If you need to go read documentation just to understand the userinterface, then the interface has missed it's goal.
Luser! Back to the AOL slum with you! You just bragged in public about never reading a manual for the sake of remaining ignorant for the rest of your life. Next!
Plus, I don't _like_ to struggle with something - I just wanna use it as quickly and well as I can.
With that attitude, how'd you get potty-trained? Staying in diapers would have had a *much* shallower learning curve than that complicated business with the toilet. And you could always keep buying bigger diapers - after all, you have _much_ more money than you have time!
As follow-up: Don't feel like the Lone Ranger, everybody, if you're reduced to screaming and pounding on the keyboard at some point in acquiring a new skill. We've all been there. If you think Gimp's tough to learn, have a swing at Blender. You have to study the docs on Blender for about two weeks, as a theologian pores over Dead Sea scrolls, before you produce your first coherent image. But Blender can do everything from simple polygons to Poser-quality mesh models to animations to 3D games.
I went through the same frustrations, over Gimp and Blender and POVray, over C++ and Lisp and Python, over HTML and XML and RSS, etc. Currently, I'm gnawing the keyboard over cURL and automated web form posting in the context of creating automated web agents that do nifty stuff for me - mainly because I left web programming for last. Frustration, that period of beginning when you strike out on your own and hardly know what question to ask, let alone the answers, is a part of learning, whether your subject is graphics design, doing your own taxes, or perfecting techniques from the Kama Sutra. It's a part of life. The thing to do is, take a deep breath and say to yourself, "This tool wouldn't exist if somebody, somewhere, didn't find it useful; now all I have to do is figure out *what* the hell they were thinking, and it'll be useful to me, too."
pointing fingers at photoshop or the user will not make UI issues disappear, so please don't do that.
My reply in length: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE GIMP INTERFACE. What YOU, the frustrated user need to do, is go find some documentation on it http://gug.sunsite.dk/docs/Grokking-the-GIMP-v1.0/ and perhaps join a forum or two http://gug.sunsite.dk/. If you don't see the howto or doc that addresses your problem, you need to ask about it in the forum. If the feature you ask for isn't there, ask if there's a script-fu extension that does that. If there isn't, well, somebody's just gonna have to write one, aren't they? Either learn script-fu and write it yourself, or patiently wait for somebody else to do it. Remember, in the open-source world, unless you're pretty wierd and your needs are that narrow, somebody else has already solved the problem which you are trying to solve.
My reply in brief: What the hell exists in the universe that is any kind of complicated at all that teaches itself to you? When pianos have interfaces that allow you to sit down your first time and play a concerto without your knowing anything about music at all, when a camera is invented with an interface that makes you look like a glamourous fashion model in every frame without your having to even bother combing your hair, when a stove is invented whose interface is designed so that we can all cook like Emeril Lagasse even if all we've ever done before is microwave burrittos, then we'll justify criticisms of Gimp's interface, thank you very much. As my sig says from time to time: "Stealth Bombers are more difficult to operate than tricycles BECAUSE THEY CAN FLY!"
The debate on this is thoughtful and mature. Nevertheless, may I be the first to put forth my humble opinion that Howard Schmidt is as full of ka-ka as you can get without bursting. Cybersecurity, while he was sitting in office, was HIS duty, and I think HE should be held liable for all the viruses and worms that happened on his shift. Furthermore, he should have had all proprietary sofware companies open their code to the public for security review. And forced all hardware manufacturors to release drivers for their hardware compatable with *every* system so we don't have to write dodgy code trying to make it work. And he should have stamped out spam, spyware, and adware; which it can be clearly shown weakens computer and network security overall. Outrageous claims? Now you know how programmers feel if they're blamed every time some warez script-kiddie with nothing else to do with his time finds a hole that nobody with a life would have thought of looking for. Now, when it's my contractor's fault every time a burglar manages to break into my house, then we'll consider it.
have (generally) spent years learning the Adobe suite. I work with ACTUAL designers. They all think it's an ugly piece of shit.
I *AM* an actual designer, and it never fails to amaze me how people will comfortably devote "years" to learning proprietary software that costs $485.00 http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/Adobe_Photoshop_7_0/4 014-3633_16-8918085.html , but cannot be bothered to investigate the menus in Gimp for five minutes for free to discover all the features they claim Gimp is missing. But, uh, oh, yeah, *sure*, you guys are ALL THAT!
