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The Gimp Software Linux

First Looks at The Gimp 2.5 446

Posted by CmdrTaco from the like-a-fine-wine dept.
desmondhaynes writes "The GIMP team announced today the first release from the 2.5 development series. It is true that this version is unstable, but a little bird told me to give it a try and see what's it capable of. First of all, let me tell you that its interface is quite redesigned and I think that some users will have problems adjusting with it, but that's just my two cents. On the other hand, version 2.5.0 of The GIMP includes some hot new features, like the integration of GEGL (Generic Graphics Library) which will finally get support for higher color depths, more colorspaces and eventually non-destructive editing."
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First Looks at The Gimp 2.5 More

First Looks at The Gimp 2.5

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  • Yay New Features (Score:3)

    by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @09:32AM (#23062380)
    With the rate of advancement in The GIMP, eventually, Photoshop enthusiasts will have nothing bad to really say about it. It was always about no cmyk, no 32 bit color support, no adjustment layers. It looks like some of these things may be coming in future.

    • Re:Yay New Features (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 14, 2008 @09:33AM (#23062398)
      You forgot "no interface elements that aren't batshit insane."

      • Re:Yay New Features (Score:5, Informative)

        by Coryoth ( 254751 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @09:59AM (#23062756) Homepage Journal

        You forgot "no interface elements that aren't batshit insane."
        I'm curious; can you tell me some interface elements that are batshit insane, and explain why they are insane? Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to admit that GIMP has some interface quirks and problems around and about. Personally, however, I've found most things to work reasonably well, and, more importantly, to be steadily improving (the dockable palettes that showed up in 2.0 or so, and the Image Window + Tools Window shown in TFA for 2.5, etc.). That leaves me honestly curious as to what leads one to the point of view that apparently all the interface elements are insane -- so please: can you explain some of the things that bug you so much about the interface?

        • Re:Yay New Features (Score:5, Insightful)

          by krazytekn0 ( 1069802 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @10:08AM (#23062868) Homepage Journal
          But they aren't the same interface elements as Photshop! So they're terrible!!! </sarcasm>

          • Re:Yay New Features (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 14, 2008 @10:50AM (#23063448)
            This is why the GIMP will never be popular. Despite its lack of popularity and the overwhelming number of complaints about the user interface, the developers, and the few existing supporters, continuously rely on the excuse that users are merely familiar and conditioned to the Photoshop user interface.

            Of course, it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that the GIMP's user interface was haphazardly thrown together by programmers with absolutely no concern for HCI. Photoshop's interface couldn't possibly be better despite the thousands of hours of research and user interface testing that Adobe has put into it. Nope, absolutely none of that matters!

            Keep blaming people's familiarity with Photoshop and you'll be sure to continue the GIMPs long standing tradition of complete and utter failure.

            • Re:Yay New Features (Score:5, Insightful)

              by Shade of Pyrrhus ( 992978 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @11:22AM (#23063988)
              If I could mod you up, I would.

              I love the GIMP, and I've never actually had Photoshop. However, I will say that I frequently get lost in trying to figure out where things are. If, instead of saying, "Oh, it's not Photoshop, your complaint isn't legit!", they all said "Let's see what we can do to fix this," things would probably get better more quickly.

              I understand they've been working on things, hence this release, but these complaints are very old.

            • Re:Yay New Features (Score:5, Interesting)

              by MoxFulder ( 159829 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @01:01PM (#23065818) Homepage

              This is why the GIMP will never be popular. Despite its lack of popularity and the overwhelming number of complaints about the user interface, the developers, and the few existing supporters, continuously rely on the excuse that users are merely familiar and conditioned to the Photoshop user interface.
              I must respectfully disagree. I am not an expert with either program, but I use GIMP much more and generally prefer it. I agree that the interface had some rough edges prior to the 2.0 releases, but they've improved a ton since... I find the GIMP's interface more intuitive. If I use Photoshop, I get confused :-P

              If you want the Photoshop interface, check out GIMPshop [wikipedia.org]. It doesn't seem to be very popular though, I guess not EVERYONE is hankering for a Photoshop interface.

              Of course, it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that the GIMP's user interface was haphazardly thrown together by programmers with absolutely no concern for HCI. Photoshop's interface couldn't possibly be better despite the thousands of hours of research and user interface testing that Adobe has put into it. Nope, absolutely none of that matters!
              Actually, I think the GIMP has put a *lot* of effort into adopting the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines [gnome.org]. GNOME applications in general have improved immensely in usability as a result of these, in my opinion!

