GIMP vs Photoshop February 10th, 2010

Even as a self-declared FOSS fanboy, I’m tired of seeing other designers make their little sesnational posts about embracing GIMP. It’s a lie. The vast majority of existing users won’t really be using the primitive image editor any time soon, even with their vastly redesigned user interface in 2.8. If GIMP could do the deed, I’d be on ship, but this just isn’t the case.

I won’t spend much time spelling out the user interface problems, since it’s already clear they are being addressed and they’ve stepped away from their single window interface. In a perfect world where the Window Managers did their job, this may have worked. Stepping away from this interface model will give them better platform independence and wider acceptance.

Even if the user interface was perfect, there is one fundamental short-coming of GIMP: It lacks any useful dynamic effects. The best thing about Photoshop is that they’ve put a lot of work into optimizing the workflow for the most common graphic design elements. Making elements with gradients, strokes, drop shadows, and other common elements is easy to do in Photoshop and GIMP is quite capable itself. However, when it comes to making a tweak to those elements, GIMP falls apart. If you want to change how it looks, you’re going to have to repeat the process.

GIMP doesn’t have a simple macro system like Photoshop does. Anytime I need to automate something, I can easily record a macro, fiddle with the history manager, and repeat most processes. I’ve done this to automate complex cuts, layer exports, batch cropping/resizing, and a lot of other stuff. Most of the time automating something in GIMP takes more time than doing it by hand with most workloads.

The layers in GIMP are also awkward to work in a lot of ways. Even the simple task of moving a lot of layers at the same time doesn’t work. It also has no free transform tool, so doing a scale and rotate are completely separate operations, and unless you know exactly what you want to do you’ll be repeating the steps until you get the combined transformation you want. There also isn’t a layer group functionality in GIMP, so organization is a pain.

I don’t do a lot of raster graphics, but from what I can tell it doesn’t have a simple right-click popup for modifying brush size and other simple options.

Vectors in GIMP are a bad joke. This is another area lacking the dynamic element. Photoshop makes vectors powerful by allowing constructive geometry. This is a fancy way of saying you can combine simple elements to make more complex elements. A good example is making a crescent moon by subtracting one circle from another.

What GIMP does have is an open development model, which is something Adobe will never do with Photoshop. But, unless we start using it to do something useful, what good is that?

Adding Twitter to Pidgin February 7th, 2010

My friend Steven was raving about a plugin that adds support for the Twitter protocol to the Pidgin instant messenger. I’ve used a lot of other Twitter clients, but this is neat because it fits in with all my other instant messaging protocols.

It would be nice if there was a PPA on Launchpad that offered this, but I don’t have the time to do that, so I just grabbed the source from SVN and did a checkinstall on it for my 64-bit system. Heres the package:

libpurple-twitter-protocol_0.20-1_amd64.deb (70 kB)

Stupificated February 7th, 2010

I’m going to be running through a gauntlet of dumb in a “study” I’m calling Stupificated. Here I’ll be spending a week straight unplugged from anything creative, educational, or remotely close to intelligent. We’re talkng about scraping the bottom of the barrel here:

  • No programming or fixing technical problems. If I have a problem with my system, then I’ll have to call one of my friends to fix it, even if I know the solution to the problem.
  • No toying with design, graphics, or writing. These are creative outlets and massive learning experiences.
  • No selectively choosing good things to watch on TV. I have to be hit with the shotgun of stupid by burying myself in the worst of the worst:
  • Surfing aggregate sites like Digg, Reddit, or Slashdot will be out of the question. Any internet activity will be strictly limited to playing stupid (Flash) games.
  • Most games, like Counter-Strike and Warcraft III (strategy-like games) are out of the question, but I might use a World of Warcraft trial.

Oh, and somewhere in there is BET, which when someone reminded me I almost called this whole thing off. Every day I’ll be measuring myself with some metrics. I noticed a weird paradox here though, very much similar to quantum mechanic’s measurement problem: the act of measuring my intelligence is learning to some degree. Basically I have to find some ways to subtly measure my intelligence, memory, comprehension, etc. without interfering (much).

Since I know I’m very likely to lose my mind, I’ll be taking some psychological evaluations along the way. Also, as a non-regular drinker, I’m banking on my desire to consume alcohol exploding.

Why would you want to do it?

Some irony in the scenario is: there are people who do this all day, every day, and it’s their life. They gave up trying to learn – for whatever reason. This is a temporary experiment for me. To some, my response is: How can you live it? I’ll be counting down the days, while some lost count a long time ago.

I’ll be starting this within the next month, since I have to plan a full week around it. I can’t very well stop tutoring someone and tell them “Oh, I’m trying to be stupid for a week, sorry, can’t help you!” I also have to get it done before some conventions come around, so it’s a slight balancing act with time.

I’ll also be measuring my recovery the week after, and I’m speculating the rebound time will be very quick.

Please give me your ideas. This is another world for me, and I’m just picking the low hanging fruit I can see. If you have an idea of something that breaks the scale of ignorant – let me know! Tweet @KristopherIves with #stupificated or leave a comment below. I’ll be reading this until I start the study, and I’ll be editing this article before and after the study. Ideally I would like to have some kind of “stupid schedule” of what to watch.