Now, Photoshop robots will have *TWO* Open-Source programs to bitch about!!! Yes, Gimp can now expect half the Photozealots to switch their flames from Gimp to how much they hate Xara for not being Photoshop. Welcome to the *deep inside*, Xara, and you can share my bread crust, but not my bunk.
I don't mind you replying, but do it with a bit of background knowlege about what you're writing about.
I have background knowledge in the form of listening to my 1,789,943,567th Slashdotter pointing out what Gimp doesn't have.
Yes, granted, Gimp does not have the features that you need in your line of work. You need to use whatever tool *does* have those features in your line of work.
Image editing is huge. H-U-G-E! There are more ways to edit an image than there are to edit text and sound combined. And if we put every feature that everybody has ever asked for in Gimp into the Gimp, it would take 200 Gigabytes in storage space and a couple of days to load. And everybody would just come up with something new on their wish-list.
What I never seem to get into people's heads is: Gimp never promised to be all that. Gimp is only a *general* *purpose* graphics tool, part of a handy suite of Free Software imaging tools (from xpaint and xfig all the way to POVray and Blender), and not the entire suite itself. The mistake was in porting it to Windows, methinks, because otherwise Photoshop users never would have discovered it. But when Windows people meet Gimp, they have no understanding of it. Gimp, and the GNU tools behind it, come from a completely different galaxy, one where the philosophy is to keep tools small and simple, keep program logic "stupid" so it can be robust, make executables light so they can easily be debugged. Windows people expect the whole wide world to be written into one big program that fills the whole disk. They don't really think in terms of "starting an operating system and running AOL to go to a web page to use a java aplet". They think "running the computer to use the part of the computer where the web page thing is". No, I'm not trying to be sarcastic, and of course I've oversimplified the case. Macintosh people have a similar syndrome: they're not used to thinking of the operating system and the hardware as two different things.
I'm not criticizing anybody, anybody's operating system, or anybody's favorite program. If you like Photoshop, good! Now go USE IT AND QUIT DUMPING TEN TONS OF CRAP ON ME EVERY MONTH OF MY LIFE ABOUT HOW MUCH EVERY PROGRAM I USE SUCKS! Haven't you ever heard the expression, "You get what you pay for!"?
For a while, I had one of my computers with no hard drive. I just swept together all the spare parts after I built the other two PCs and had enough left over for a diskless workstation connected to nothing. But I have about six different live Linux CDs and a USB flash drive, and we ran it that way for quite a while./home partition on the USB with all user files, and you could switch operating systems as easily as a DJ swaps CDs. It had enough RAM and motherboard oomph that swap memory wasn't an issue, but later an old IBM 276-Megabyte hard drive from a Win 3.0 box became it's swap drive. I finally got around to putting a real hard drive in it and it runs Mandriva today, but the experiment was fun!
But then I have to agree with your trolling a bit. Many new users find the GIMP very confusing simply because it forces them to change all their habbits.
Well, then, if people are so resistant to change, how'd they ever learn to use a computer in the first place? Wasn't it an equally high step from the Etch-a-Sketch to the TTY? Man, some of us have to learn a new programming language every six months just to keep up with work - and we do it without nearly as much fussing as people do because they had to poke around menus for five minutes and investigate everything. Please, I'm BEGGING you, STICK to Photoshop!
There aren't any shape tools,
right_click->Filter->Render->gfig
changing size of the brush isn't strait-forward (it isn't visible to new users).
Double-click on the little brush box, the same way you double-click on the colors and gradients.
An advice to the GIMP creators would definately be to make it more user friendly towards newcommers and improve startup time. Another thing is the much questioned window-hell they have. I am one of those users who just hate it. I know there are plugins for this, but they are unstable and extremely bad quality (i've tried).
I *LOVE* the floating palettes! I got sick and tired of monolithic one-window apps back in Windows. With Gimp, I can open/close whatever I need open at the time (improving speed during edit-time), resize and move them where I need relative to the canvas, and if you hate the windows so much, just minimize them *all* except the canvas and right-click to pick your tools from the menu that pops up from the canvas itself! *I* think everybody who doesn't like it owes Gimp developers an ass-kissing. Sure, it's challenging to learn how to do the first time. By this logic, we should all be crawling on all fours and crapping in diapers.
Without an entire virtual desktop to work on, the GIMP is a drag to work with, since minimizing it takes ages wasting productivity time.
