08 July 2010

GIMP 2.7.x

Thanks to Luya (and the people who helped him in turn) there is a GIMP 2.7.x package (the development trunk, leading to the much awaited 2.8) available in koji, I was busy these days and almost forgot about it but the GIMP scammer this morning reminded me about it, so I had the opportunity to play:

gimp 2.7.1

For starters I tried the single-window mode, which everyone seems to anticipate so badly and forced myself to use it for a while: I am not sure I will end using it as default, I feel it wasted some screen estate, probably is not usable on the netbook. There are also some smaller interface changes you have to accommodate with, like the move from Save to Export dialog of a lot of file formats, zoom shortcuts and more.

7 comments:

  1. all i want to know is... who is she? and can i have her number? :P

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  2. @Anonymous: she is my model from the "Wet Fedora T-shirt Photo Session" and no, you can't have her number

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  3. I really hate that it forces you to "Export" (instead of "Save") non-Gimp file formats.

    Simple workflows like opening a PNG image, doing some small change and saving back to the same file have suddenly become much more complicated and frustrating (Especially if you add the several clicks now needed to close Gimp after you're done).

    It's like the program doesn't trust me, the user, of handling the consequences of saving my image in a flat, possibly lossy, possibly reduced-depth format, so it thinks it needs to "protect" me from that.
    Not sure whether to feel insulted or just very annoyed.
    But I guess that has always been the Gnome way of treating users... :-/

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  4. @Sascha: GIMP is not, and never was, a GNOME project.

    The Export dialog stays also into my workflow and I am not sure I buy the developers rationale: make it clear GIMP is a serious app, for complex image editing, not just a JPEG editor

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  5. I can't understand why people get so excited by a single wndow mode. Surely that's going to be a lot more limiting, especially on mulit-monitor setups.

    It seems to me that this single window interface came from Windows (or they got it from somewhere) as a work around for broken window management. Why build a window manager into every app?

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  6. Most of the people excited by the single window mode hope GIMP will become what I wanted for so long: a clone of the Windows version of Photoshop.

    I tried this new mode and then returned to the old one, I find it using the screen more efficiently and better when working with multiple images at the same time.

    And AFAIK the multiple window apps on Linux came due to gtk+ lack of MDI (and in turn MDI was invented on Windows due to the lack of the Mac global menu).

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  7. Well, I've never ever used photoshop, and I hate having tones of windows, especilly when using multiple desktop. It makes it so tidious, to find the right window when you have many opened. On top of that the toolbox window is always to disapear at times, for no reason. Then you look for it among your stack of windows, and loose an icredible amount of time.

    I think the single window mode is just fine.

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