              Keep blaming people's familiarity with Photoshop and you'll be sure to continue the GIMPs long standing tradition of complete and utter failure.
              Failure? Why?

              I use it a lot and like it a lot. So do many other people. It keeps getting better and gaining more features.

              No one's getting paid to write the GIMP... they don't *have to* judge their success based on commercial competition. That's the beauty of open source/free software: if it's useful to *someone*, it will continue to be developed.

              • Re:Yay New Features (Score:5, Insightful)

                by Z34107 ( 925136 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @02:04PM (#23066920)

                I use only the Windows port of GIMP - I don't do much photo editing, but before the not much that I didn't do was not done in Photoshop. </Englishgrammar>

                The Photoshop interface was clunky, but I blame that on the "We have 5 million features that you will probably never used, all cleverly hidden under buttons!

                The GIMP interface, however, fails at basic Windows GUI principles. This is to be expected, of course, but come on - the interface is generally split up into 3 modeless dialog boxes. The one that has your tools on it is hidden if you maximize your editing window. Ditto for the layers box. They kinda got it right with some features like "transform" - the relevant dialog box pops up, in view, in the editing window, as you're editing.

                The whole 3-separate-windows thing (editing, tools, layers) looks like a lazy hack, something I did when a project was due and I was too lazy (read: procrastinated on the deadline and was too time constrained) to write a proper interface.

        • Re:Yay New Features (Score:5, Informative)

          by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @10:35AM (#23063264) Homepage
          The problem with GIMP is that the interface is so far gone, so weird, so bizarre, so non-standard - that it is really tough for anybody to sanely explain what's wrong with it. It's just so darn self evident.

          Having not used it in 2 years, I'll try:
          1) The multiple windows thing
          I think this is the most often cited issue so I will list it first. GIMP opens multiple top-level windows which means that normal shortcuts and window navigation doesn't work. (Alt-tab on Windows -- apple-tab on Macs, etc.) The only way to use GIMP is to have multiple virtual desktops, which not everyone likes. The barrage of windows clutters the interface, and windows move around a lot because when you select new tools they resize or change. You can see through to the desktop which is distracting. I know at least on the Windows version, the keys that hide windows so you can get to your image don't really work right. Maybe my experience is skewed though because of the Windows and Mac ports. But IIRC, this same stuff happened on Linux.

          This problem has garnered enough hate that there are several open-source projects that are either modifications to Photoshop, or programs that re-parent the window so that it behaves more normally. Unfortauntely, all of them are hacks and don't work super-well.

          2) Unusual use of menus
          - The menus are just... oddd. To a new user, the app is useless because once you open something, you get a window with no menus. After much frustration, the user monkey-clicks the mouse and realizes the menus are on the right-click instead of at the top of the window. That might not actually be a bad idea, but it is definitely counter-intuitive. Especially for "file" operations where people are used to seeing File-New/Open/Save/Save As/Close and those just aren't there.

          This is not an issue for an advanced user, but it is strikingly odd to someone new, and it might force a lot of people to give-up right away.

          3) Things that are NOT problems
          - I'm browsing the comments and I see comments about Photoshop having an odd user-interface. I see comments that one particular tool or another doesn't work the way someone expects. I think these people are missing the point. The problems with GIMP aren't that some particular tool is not as easy to use as a Photoshop tool, or vice-versa. The problem is that nobody can even find the tool in GIMP because the overarching user-interface is so strange. Once people can get to the tool in the first place, then think about how the tool behaves.

          4) Other
          If you really want to know, this comes-up on Slashdot every 6 months or so. Probably some searching will come-up with obvious things I've completely forgotten over time.

          • Having not used it in 2 years, I'll try:

            Use a recent version. Point number two is definitely fixed (by default, image windows have a conventional menu bar at the top) - and point number one has been worked on. A lot.

          • 1) The multiple windows thing I think this is the most often cited issue so I will list it first. GIMP opens multiple top-level windows which means that normal shortcuts and window navigation doesn't work. (Alt-tab on Windows -- apple-tab on Macs, etc.) The only way to use GIMP is to have multiple virtual desktops, which not everyone likes. The barrage of windows clutters the interface, and windows move around a lot because when you select new tools they resize or change. You can see through to the desktop which is distracting. I know at least on the Windows version, the keys that hide windows so you can get to your image don't really work right. Maybe my experience is skewed though because of the Windows and Mac ports. But IIRC, this same stuff happened on Linux.

