GIMP's 10th Anniversary Splash Contest

Lalakis writes "Barely in time for GIMP's tenth birthday is the 10th Anniversary GIMP Splash Contest. This new contest requires a tutorial with the submissions, so get out your favorite text editor and show us all of the beautiful things you can make your GIMP do. Submit those entries and wait to see if there is a gimp-2.2.10 with your entry as the very special release splash. Here are all the current submissions. The contest will be open until Sunday the 27th of November, at which point the winner will be announced and committed to CVS. Happy Birthday GIMP!"

Fancy text editor

[0110011001110101]

FTFA - so get out your favorite text editor and show us all of the beautiful things you can make your GIMP do.

I looked at those current submissions, and if I could get my text editor to do that, I wouldn't need any fancy competition to validate my skillz!

Age shows

[Anonymous Coward]

GIMP's age shows. It has been improved and polished what it has but it has also in features fallen behind with the modern features the commercial professional photo editing and imagery applications have. I wouldn't myself even bother noticing GIMP's anniversaries nowadays, sadly.

No dynamic effect layers, the drawing tools are from CCCP, the color management still has got a lot to do, pdf importing isn't very good afaik, ... Bah. GIMP can imho just plain rot in hell and stay in the earlier 80s as a tool as the developers seem to be prioritizing.

Redirect your efforts.

[Stumbles]

You know instead of worrying about some silly splash screen. How about making it support 16 bit tiffs and saving at that. AFAIK 2.2.9 don't.

Re:Is it ok

[Anonymous Coward]

This is probably why they require a tutorial.

Time flies

[gnarlin]

10 years and still no CMYK support, which incidentally is the key feature which is holding the GIMP back from becoming a serious contender with photoshop. One would think that someone or some group would see the value of such a feature in a free software graphics program and have it implemented. If for nothing else then to save money and have a better bargaining position when dealing with vendors of propriatery notoriety [adobe.com].

Re:NO

[BigSven]

Now why is that the fault of GIMP? GIMP does set the appropriate window hint that is telling the window manager that this is a splash screen. It appears that Apple is to be blamed here for delivering a lousy X server.

On a related note, GIMP startup takes about 3 to 5 seconds here. See also http://svenfoo.geekheim.de/index.php/2005-11-05/gi mp-startup-time/ [geekheim.de]

Re:Thank you for windows port

[benbob]

I have saved money and also stayed on the right side of the law thanks to the GIMP.
In the "war on piracy", there is no better weapon than Open Source :-) Why steal it (Piracy IS theft remember!) when:
a. you can get it for free.
b. it does almost exactly what you want and,
c. you can even have a say in what it does next! if you're that way inclined ;-)

I would submit for the contest...

[Apostata]

...but the number of steps involved to create a simple drop-shadow would depress anyone who read the tutorial.

Re:Redirect your efforts.

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you think GIMP needs a particular feature, get off your duff and fix it!

Newsflash! The days of 10-minute feature hacks to pissant little GNU utilities are long gone. Learning the codebase for any non-trivial application (of which the GIMP certainly qualifies) is not a 'get off your duff' job. It took me months to gain enough familiarity to the GIMP's structure before I was even in a position to make any significant changes - and for most of that time I was hacking at it full time. Ask anyone else who's been involved with anything more sophisticated than 'ls' and they'll agree with me.

It's tired, outdated retorts like that that keep OSS playing second fiddle. Kindly stop making them, dumbass.

Re:10 years of Innovation

[KiloByte]

In fact, the user interface differs so much that a photoshop user has a very hard time using Gimp -- and someone used to the Gimp finds Photoshop cumbersome.

Re:Needed features

[slavemowgli]

There's a GIMP fork called CinePaint (formerly known as Film Gimp, as it focused on features needed by the movie/special effects industry) that has CMYK support, IIRC. The features it adds were originally supposed to get merged into GIMP 2.0, but the GIMP developers later told the Film Gimp guys that they didn't want these things in the main branch after all.

For me, this is one of the biggest mistakes the GIMP developers ever made, but it also shows a fundamental problem in their attitude: instead of welcoming additions and new users scratching their own itches, they locked them out and told them they weren't welcome. Of course, you do have to focus on what you want to accomplish in a project and avoid feeping creaturism, but rejecting features that are clearly useful and within the scope of a project... that's arrogance.

As someone else said, it actually shows that GIMP is 10 years old by now. It's still a useful tool, and I actually use GIMP 1.2 almost daily (I also have GIMP 2.2 installed, but I always found it slower and more clumsy than the earlier versions), but the idea to produce a free Photoshop replacement... that was missed long ago, and without some radical changes on both the code and the project management level, I doubt it's ever going to happen.

I hate to say it, but GIMP is looking old, and considering that it's still considering a kind of flagship among open source application, it's making us all look bad. Is this really the best we can come up with?

Re:Time flies

[FooBarWidget]

Why are everybody so obsessed with CMYK? Face it: most people are not professional graphics designers and don't need CMYK. If I want to touch up some photos for my homepage, I couldn't care less what CMYK is. If Joe Average wants to create a few drop shadows for his photo gallery, he doesn't need CMYK.

Besides, professionals wouldn't use Gimp even if it supports CMYK. They'd still use Photoshop because that's what they were thaught at school. Implementing CMYK wouldn't solve anything at all - the peopel who complain would just move on to new things to complain about.

Re:Redirect your efforts.

[dominator]

The developers don't need to do a lick of work for this splash screen contest. It's fun, something a non-hacker can do, and good advertising for the Gimp. It's not like the devs are all drawing splash screens instead of making 16-bit support work (not that you have a right to demand that they do *anything*, let alone a specific feature on a specific timeline). It's not the "either-or" situation you make it out to be...

What about lazy initialisation?

[stivi]

First, let me congratulate the Gimp for its 10 years.

Second, the splash screen is really annoying as well as slow application loading. What abou lazy initialisation of everything that is not needed at the moment and is not essential for basic application run? Just load information about plug-ins, such as name, description, menu entries or tool icons at app startup. Then load tools/plug-ins/scripts when the user first needs them.

When I launch an application I want to use it immediately. I am fine with half or whole second when I am going to use a tool once or twice for the very first time.

On the other hand, why should not application learn something about me and my habits? For this simple task, at the beginning, you do not need anything fancy, just collect statistics about tool/feature usage. With this, application can optimallise the lazy initialisation...for example, loading when idle, or preloading only frequently used, or ... (imagine).

I wish all splashcreens go away and applications start learning something about their users...

Frankly, they should change the name

[Dirtside]

I love the GIMP, I use it every day (yes, for real work), but the name is beginning to bug me more and more. It may seem harmless, but 1) it could be a lot more appealing with a better name, and 2) yes, there are some people who find the name offensive. We wouldn't want it named New Image Gnu Graphics Editing Routine, would we?