Ctrl-F[1-4] to a differnet virtual desktop, a feature supported in all Linux OSes "out-of-the-box", which is the NATIVE ENVIRONMENT OF A GNU PROGRAM - duh! Should I go over to the Macromedia site and demand that they shut down development just because Macromedia doesn't run on Linux?
And how much does Adobe pay you people to post this SHIT??? All this from the people who brought us the documant-reading-interface that forces you to use a stupid little white hand to drag the page around and whose format is a Gordian Knot to translate into any other text file format.
You forgot, 'PS fans will heap steaming piles of BS around about "missing" features of Gimp, which they were simply too lazy to right-click and pick from the menu.'
God I can't stand the fucking gall! You people know damn good and well you get shapes from right_click->Filters->Render->Gfig!!! Every goddamn thing you need to do is just that simple!
I need to go into a Photoshop forum and bitch a blue steak about PS. Which seems to be missing the "M" in the middle, to listen to it's fans.
Those of us who actually *work* with graphics and *know* open source are happy with the Gimp's progress. Commercial software shills continue to play their broken record: "I hate Gimp because it isn't Photoshop...I hate Gimp because it isn't Photoshop...etc", but did not get their way in ruining a good thing. Once again, here's a tea-towell to dry their crocodile tears.
Those of us with a *brain* who actually *program* understand that to *surpass* Photoshop, you have to keep the Gimp infrastructure - an infinitely extensible assortment of plug-ins and features, and not a frozen single monolithic window.
I'll time it with a stopwatch this time to see the flames and -1 troll mods pour in. I'm using it to create an AI algorithm that simulates mob frenzy.
Nah, these days I let *somebody else* buy the box from the Big Name store. Then when it's giving them trouble later, and they want to throw it away because it's *broken*, I say, "Lemme see it, maybe there's some parts I can strip off of it for the new box I'm building." *Then* I take it and replace the CPU fan, and run fdisk on the drive. Cheaper...
I know, I worked for a company that paid OEMs to pre-install crippleware in the hopes for upgrading
Well, see, that's another reason I've never done business with Big Name hardware stores. The only time I ever paid somebody else to assemble my PC for me was my first one, and that was a sharp teen at a Mom-n-Pop store who literally built it right in front of me while explaining what and why. I wonder if he knows what an influence he was?
Another C dialect. To go along with C, C++, Objective-C, C-99, ANSI-C, C-for-dummies, C-with-low-carbs-and-just-one-calorie, Lemony-fresh-C, tartar-control-C, low-milage-hybrid-C, son-of-C, As-the-C-turns, Sesame-Street-C, and Freddy-vs-C. And we still have a whole alphabet to go through!
I view it as a big inner-city wall covered in graffiti. Sometimes it's right. Sometimes it's wrong. Whatever it is, it gets painted over eventually. As an information source, I rank it somewhere between astrology and next week's stock picks.
Slashdot Mirror
Luser! Back to the AOL slum with you! You just bragged in public about never reading a manual for the sake of remaining ignorant for the rest of your life. Next!
Oh, go sit on your gentle learning curve!
With that attitude, how'd you get potty-trained? Staying in diapers would have had a *much* shallower learning curve than that complicated business with the toilet. And you could always keep buying bigger diapers - after all, you have _much_ more money than you have time!
I went through the same frustrations, over Gimp and Blender and POVray, over C++ and Lisp and Python, over HTML and XML and RSS, etc. Currently, I'm gnawing the keyboard over cURL and automated web form posting in the context of creating automated web agents that do nifty stuff for me - mainly because I left web programming for last. Frustration, that period of beginning when you strike out on your own and hardly know what question to ask, let alone the answers, is a part of learning, whether your subject is graphics design, doing your own taxes, or perfecting techniques from the Kama Sutra. It's a part of life. The thing to do is, take a deep breath and say to yourself, "This tool wouldn't exist if somebody, somewhere, didn't find it useful; now all I have to do is figure out *what* the hell they were thinking, and it'll be useful to me, too."
My reply in length: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE GIMP INTERFACE. What YOU, the frustrated user need to do, is go find some documentation on it http://gug.sunsite.dk/docs/Grokking-the-GIMP-v1.0/ and perhaps join a forum or two http://gug.sunsite.dk/. If you don't see the howto or doc that addresses your problem, you need to ask about it in the forum. If the feature you ask for isn't there, ask if there's a script-fu extension that does that. If there isn't, well, somebody's just gonna have to write one, aren't they? Either learn script-fu and write it yourself, or patiently wait for somebody else to do it. Remember, in the open-source world, unless you're pretty wierd and your needs are that narrow, somebody else has already solved the problem which you are trying to solve.
