Re: artwork project

[Garrett LeSage <garrett redhat com>]

Thomas Dodd wrote:

> Garrett LeSage wrote:
>
> > For Linux, basically, there's GIMP and only GIMP.
>
>
> You might find a copy of Corel's PhotoPAINT! somewhere.
> Not too bad.


I have a copy of it.  I don't use it.  I suggest that no one else does.  
It's a dead ex-product.

It came with my copy of CorelDraw! for Linux -- I happened to be on the 
beta team a number of years back, so I have a few beta copies as well as 
the final released product.

CorelDraw! and PhotoPaint! are both programs which are:

   * discontinued
   * unsupported
   * buggy
   * clunky
   * proprietary
   * made to run under a hacked version of Wine (they don't use
     winelib, as promised way-back-when)

The first reason itself is more than enough to consider not using it, 
imho.  Same can be said of any one other issue, depending on any one 
individual you may talk to.

> > It's actually a great program, once you get used to the quirks.  I've 
> > been using it for a number of years now (since around 1995 really).
> >
> > The way I cope with the GIMP's UI is by opening it on its own virtual 
>
>
> Whay UI are you comparing it too?


Any other UI.  (:

(Sodipodi being a notable exception, as it copied the GIMP's general 
interface somewhat.)

> Have you used Photoshop on the Mac?


Yes.  I am also familiar with most other DTP apps on the Mac as well, 
including Illustrator, FreeHand, and Quark.

> Mayny *nix /X applications?


Yes, I've been using Linux since 1995 and also the GIMP since before the 
1.0 series.  I first toyed around with the GIMP back in the Motif days, 
but Lesstif wasn't up to snuff, so most people (myself included) had to 
use the binary build as building from source wasn't an option.  (Motif 
was EXPENSIVE, especially for a poor college student.)  When the first 
version of the GIMP came out with GTK+ (which, at the time, was only 
distributed with the app), I started using it extensively.

> You should try Cadence tools, or SmarTest for HP-UX for some real 
> interesting UI's.


Check out GeoPak (screenshots and documentation @ 
http://198.145.188.3/geopak/idiot2001/idiot2001.htm) or GProFTPD 
(screenshots: http://mange.dynup.net/linux.html#Screenshots) for other 
apps with "interesting" UIs.  (:

> Do you have a solution for the nested menus? One long menu doesn't work.


Place the menu bar at the top instead of contextual (which adds one 
extra level of menus), only go down one sublevel (two at the very most, 
but rarely, if ever), weed out useless menu items, arrange everything in 
a more sensible fashion.

One long menu is on crack.  Menus should be short, have nice, simple, 
suggestive item names, and should only go down one sublevel (two at the 
very most).  Of course, these concepts should be applied to every menu 
-- including the hat menu, although it is much better than it once was 
(such as the 7.3 time frame and before).

The GIMP's interface is a result of copying Photoshop's general look.  
On the Mac, Photoshop works great.  On Windows, Photoshop is in MDI, 
which is hideous.  On Linux, since no tool bar exists on the top of the 
screen and MDI is a bad thing (and isn't really supported well), the 
GIMP has windows all over the place.  The best way to cope with this is 
to either have application windows (which some apps are starting to do) 
or to manage different applications on separate virtual workspaces 
(which is what most people who use the GIMP actually do).

Garrett