech our boss gave us after this whole ordeal. He made sure that we all knew that the company wasn't scanning our e-mail, they're not checking which sites we surf to, they're not getting alarms ringing when someone uses SSH. If someone surfs porn, that's bad and could cause consequences (but you probably don't get fired), but the only time they're actually checking what you're doing with your box is when someone calls them up and telling them that a box is used for illegal activities, like in this particular case.
I'm not using my box for illegal activities, but i sure felt relieved to know that all i do isn't logged and read by some evil all-seeing eye, looking for stuff that might be compromising for the company. Or that my mail is scanned for keywords and what-not.
This thing must've cost a lot of money. And i bet it took quite alot of hours of thinking, pondering and building it before it turned out the way it did.
What did they get after all that effort?
A machine playing a wonderful instrument with the grace of Hulk Hogan - that Layla-version (with a MIDI-track playing in the background) sounded just.. awful. Sure, that might be a "beta-track", better things might come out of this thing. But sometimes i get a bit aggrevated when i see what people either get paid to do, or get funds to do.
Sure, those thingies playing the guitar might come in hand for other projects. But.. Ack.:)
My family will never need these.. automobiles. We've been using horses and carts forever, and they will forever be usable. As long as there is hay, there is transport!
No, but seriously. I agree with you. A while ago i was checking out new cellphones and i thought, hey, i never actually play slow, crappy javagames on my phone. I never use the camera. I don't want the latest popchart hit-single as as my ringtone. All i want is a phone that 1. looks good, 2. has a good menu system, 3. doesn't annoy me and 4. isn't 3x the price because of features i don't even want.
I found one by Samsung but apparently they still have the flaws from their older models. (Can't have vibrator+ringtone on at the same time, it beeps everytime it has completed something etc). But their aim was right - to take a nice, modern phone, strip all the excessive features out of it and sell it for a cheaper price.
What would the world look like if MS figured out that they might be able to produce Linux apps, and have their Windows monopoly, too.
I think it's a bit naive to assume that a number of different official (and perhaps unofficial) departments over at Redmond haven't pondered over this matter quite a few times already and come to the conclusion that it's not worth the time and money, as for now at least.
And, imagine the confusion amongst the hackers out there. Who would we blame all the sorrows of the world on when Microsoft embraces the concept of *NIX and OSS?;)
One thing i'm sure of when it comes to this whole SCO circus is that all of a sudden i found myself thinking "oh, is this mess still alive? i thought it was gone and forgotten". And i bet a whole lot of people responsible for the IT-infastructure at companies thinks the same thing.
"Hmm what was it about Linux and those court problems last year.. It was a rip-off or something.. I can't remember, it's free - now that's suspicious.. Can't remember what happened in court though, but i might be better off choosing this expensive piece of software instead. After all, it costs a lot of money - it must be good."
If shitloads of people think like that now someone in Redmond can smirk a little. I'm basing this off the rumours that Microsoft funded the whole SCO-legal circus last year. I love conspiracies.
I'm a webdeveloper / graphics designer and i have a great interest in operating systems as a whole too, i love trying out Linux-as-a-desktop-environment every now and then to see how far it has progressed, aswell as how far The GIMP has progressed. (I've tried it under Windows and OS X too, briefly)
I'm always struck with how much power there seems to be in there, but that i just can't utilize it.
I'm just an old dog, and somehow my brain tells me not to relearn, i know Photoshop and Illustrator so well but the treshold to learn The GIMP-way seems just too high for me. I tried applying the Photoshop keycombinations, but the fundamental window handling is too different.
Now, i realize that you just can't copy the Adobe UI design, i think Macromedia got in legal trouble for doing so. I do realize that just because something is standard it doesn't mean it's the best way to do something (i.e Windows). But.. There must be something you can do to make it easier for Photoshop users to switch to The Gimp. Right? The GIMP is not made for computer screen graphics, not print, but there's heaps of designers using Photoshop today not designing anything at all for print.
How about a switch-campaign in a smaller scale, like "How to switch to the gimp in eight easy steps".. Could be hosted at their website and first-time starting the program.
Just starting the program, realizing all your hard earned years of Photoshop experience is useless will make just about anyone eager to close down the program and re-open Photoshop.
As i said, i would love to use The GIMP.. But somehow i just won't. Strange.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using Photoshop since 1995 and Linux since 1994 and I've tried really really hard to like GIMP during the years - and failed every single time. It's just one of those programs I wish I had on floppy so I could break the disk in two.