            Just checked on a Kubuntu Linux System. Alt+Tab cycles through each GIMP window and any other window on my desktop one at a time. Does that not work in the Windoze world, or is that your problem with the interface? I like it just fine.

          • Re:Yay New Features (Score:4, Informative)

            by Coryoth ( 254751 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @11:01AM (#23063656) Homepage Journal

            Having not used it in 2 years, I'll try:
            That may be part of the problem -- as I said, they have been working on various issues...

            The multiple windows thing
            This was slimmed down in 2.0 with dockable palettes so you could just have one tool window and then image windows. The docked windows also solve the issue of windows resizing (palettes don't when docked; they may, at worst, acquire scroll bars). This particular release sees the start of further UI overhauls the first of which is to provide a default main window with a single "tools window" which has the various palettes docked into it. Furthermore, the "tools window" is marked as a utility window, so windowing systems that understand such things will consider it as different (i.e. not a main window). This fixes (I presume, I haven't tried it) your window navigation keybinding issue.

            I guess the long answer is: GIMP was initially designed for systems that didn't have taskbars, and did have multiple desktops; the result was the interface you seem familiar with, which, I agree, had serious shortcomings when ported to Windows. Over the years various efforts have been made to clean this up, and are still ongoing. Windows, of course, is still not the best platform, though there are plugins like Portable Background Window [portableapps.com] which provide a single background window which contains all the GIMP windows, providing an MDI style interface for Windows.

            Unusual use of menus...To a new user, the app is useless because once you open something, you get a window with no menus.
            This was fixed in, I believe, 2.0 (or possibly 2.2). All image windows have menu bars with a menu that replicates the right click menu. This means users can simply use the menu at the top of the window as they might expect, or use the right click menu if they prefer. The latest version from TFA goes so far as to remove the menu from the tool window and provide a default empty image window (with menubar) upon start up. While the last problem is still potentially somewhat irksome depending on taste (though with plugins it can be "fixed") I think this one has been safely dealt with since the last time you used the GIMP... indeed, it was dealt with some time ago.

          • ...something Windows and, for the most part, Mac users can't rely on.

            Yes, if you have a single desktop (because in your mind it's still 1992 or something), GIMP is a horrible interface. If you have an actual windowing system, it's a whole lot better than some MDI monstrosity.

            Remember: the multi-document interface was developed to make up for the window management capabilities Windows and Mac lacked. If your leg is broken, a crutch can be a key to mobility; that doesn't mean the crutch itself is a good.

            • Re:GIMP relies on having decent window managers (Score:5, Insightful)

              by blincoln ( 592401 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @11:18AM (#23063924) Homepage Journal
              Yes, if you have a single desktop (because in your mind it's still 1992 or something)

              Why would I want multiple desktops? So that I can be even less aware of applications that aren't running in the foreground?

              Not everyone's brain works the same way. You may like virtual desktops. I like having three physical monitors with one desktop that spans them so I can see at a glance all of the applications I'm using for a given task.

            • Re:GIMP relies on having decent window managers (Score:4, Insightful)

              by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Monday April 14, 2008 @11:20AM (#23063952) Homepage
              Your argument would make sense if most other applications on Linux used the same archipelago-of-small-windows approach the Gimp does. It would be the standard way of working to set up multiple virtual desktops with one for each app. But practically no other graphical program is like that, even on Unix-like systems. Even if the Gimp's way is theoretically superior, what matters most of all is consistency and not having each app reinvent the wheel in its own peculiar way. So the Gimp needs to get a more conventional user interface style.

              (Are multiple desktops set up by default in a typical Linux distribution these days?)

          • I think this is the most often cited issue so I will list it first. GIMP opens multiple top-level windows which means that normal shortcuts and window navigation doesn't work. (Alt-tab on Windows -- apple-tab on Macs, etc.)

            OTOH, I like this. It allows me to move images to different virtual desktops - sometimes I like having my images contained in 2 or 3 of them. A single parent window won't allow me to do that.

            The only way to use GIMP is to have multiple virtual desktops, which not everyone likes.

            Not at all. If you're on Linux, use a window manager that allows you to group multiple windows and treat them as one (i.e. minimize all with one click, switch to other apps with one keystroke, etc).