My reply in brief: What the hell exists in the universe that is any kind of complicated at all that teaches itself to you? When pianos have interfaces that allow you to sit down your first time and play a concerto without your knowing anything about music at all, when a camera is invented with an interface that makes you look like a glamourous fashion model in every frame without your having to even bother combing your hair, when a stove is invented whose interface is designed so that we can all cook like Emeril Lagasse even if all we've ever done before is microwave burrittos, then we'll justify criticisms of Gimp's interface, thank you very much. As my sig says from time to time: "Stealth Bombers are more difficult to operate than tricycles BECAUSE THEY CAN FLY!"
*snork* You say what you want to, pal, it's YOUR hide!
Then so's the difference between five minutes and several years, or, for that matter, the difference between intelligence and stupidity, right?
The debate on this is thoughtful and mature. Nevertheless, may I be the first to put forth my humble opinion that Howard Schmidt is as full of ka-ka as you can get without bursting. Cybersecurity, while he was sitting in office, was HIS duty, and I think HE should be held liable for all the viruses and worms that happened on his shift. Furthermore, he should have had all proprietary sofware companies open their code to the public for security review. And forced all hardware manufacturors to release drivers for their hardware compatable with *every* system so we don't have to write dodgy code trying to make it work. And he should have stamped out spam, spyware, and adware; which it can be clearly shown weakens computer and network security overall. Outrageous claims? Now you know how programmers feel if they're blamed every time some warez script-kiddie with nothing else to do with his time finds a hole that nobody with a life would have thought of looking for. Now, when it's my contractor's fault every time a burglar manages to break into my house, then we'll consider it.
It was probably an Ubuntu or Debian user...the rest of us are more laid back...
I work with ACTUAL designers. They all think it's an ugly piece of shit.
I *AM* an actual designer, and it never fails to amaze me how people will comfortably devote "years" to learning proprietary software that costs $485.00 http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/Adobe_Photoshop_7_0/4 014-3633_16-8918085.html , but cannot be bothered to investigate the menus in Gimp for five minutes for free to discover all the features they claim Gimp is missing. But, uh, oh, yeah, *sure*, you guys are ALL THAT!
Slashdot is bouncing back your reality check due to insufficient funds.
Now, Photoshop robots will have *TWO* Open-Source programs to bitch about!!! Yes, Gimp can now expect half the Photozealots to switch their flames from Gimp to how much they hate Xara for not being Photoshop. Welcome to the *deep inside*, Xara, and you can share my bread crust, but not my bunk.
I have background knowledge in the form of listening to my 1,789,943,567th Slashdotter pointing out what Gimp doesn't have.
Yes, granted, Gimp does not have the features that you need in your line of work. You need to use whatever tool *does* have those features in your line of work.
Image editing is huge. H-U-G-E! There are more ways to edit an image than there are to edit text and sound combined. And if we put every feature that everybody has ever asked for in Gimp into the Gimp, it would take 200 Gigabytes in storage space and a couple of days to load. And everybody would just come up with something new on their wish-list.
What I never seem to get into people's heads is: Gimp never promised to be all that. Gimp is only a *general* *purpose* graphics tool, part of a handy suite of Free Software imaging tools (from xpaint and xfig all the way to POVray and Blender), and not the entire suite itself. The mistake was in porting it to Windows, methinks, because otherwise Photoshop users never would have discovered it. But when Windows people meet Gimp, they have no understanding of it. Gimp, and the GNU tools behind it, come from a completely different galaxy, one where the philosophy is to keep tools small and simple, keep program logic "stupid" so it can be robust, make executables light so they can easily be debugged. Windows people expect the whole wide world to be written into one big program that fills the whole disk. They don't really think in terms of "starting an operating system and running AOL to go to a web page to use a java aplet". They think "running the computer to use the part of the computer where the web page thing is". No, I'm not trying to be sarcastic, and of course I've oversimplified the case. Macintosh people have a similar syndrome: they're not used to thinking of the operating system and the hardware as two different things.
I'm not criticizing anybody, anybody's operating system, or anybody's favorite program. If you like Photoshop, good! Now go USE IT AND QUIT DUMPING TEN TONS OF CRAP ON ME EVERY MONTH OF MY LIFE ABOUT HOW MUCH EVERY PROGRAM I USE SUCKS! Haven't you ever heard the expression, "You get what you pay for!"?