.NET installed, but that's easier than telling users to install the Windows port of GTK.
Anyway, this is more of a Photoshop Elements alternative than CS but if you're on a Windows box I'd recommend the free software Paint.NET ( http://www.getpaint.net/ ), it's completely free and way more intuitive than GIMP, obviously influenced by Photoshop instead of trying to go its own way. It's spartan - no CMYK that I know of - but enough for all basic photo/image editing tasks (unless your profession mostly involve pixels Photoshop is probably overkill anyway).
As the name implies you need
Does the play count for each song in iTunes also reflect the number of times the song has been played on the iPod?
:)
In that case, can't someone just replace the mp3's on his/hers iPod with 1-second versions and then have the iPod play away for a while. I own an iPod and the thought of it liking some songs/artists more than others has struck me as well, but I've just assumed it's because I react to some songs more than others.
If the playcount shows up as even this discussion could be ended once and for all.
For those of us who understand the Swedish language there's always http://www.ichigo.se/ (it's been around for a couple of years now).
It does the same thing as SiliconNews but along with feeds from Slashdot/OSNews/Digg/Del.icio.us and such there's quite a bunch of Swedish feeds. And it looks pretty too.
Really? The only Linux users I've met has been extremely computer-savvy. To this day I've never (afaik) met a regular Joe (as in "Internet explorer? Ah, you mean the blue internet button!") who's using Linux at home or at work so I have to say stories like these are still news to me. Keeps the hope up you know.
I don't know about the states but I have a feeling Linux is still just as a) unknown b) scaring c) looked at as a server OS to the general population as here in Sweden.
I'm setting up a webstore with osCommerce right now - I'm sorry to say that the annoyances you found are still around.
Not only is all the HTML deeply baked into the PHP code, it's quite crappy HTML as well. To be honest, the standard layout looks like utter crap and I pity anyone who uses it. Well, atleast if you don't have a fondness for the worst freeware clipart this planet has to offer. If you add plugins to the code you'll find yourself in a world of pain when a new version of osCommerce is released since you've modified some of the core files.
I've spent some serious time with the current version though, I've made it easier to implement different frameworks and to make it spit out better HTML, so as of now I'm pretty pleased with it. The next major release of it will actually have theme-support, finally!
Anyway, once you have osCommerce looking the way you want it it's actually quite nice, especially considering the price. There's some seriously nice plugins available to extend its capabilities aswell (modify quantity behavior, add support for payment solutions etc).
I'm a pretty advanced Photoshop user - I use it for both print and digital purposes and I've been doing so for over 10 years now. I like Linux and I'd really like to be able to switch to a Linux desktop completely one day. That said I'm giving GIMP a try every once in a while. People say it rocks once you clear the Photoshop mist and once you get familiar with the somewhat weird GUI you'll find it, well, awesome.
My conclusion so far is that while GIMP has a Photoshop resembling toolset it's really not a Photoshop competitor. Really. While Photoshop is overkill for John Doe, especially regarding the price (yeah, most people pirate it, I know), GIMP is quite sufficient. It's an awesome tool for removing red eyes in photos, fixing resolutions, brightness/contrast and stuff like that - but it's not competing with Photoshop. It's obviously not made for print due to the lack of CMYK-support, and for web production.. well, compare Photoshops "Save for web"-module vs GIMP's "Select a JPEG compression percentage please"-prompt.
I've seen work by one or two people who do some seriously impressing stuff with GIMP - and that's it. Those two people also seem to have been involved in the GIMP project since the dawn of mankind, might be a good indicator on how much time you need to spend before being able to use it fluently enough.
Some people who doesn't work with graphics professionally (or claim GIMPs awesomeness without even using it) will probably disagree with me and claim that I'm wrong. But hey, at least I've TRIED to use it. It's just completely pointless for me to even spend time with it when I have access to a (legal) Photoshop license. I don't think the GIMP project is useless though, as I said - it's good enough for the average guy, even though I think the UI could improve tremendeously.
This looks weird. Ok, so Luke Skywalker's dad is Darth Vader, hence his Skywalker last name - but Google says:
:)
"As a company that tries to do no evil, we were quite pleased to see that [the force] outdraws [the dark side] in search queries."
And then "Skywalker" is represented by one of the colors, "Yoda" the other one. Yoda seems to win, according to the graphs.
I'm not a Star Wars fanboy or anything, but wouldn't you assume people were looking for Luke "I'm on the good side" Skywalker, and not his dad? As I see it, the "do no evil" company has a win-win situation in this graph! Where's the dark side searches?