            2) Unusual use of menus
            - The menus are just... oddd. To a new user, the app is useless because once you open something, you get a window with no menus. After much frustration, the user monkey-clicks the mouse and realizes the menus are on the right-click instead of at the top of the window. That might not actually be a bad idea, but it is definitely counter-intuitive. Especially for "file" operations where people are used to seeing File-New/Open/Save/Save As/Close and those just aren't there.

            This has long been fixed. Whenever you open an image, the image window has the usual menu.

            I strongly recommend you try i

        • Let's start with File>Print... which opens the same dialog you'd see with Notepad. The ability to set up a printout are nearly null (if you dig into it, you'll spot Image>Print Size which allows you to set DPI, but about nothing more than that. If your printer driver doesn't provide 'center', 'landscape', 'multi-page', 'position' etc, you're out in the cold. Print preview? Dream on! And interestingly, GIMP had a pretty rich (though batshit insane) print setup dialog somewhere in 1.x times.

          There's no w

      • Re:Yay New Features (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @10:06AM (#23062834) Homepage

        You forgot "no interface elements that aren't batshit insane."

        Yeah, like changing a simple right-click on a layer, then 'Alpha to selection' to 'Select', 'Load Selection...', then selecting the appropriate document and channel from no-preview combo-boxes...

        The GIMP's batshit insane, but Photoshop is as loopy as a teapot. Their particular modes of madness simply aren't entirely compatible - The GIMP is definitely pretty bad in places, but for the life of me I can't figure out how Photoshop is supposed to be infinitely superior from a user interface point of view.

        I must admit that I still really like The GIMP's perspective correction tool - Photoshop's got better distortion tools, but they won't run backwards. Unlike the crop tool's perspective correction, which has no handy grid-lines visible. There's the lens correction filter, but that's really fiddly. But is brilliant at removing barrel distortion from texture references - something that's a real arse in The GIMP.

        Drawing tools? I really like how the hold-shift-to-draw-a-straight-line works in The GIMP. Click somewhere, undo to remove that splodge, hold shift down and it'll preview a fine line from where you clicked to the current cursor position. Click somewhere, and it'll draw a line with the current drawing tool. Hold down control-shift, and it'll lock to particular angles.

        Photoshop? Click, undo to remove that splodge, ARSE! it's forgotten where I clicked. Okay ... Leave that initial splodge, hold down shift, NO FINE PREVIEW LINE!, click somewhere, oops wrong place for that line, undo, ARSE AGAIN! it's forgotten where I wanted to draw the line from!

        With Photoshop, it's really easy to set up guides for your simple, shadowy lines on yer textures - but I still like The GIMP's way of doing it.

        Actually, The GIMP's handling of alpha channels is a bit more sensible - right up until the point it merrily decides to discard colour information from completely transparent pixels. As part of an 'optimisation', albeit one that only gets invoked with certain operations. So it's very easy to completely destroy your texture, unless you keep to a strict, undocumented set of operations.

        Photoshop's alpha handling is plain weird in places, but it's a bit more predictable...

    • Re:Yay New Features (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 14, 2008 @09:42AM (#23062520)
      With the rate of advancement in The GIMP, eventually, Photoshop enthusiasts will have nothing bad to really say about it.

      You're right. It's only been 12+ years that people have been asking for those things. Now GIMP actually has an engine capable of doing them (note that it doesn't actually do them yet). It'll only be another few years until the basics are covered!
      • Yes, it hasn't caught up yet, but I think that eventually, it will. And then what? Do you think that people will continue to pay for Photoshop once GIMP does everything Photoshop does? Sure, some will, but a lot won't. And also, have people been asking for 16 bit per channel color and adjustment layers for 12 years? I highly doubt it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by stubear ( 130454 )
          By the time GIMP catches up with Photoshop, Adobe will have added new improvements for GIMP to ape and the cycle will start all over. GIMP will NEVER be as good as Photoshop for professional use.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by CastrTroy ( 595695 )
            I'm sure at one point, a lot of people said the same thing about Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Sendmail, PHP, and all the other open source products that are used by professionals on a daily basis.

      • I wish they'd drop GTK+. (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I wish they'd drop GTK+ and move to Qt, wxWidgets or one of the other real GUI toolkits. I know that they were the original developers of GTK+, but they'd gain so much by moving to Qt.