For a while, I had one of my computers with no hard drive. I just swept together all the spare parts after I built the other two PCs and had enough left over for a diskless workstation connected to nothing. But I have about six different live Linux CDs and a USB flash drive, and we ran it that way for quite a while. /home partition on the USB with all user files, and you could switch operating systems as easily as a DJ swaps CDs. It had enough RAM and motherboard oomph that swap memory wasn't an issue, but later an old IBM 276-Megabyte hard drive from a Win 3.0 box became it's swap drive. I finally got around to putting a real hard drive in it and it runs Mandriva today, but the experiment was fun!
In other words, you hate Gimp because it's not Photoshop.
Well, then, if people are so resistant to change, how'd they ever learn to use a computer in the first place? Wasn't it an equally high step from the Etch-a-Sketch to the TTY? Man, some of us have to learn a new programming language every six months just to keep up with work - and we do it without nearly as much fussing as people do because they had to poke around menus for five minutes and investigate everything. Please, I'm BEGGING you, STICK to Photoshop!
There aren't any shape tools,
right_click->Filter->Render->gfig
changing size of the brush isn't strait-forward (it isn't visible to new users).
Double-click on the little brush box, the same way you double-click on the colors and gradients.
An advice to the GIMP creators would definately be to make it more user friendly towards newcommers and improve startup time. Another thing is the much questioned window-hell they have. I am one of those users who just hate it. I know there are plugins for this, but they are unstable and extremely bad quality (i've tried).
I *LOVE* the floating palettes! I got sick and tired of monolithic one-window apps back in Windows. With Gimp, I can open/close whatever I need open at the time (improving speed during edit-time), resize and move them where I need relative to the canvas, and if you hate the windows so much, just minimize them *all* except the canvas and right-click to pick your tools from the menu that pops up from the canvas itself! *I* think everybody who doesn't like it owes Gimp developers an ass-kissing. Sure, it's challenging to learn how to do the first time. By this logic, we should all be crawling on all fours and crapping in diapers.
Without an entire virtual desktop to work on, the GIMP is a drag to work with, since minimizing it takes ages wasting productivity time.
Ctrl-F[1-4] to a differnet virtual desktop, a feature supported in all Linux OSes "out-of-the-box", which is the NATIVE ENVIRONMENT OF A GNU PROGRAM - duh! Should I go over to the Macromedia site and demand that they shut down development just because Macromedia doesn't run on Linux?
And how much does Adobe pay you people to post this SHIT??? All this from the people who brought us the documant-reading-interface that forces you to use a stupid little white hand to drag the page around and whose format is a Gordian Knot to translate into any other text file format.
You forgot, 'PS fans will heap steaming piles of BS around about "missing" features of Gimp, which they were simply too lazy to right-click and pick from the menu.'
I need to go into a Photoshop forum and bitch a blue steak about PS. Which seems to be missing the "M" in the middle, to listen to it's fans.
Those of us with a *brain* who actually *program* understand that to *surpass* Photoshop, you have to keep the Gimp infrastructure - an infinitely extensible assortment of plug-ins and features, and not a frozen single monolithic window.
I'll time it with a stopwatch this time to see the flames and -1 troll mods pour in. I'm using it to create an AI algorithm that simulates mob frenzy.
Nah, these days I let *somebody else* buy the box from the Big Name store. Then when it's giving them trouble later, and they want to throw it away because it's *broken*, I say, "Lemme see it, maybe there's some parts I can strip off of it for the new box I'm building." *Then* I take it and replace the CPU fan, and run fdisk on the drive. Cheaper...
Well, see, that's another reason I've never done business with Big Name hardware stores. The only time I ever paid somebody else to assemble my PC for me was my first one, and that was a sharp teen at a Mom-n-Pop store who literally built it right in front of me while explaining what and why. I wonder if he knows what an influence he was?
Another C dialect. To go along with C, C++, Objective-C, C-99, ANSI-C, C-for-dummies, C-with-low-carbs-and-just-one-calorie, Lemony-fresh-C, tartar-control-C, low-milage-hybrid-C, son-of-C, As-the-C-turns, Sesame-Street-C, and Freddy-vs-C. And we still have a whole alphabet to go through!
Objection! Everyone not guilty by reason of insanity!
The blank hard drive is worth more!
I view it as a big inner-city wall covered in graffiti. Sometimes it's right. Sometimes it's wrong. Whatever it is, it gets painted over eventually. As an information source, I rank it somewhere between astrology and next week's stock picks.