(Oh, and this comment contains spoilers. Please don't read it if you haven't seen the Star Wars movies yet. It would spoil the ending completely.)
Ah, the future of the computer desktop. I was waiting to read some interesting comments by all those who claim that FVWM or Blackbox/Fluxbox is the ultimate desktop environment - and that if you think putting rounded corners, animations or other visually appealing elements into the mix you're an idiot who shouldn't be using computers in the first place. Maybe this applies to people-of-the-future as well.
:(
Haven't found any yet though, they're usually there
Yeah I agree. Truly great post.
Can't help to think that many of the "do the switch now dammit, it's easy!"-persons sound like either people running their own small scale businesses, and/or people with no experience with working in a big company at all. With that I'm not saying it's not important for smaller businesses to run Linux, but it's the big dogs that counts here, at least for PR purposes.
I can understand that the switch to a Linux desktop environment seems trivial for the generic and experienced Linux user;
"Why would a switch be difficult? It comes with a Mac OS theme! It comes with a Windows theme! It comes with an Outlook-ish mail client and a browser that kicks MSIE's ass!"
It shouldn't take more than a few seconds of pondering though to realize there's more to the story, and it's really not that simple at all.
Ah, well put!
I agree with you. Unfortunately I work at a Mac based office, and I have a hard time seeing Mac based companies switching to Linux (giving they've payed for Apple hardware and gotten what, in my opinion is, the best desktop OS available as of today). KDE and Gnome will have a harder time beating OS X than Windows when it comes to usability and general prettiness. Having said that I think my renegade PC will be the only Linux desktop machine around here, but it would sure be sweet to see it more actively used at Windows based companies. And hey - it's actually happening.
People have stated This is the year of Desktop Linux! since when, 1997? But I don't think either of the popular DE's were good enough to seriously compete with anything (other that they came with a nicer license model) up until today. KDE and Gnome are seriously usable and John "I've gotta mail my Word documents now!" Doe would do just fine using it. Some time to adjust is needed, indeed, but it would work. And that's pretty amazing.
I'm not meaning to flame the free desktop environments (Gnome, KDE), I'm using them myself all the time to see how far they've progressed. But am I the only one who spends his Linux Desktop-time getting excited (and amazed) over the fact that it actually works as it should, like "Whoa, i drag&dropped this file and it actually did what it was supposed to, it didn't make my desktop go fubar for no apparent reason!", things that you would expect an OS to do (as in Windows and Mac OS).
I mean, Gnome and KDE are great. I think they've come a far way and they're "nearly there". Typical office-websurf-email-persons would probably do fine with a KDE-desktop today, but I still have this nagging feeling of uncertainty when I use it, and I'm not even a complete newbie.
But when i come to think of it, this feeling might not exist among people who haven't spent time with older and unstable versions of the DE's though.
For example, the browser, Konqueror will go everywhere, even below the "unseen line" of OSX and yes, you can tweak finder to go there to but not without non-free software and even then, you'r stuck with finder's interface.
Non-free software? Try entering "shift-apple-g" (as in "go") in a Finder window. A neat little box will fall down, asking you where to go. Here you can enter any path at all on your file system. (/etc/ etc).
Still, if you despise the Finder you probably should've gotten something else than a Mac. Lots of dollars could've been spent on better things if you just want to spend your days using Konqueror.
Don't get me wrong, i use Linux every day, but I'm always amused when people criticize it.
Alternative #1: Negative criticism
-"Man, Linux SUCKS. NOTHING WORKS!!!"
-"Shut up you ignorant Redmond-loving fool. Noone ever said Linux was anything but a kernel."
Alternative #2: Positive criticism
-"Man, your desktop looks awesome. Can i get my machine to behave like that?"
-"No. This is Linux. You should try it. Best. OS. Ever."
I work at a rather large company and we had an incident with an employee a while ago who used his company laptop for illegal activities, and then i don't mean that he used the wonderful multitasking possibilities of his OS to download GTA San Andreas in the background while making some Powerpoint presentations or whatever he did to earn his wages. It was actually quite disgusting, but i won't go into details there.
:)
He got detected from the outside, people from the outside could tell it was a company box causing this traffic, but not which one. After several (and apparently quite heavy) discussions about the employee's personal integrity they moved the filter behind our firewall to detect which computer it was and ta-daaa, they could identify him and the cops took him.