        Qt, especially Qt 4.x, is a much better platform for portable, large-scale software development. And their recent graphics-related advances would no doubt be very useful for GIMP.

        The Windows and Mac OS X ports of GTK+ are, to put it kindly, utter crap. When using GTK+ apps on OS X, even with a Mac OS X theme, there's a horizon

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by qbast ( 1265706 )
          Try Krita. Based on Qt, with all those new hyped features of GIMP (like 16bit channels) available since long time. Sane GUI as a bonus.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Haeleth ( 414428 )

            Try Krita. Based on Qt, with all those new hyped features of GIMP (like 16bit channels) available since long time.

            Been there, tried it, gave up because it was too immature. Far from having a sane UI, it had crazily mis-designed keyboard shortcuts (loads of cases where multiple tasks were assigned to the same key, even though there were plenty of keys available with no tasks assigned to them at all). Okay, no big deal, you might say: it has a handy interface for configuring your keyboard shortcuts however

    • I'm hoping. The lack of 16bpp color support was the factor that was bugging me most.
    • At what rate? I don't see that the new release does much in that regard. There is still no CMYK or 32bit support as far as I can tell from the article.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nmg196 ( 184961 ) *
      Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but the rate of advancement of the GIMP is very slow - which is probably why the vast majority of people still use Photoshop. It's currently nowhere near Photoshop in functionality or reliability and I doubt that will change any time soon. It's OK for editing your holiday pics and retouching photos, but it's got a long way to go before professional designers can adopt it company-wide to produce professional artwork for print.

  • Jam Tomorrow (Score:3, Insightful)

    by allcar ( 1111567 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @09:35AM (#23062424)
    This feels like one of those releases that will be exciting for the developers, but largely irrelevant to the end users. Hopefully, it will lay the foundations for future releases to have exciting new features and capabilities, but for now there seems little to shout about.
    Reminds me of KDE4.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by i.of.the.storm ( 907783 )
      Well, 2.50 is the first development release, there's going to be a ton more (2.3 had over 20 iirc) so we'll see it take shape in the coming months or years. 2.4 was in development for quite a while, so I'd say 2.6 (the final stable version of 2.5) won't be here for quite a while, and it that time it could well be a very important release to end users. This version will probably feature some GUI reworking, which is definitely welcome considering how a lot of people seem to complain about the UI. Personally,

    • Re:Jam Tomorrow (Score:5, Informative)

      by tpwch ( 748980 ) <slashdot@tpwch.com> on Monday April 14, 2008 @09:43AM (#23062550) Homepage
      Wrong. Finally getting higher than 8-bit depth is great news for anyone who does more than a bit of hobby work with the gimp.

      To take myself as an example I take photos with a digital camera that gives me RAW files. Those are 12-bit files, which means 4096 colors per pixel rather than the 256 you get with 8 bit. Now I will be able to edit those in the gimp without loosing any quality, which means alot less posterisation when adjusting contrast and settings like that. The output image will simply look alot better, with the same tools that we already have in the gimp (assuming that the input image is of good quality of course).

      • Re:Jam Tomorrow (Score:5, Informative)

        by simcop2387 ( 703011 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @10:16AM (#23062992) Homepage Journal

        To take myself as an example I take photos with a digital camera that gives me RAW files. Those are 12-bit files, which means 4096 colors per pixel rather than the 256 you get with 8 bit.
        just to be pedantic, i doubt you're raw files are actually 12bit per pixel, its most probably 12bit per channel per pixel (and in the case of the gimp it was a maximum of 8bit per channel per pixel). this gives you 12bits * 3 channels (assuming RGB here) per pixel, so its a 2^36 colors (68,719,476,736 ) instead of 2^24 colors (16,777,216). still a dramatic change, but i just figured it'd be nice to have the complete numbers there :)
        • Actually, if his camera has a Bayer filter over the image sensor, they quite probably are 12 bits per pixel - they're interpolated to something more appropriately RGB afterwards. Until then, they're just red OR green OR blue. Not a combination!

          If you're loading raw files into the GIMP, they go through the not-half-bad UFRaw loader. I'm not sure what sort of precision that uses internally, but it's pretty high - on a par with Photoshop's raw loader. Correct the basic contrast and curves in the loader, then i

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by allcar ( 1111567 )
        I must have misread TFA. I really look forward to support for higher colour depth. I took

        In other words it will get support for higher color depths, more colorspaces and eventually non-destructive editing in The GIMP!
        to mean that a future version will now be able to support higher. If you are telling me that capability is with us now, then I rejoice, but that's not how the article reads to me.
    • The 'complete failure (to do anything but convince users that 3.5.x was a good release)' part or the 'took a lot longer than we said and still isn't remotely stable or all that usable' part?

