MESSAGE
| DATE | 2002-06-10 |
| FROM | Marco Scoffier
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [hangout] I Bid You All Adieu
|
As I use photoshop and the Gimp on pretty much a daily basis, (and have
been known to exaggerate to make a point) let me start to answer.
On 2002.06.10 11:21 Brendan W. McAdams wrote:
> 1) What, if any, is the software's analog (Windows equivalent; e.g.
> If a user is coming over to Linux from Windows, and they will use
> $program to replace $analog. $program = GIMP, $analog = Photoshop.
> $program = OpenOffice, $analog = MS Office. $program = Evolution +
> Ximian
> Connector, $analog = MS Outlook connected to an Exchange server) on
> Windows?
The most obvious new user problem with the GIMP is that there is no
main Menu Bar across the top of the screen. You have to right cilck on
one of the dialog windows to get the menu. Unfortunately I find this
to be a plus, and go crazy when mousing for miles and miles in
photoshop. I really like having the menu when I right click. (pro?
con?)
>
> 2) What functionality is required in order to replace the analog fully
> (e.g. what features do we lack or need to add [if starting from
> scratch] in order to make it worth while to use $program over
> $analog)?
>
People talk of CMYK separations, which quite frankly I never do with
photoshop. Every print job I have done has gone to tiff, and I can get
good enough colormatching using my eyes to calibrate my equipment, that
I don't really fall for the unbelievably expensive colormatching
solutions which seem to get designers excited the way chrome bumpers
get the car fanatic in a tizzy. One of the students from teh first
Unix_1 is a professional color matcher for color-aid, he too will tell
you how the eye can be more precise than equipment, or once you get to
a certain point do you really care?
> 3) File Formats. Can we fully support the file format of $analog,
> even if it's only to read it and save it in our own internal format?
> If no, why not? Should we?
>
The GIMP supports the photoshop psd format for reading, layers and
transparencies are maintained ( I will double check the levels of
transparencies.) Non-rendered layers like the photoshop text layers
you can go back to edit are not understood. Speaking of text the
free-type plugin is excellent, but will never have enough fonts, there
are no commercial ttf font sets which I know of under linux and fonts
have been a long complicated battle even among the proprietary
systems. You cannot however re-edit a font layer in the GIMP you must
make a new one.
> 4) Usability. How easy is $program to use compared to $analog.
> Remember, we're trying to entice people who aren't necessarily
> computer pros into using Linux and $program. How easy will the
> transition be for them? What can we do to make it easier? UI Design
> isn't easy, admittedly.
THere are some mouse event problems in the GIMP where grabbing exactly
what you want when it is too thin or small can be difficult. This can
be quite annoying. I have had similar problems in other applications,
despite spending weekends tweaking my wacom tablet parameters.
Also there is no preview for most of the filters, or even the
transformations, which is troubling when you first come from photoshop,
but since GIMP's history is quite bullet proof, you can just do and
then undo.
>
> 5) Transitional Help. Do we have documents so that a user who knows
> $analog can use $program easily? MS Word has shipped, for as long as
> I can remember, with a help menu item called "Help for Wordperfect
> Users"; this is the kind of thing we need.
>
I always find it suprising that people imagine they can pick up a
complex program like the GIMP without reading the documentation. There
are two excellent books on the GIMP available for free download,
Grokking the GMIP and the Manual. Including many tutorials to fill in
the gaps for specific problems. I know when I started photoshop I was
sponsored to take a three day training workshop with a professional
trainer, by the Digital Imaging lab where I worked and when I went to
Art School there were Semester long classes, which would teach concepts
such as pixels and bitmaps and resolutions and sharpness masks and
image compression, as though all these things existed only in photoshop.
> 6) Are there other -at-programs in this segment trying to duplicate
> $analog? Is it worth merging programs, or taking features from
> $programs[$i] to enhance $program ? Collaboration is a good thing!
>
> 7) Are the right developers working on the project? What kind of
> people do we need to accomplish our task?
>
> 8) In a broad sense, what is still lacking to make $program comparable
> to $analog?
>
> I think this covers a good initial set of 'questions' to use.
>
I sort of peter off in the middle of the responce, because point for
point comparissons get tedious, and often miss essential features.
Like the Gimp runs in X and I always run multiple desktops and copy and
paste works so smoothly in X (except in Balsa god knows why). Or take
the X-sane scanner interface, I think I mentioned at the CUNY demo, or
the image map and jpeg compression plugin, or the ease with which one
can do animations in the GIMP, you can start to treat film or video
footage with the same filters as your images. The fact that the GIMP
or any free software doesn't try to implement the "feature" which
Adobe's marketing team has decided will help to sell more licenses,
makes it a product which I find caters more to what I need to get done,
and often makes a different product..
I love the X-sane scanner interface because it gives me control over
every parameter which I can adjust in my scanner, and I know how to
adjust my scanner to make the scans I want. The Epson driver which
came with the scanner for the mac had TWO BUTTONS "for print" and "for
web" I had to pay extra for the full control. Now I imagine that,
though it makes my skin crawl, there are probably people who want one
button scanning, and I did notice that in Suse 8.0 they had come up
with such a tool, but I still maintain that free software is amazing
because you get control, not because you imitate the one-button magic
of the proprietary world.
You can convince people, even completely non-technical people, of the
control arguement using examples like the TiVo which gives you control
over your television experience, and (I have heard from numerous
non-technical people) is quite easy to program ("my six-yr old figured
out how to record all her favorite cartoons and is filling up all my
disk-space" , one man told me).
It is issues like that of control and freedom, which make me and many
others put up with usability weirdness, or difference. Believe me
there are numerous usabilty issues in the proprietary world, I can't
even begin to number the hours I have spent babying an unstable mac.
People have just gotten numbed to the usability issues they encounter
every day. The way someone who uses free-software everyday becomes
numbed to some useability issues. I know, however, that fundamentally,
when using free-software, I don't have much to complain about. For
some reason for me there is much less anger when a free program is
acting weird than when a $1000 program on a $3000+ system is acting up,
and I spend 3hrs on hold to get an inexperienced, clueless help-desk
whose only answer is that they will e-mail me if they find an
answer or that the problem is with another program I am running and
they don't have any control over that.. I have an extremely powerful
system under my control, and everytime I learn to control another part,
I gain in knowledge, power and freedom, which I try to share.
Now I know that like many other free software enthusiasts I do get
carried away, I don't know how many times I have been in a discussion
where I see my wife's eyes glaze over and she gets a "here he goes
again" look. But I think most of the underlying issues surrounding
free-software are much too important to get glossed over.
And right now I think it is more important to get more people using the
already amazingly powerful free-software tools than to work on
imitating every minute aspect of the $analog
my always too long $0.02,
--Marco
--
Repeal the DMCA and fight the Hollings Bill
____________________________
New Yorker Linux Users Scene
Fair Use -
because it's either fair use or useless....
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