The point here was the speech our boss gave us after this whole ordeal. He made sure that we all knew that the company wasn't scanning our e-mail, they're not checking which sites we surf to, they're not getting alarms ringing when someone uses SSH. If someone surfs porn, that's bad and could cause consequences (but you probably don't get fired), but the only time they're actually checking what you're doing with your box is when someone calls them up and telling them that a box is used for illegal activities, like in this particular case.
I'm not using my box for illegal activities, but i sure felt relieved to know that all i do isn't logged and read by some evil all-seeing eye, looking for stuff that might be compromising for the company. Or that my mail is scanned for keywords and what-not.
Then again, I live in Sweden.
This thing must've cost a lot of money. And i bet it took quite alot of hours of thinking, pondering and building it before it turned out the way it did.
:)
What did they get after all that effort?
A machine playing a wonderful instrument with the grace of Hulk Hogan - that Layla-version (with a MIDI-track playing in the background) sounded just.. awful. Sure, that might be a "beta-track", better things might come out of this thing. But sometimes i get a bit aggrevated when i see what people either get paid to do, or get funds to do.
Sure, those thingies playing the guitar might come in hand for other projects. But.. Ack.
My family will never need these.. automobiles. We've been using horses and carts forever, and they will forever be usable. As long as there is hay, there is transport!
No, but seriously. I agree with you. A while ago i was checking out new cellphones and i thought, hey, i never actually play slow, crappy javagames on my phone. I never use the camera. I don't want the latest popchart hit-single as as my ringtone. All i want is a phone that 1. looks good, 2. has a good menu system, 3. doesn't annoy me and 4. isn't 3x the price because of features i don't even want.
I found one by Samsung but apparently they still have the flaws from their older models. (Can't have vibrator+ringtone on at the same time, it beeps everytime it has completed something etc). But their aim was right - to take a nice, modern phone, strip all the excessive features out of it and sell it for a cheaper price.
Why not call Firefox "COOL, FREE SCREENSAVER.EXE", and Thunderbird "HOT WEBCAM GIRLS OOPS!.EXE" and just watch the adoption rate increase like crazy.
No?
What would the world look like if MS figured out that they might be able to produce Linux apps, and have their Windows monopoly, too.
;)
I think it's a bit naive to assume that a number of different official (and perhaps unofficial) departments over at Redmond haven't pondered over this matter quite a few times already and come to the conclusion that it's not worth the time and money, as for now at least.
And, imagine the confusion amongst the hackers out there. Who would we blame all the sorrows of the world on when Microsoft embraces the concept of *NIX and OSS?
One thing i'm sure of when it comes to this whole SCO circus is that all of a sudden i found myself thinking "oh, is this mess still alive? i thought it was gone and forgotten". And i bet a whole lot of people responsible for the IT-infastructure at companies thinks the same thing. "Hmm what was it about Linux and those court problems last year.. It was a rip-off or something.. I can't remember, it's free - now that's suspicious.. Can't remember what happened in court though, but i might be better off choosing this expensive piece of software instead. After all, it costs a lot of money - it must be good." If shitloads of people think like that now someone in Redmond can smirk a little. I'm basing this off the rumours that Microsoft funded the whole SCO-legal circus last year. I love conspiracies.
I'm a webdeveloper / graphics designer and i have a great interest in operating systems as a whole too, i love trying out Linux-as-a-desktop-environment every now and then to see how far it has progressed, aswell as how far The GIMP has progressed. (I've tried it under Windows and OS X too, briefly)
I'm always struck with how much power there seems to be in there, but that i just can't utilize it.
I'm just an old dog, and somehow my brain tells me not to relearn, i know Photoshop and Illustrator so well but the treshold to learn The GIMP-way seems just too high for me. I tried applying the Photoshop keycombinations, but the fundamental window handling is too different.
Now, i realize that you just can't copy the Adobe UI design, i think Macromedia got in legal trouble for doing so. I do realize that just because something is standard it doesn't mean it's the best way to do something (i.e Windows). But.. There must be something you can do to make it easier for Photoshop users to switch to The Gimp. Right? The GIMP is not made for computer screen graphics, not print, but there's heaps of designers using Photoshop today not designing anything at all for print.
How about a switch-campaign in a smaller scale, like "How to switch to the gimp in eight easy steps".. Could be hosted at their website and first-time starting the program.
Just starting the program, realizing all your hard earned years of Photoshop experience is useless will make just about anyone eager to close down the program and re-open Photoshop.
As i said, i would love to use The GIMP.. But somehow i just won't. Strange.
Tobbe / zalt
http://www.ichigo.se/