      Heh, I can't even be marked a troll, it's all true.

  • Have they changed the name yet? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Eevee ( 535658 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @09:38AM (#23062458)
    I realize that marketing has nothing to do with the features or performance of a program. But it does have a factor in acceptance at work. There's no way I'm going in front of our Engineering Review Board for a product called "The Gimp", no matter how much money it's going to save.

    • Re:Have they changed the name yet? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Rob T Firefly ( 844560 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @09:40AM (#23062500) Homepage Journal
      So call it the "GNU Image Manipulation Program" around your bosses.

    • Re:Have they changed the name yet? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by piojo ( 995934 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @09:44AM (#23062560)
      I've heard a lot of people complain about this. Why doesn't someone make a friendly fork, that essentially mirrors the source, but calls the project by any name other than "GIMP"? (Agreeing on such a name could be a start.) I hope this wouldn't piss off the developers, but it seems like it would be so easy to implement. It would be easy to install, especially if it got some support from the GIMP developers. Would devs be friendly to this idea? What would we call it?
    • Dude, they have marketing in mind. Just in stead of going for silicon valley, well, they are targeting the strategic market of silicone valley. Think about it, of the two, which has a larger mindshare.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by drooling-dog ( 189103 )

      There's no way I'm going in front of our Engineering Review Board for a product called "The Gimp", no matter how much money it's going to save.
      Your engineering board should make it explicit that a fashionable name trumps functionality and cost-effectiveness when it comes to software procurement. In fact, I dare them to.
      • You've got to be kidding me. Let's look at what "gimp" means:

        Gimp is a usually derogatory term used to refer to a (male or female) sexual submissive person, typically dressed in black leather (or rubber), often in a gimp suit, and wearing a bondage hood or mask of the same material.

        Would you think it a boneheaded move to name software "Shitting Dick Nipples"? It's not a stupid engineering board; it's people who don't want to stand in front of their boss and say, "DUDES WE TOTALLY NEED THIS SOFTWARE CALLED '

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ed Avis ( 5917 )
      Could you explain what you find objectionable about the name?

      Would your engineering review board also have a problem with the name of the program? Or would they politely pretend not to notice and approve it with a straight face?
  • ... before the MDI argument kicks off? ;)

    • ... before the MDI argument kicks off? ;)

      From the release notes: "With the help of the UI team, the Toolbox menu has been merged into the image window. GIMP now always keeps an image window open and the default configuration treats the toolbox and docks as utility windows."

      Well, they're doing something about it - although I much preferred the previous way of doing things. It was almost RISC OS-like in its simplicity - context-sensitive menus only! ;-)

      As for the article linked by Slashdot, was it just me who

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Rik Sweeney ( 471717 )
      ... before the MDI argument kicks off? ;)

      You need to be more patient, first we're going to discuss CMYK.

      Once we're done with that we'll look at your MFI problem...

  • You *know* it hasn't noticeably improved when... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 14, 2008 @09:38AM (#23062466)
    ...the very first item in the list of "noteworthy" improvements is a new splash screen. :'(

  • Ad trap (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Zebedeu ( 739988 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @09:44AM (#23062564)
    Wow, that's a bad review!

    One can tell that from his very first comment (on the splash screen):

    HOT new splash
    But probably this is just a temporary one, as the final version will have a totally different splash!
    Really? You mean the splash screen is a HOT new feature? And you say it will "probably" change on the final version? Amazing!

    Then it just goes downhill from there, ending with a description of what The Gimp is.
    Thanks, I didn't know what it was before, now I have to read your crappy review once again so it makes sense.

    At least there were no shortage of ads, which surprisingly got through my AdBlock Plus.

    BAD ADBLOCK! BAD!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by waa ( 159514 )

      At least there were no shortage of ads, which surprisingly got through my AdBlock Plus.
      Mine too for some strange reason. And the number of cookies I had to decline was practically unbelievable. I counted somewhere around 20!
      This empty "article" was nothing more than a pathetic attempt at driving up ad views and installing tracking cookies.
      But you have to admit, the new GIMP splash screen is HOT! (sigh)

  • Appauling (Score:5, Informative)

    by Stuidge ( 1104439 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @09:45AM (#23062578)
    This is a word for word, picture for picture copy of the original at Softpedia [softpedia.com] (I'm guessing, as the Softpedia article was posted 4 days earlier). The article linked is full of adverts as well. You would be better off reading the offical GIMP release notes [gimp.org].

  • Malware (Score:5, Informative)

    by pelago ( 957767 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @09:45AM (#23062582)
    Hmm, I'm getting malware popups from 'trustedbrowser.com' from the site in TFA.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by makomk ( 752139 )
      Someone was complaining about the same thing on the last article from techrunch.blogspot.com - I think /. should probably blacklist it or something. (Allgedly, the content is stolen, too.)

  • Single window, please? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MMC Monster ( 602931 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @09:50AM (#23062624)
    Forget changing the name. In the list of requests for 2.8, the number one request is a single window model.

    This is likely the number one request for s number of years, yet we have to wait until 2.8 to even see if it will happen?

    The Gimp is a nice tool, but it really should listen to it's users.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GauteL ( 29207 )
      I am a user and I don't want a single window model. What I want is the multiple window model to work properly and it looks like they are taking steps to make this happen.
      (i.e. toolbox should be a utility window that always comes to the front when selecting a gimp window).

  • Solen content!!! (Score:5, Informative)

    by theempire ( 1272824 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @10:00AM (#23062760)
    Dear Slashdot admin, be aware that the current article (http://techrunch.blogspot.com/2008/04/first-look-gimp-250.html) was completely stolen from Softpedia (http://news.softpedia.com/news/First-Look-The-GIMP-2-5-0-83090.shtml) which was posted, as Stuidge said above, 4 days ago....
  • What's the theme/window manager being used in the screenshots? Is that a "dock"-like interface for Linux?
  • http://techrunch.blogspot.com/2008/04/first-look-gimp-250.html [blogspot.com] Resulted in the jre kicking in on my machine and a bunch of virus mumbo-jumbo from my (crappy) avast software.

    first time avast has ever found anything.

  • SPAM BLOG (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 14, 2008 @10:16AM (#23062984)
    WHY is /. linking to a spam blog. look at the name for pete's sake. here's the original: http://news.softpedia.com/news/First-Look-The-GIMP-2-5-0-83090.shtml [softpedia.com]

    The blog is just a giant redirect. Way to editorially review, slashdot. I'm on IE here at work, but Opera kills the scripting on this blog at home. forbid anyone the other way around reads this article.

  • Excited about GEGL (Score:5, Interesting)

    by radarsat1 ( 786772 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @10:19AM (#23063024) Homepage
    Yes, this is great. Forget the bad / stolen / whatever review, a look at the product..

    I've been looking forward to them integrating GEGL for some time now, and it looks like they've finally done it. This is going to be the single best thing to happen to open-source image manipulation in a long time.

    GEGL will take care of almost all the current complaints from image professionals related to image bit depths, printing features, etc. It'll make layering effects much easier to apply and it makes everything related to image manipulation completely modular.

    Also, think about how REALLY nice it is that the image manipulations routines are now librarified (is that a word?)... It means that we'll likely see other new applications pop up here and there taking advantage of this nicely-designed back-end. So don't worry about the lack of changes to the GUI, this will come in time, and even the GUI-related complaints (though I don't understand them) will likely be eventually moot.

    I think it's great that they've finally achieved this long sought-after goal of redesigning the GIMP back-end and integrating it into the application. We should all be very excited about this! I use the GIMP all the time for my (non-professional) needs, and it's an amazing piece of software.

  • Let's look at Inkscape: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bbyakk ( 815167 ) on Monday April 14, 2008 @01:18PM (#23066094)
    Inkscape has just had a major new release, 0.46. (Yeah, its number does not look like it's a major release, but it is. It's the biggest one so far).

    Inkscape's UI is a lot better than GIMP's. Everyone admits that. And it's much improved in 0.46 anyway.

    Inkscape, as a vector application, is simply a better choice for a lot of graphic tasks for which clueless people still try to use GIMP or Photoshop. Just look at the "can it draw circles" thread in this discussion!

    AND YET, despite all this, new version of GIMP gets front page news on Slashdot, but any submissions about Inkscape 0.46 are rejected.

    This is simply ridiculous.

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