On Tuesday 27 November 2001 02:18, Branko Collin wrote:
snip
3. A page on the GIMP site should be dedicated to the topic of How
to
transition from Photoshop to the GIMP successfully. The
community would be a lot larger if more people realized that 'you
get what you pay for' is a false statement; get professional
artists interested in GIMP and the development potential would
skyrocket. Once professionals depend on GIMP, then we may even
see some corporate funding for making GIMP do all the things that
need to be done: CMYK, serious halftoning, and easy font work
come to mind, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I thought you were working on such a tutorial?
Has anyone looked at any Photoshop books? I use Gimp at home under Linux, and
yesterday I happened to find myself at a Mac with Photoshop. The experience
reminded me of my first days with Gimp. So how did all those Photoshop users
learn how to control the program? How about getting a popular Photoshop book
and copying the structure, but using Gimp instead?
Having said that, I think the tutorials and the manual are pretty good, it's
just not that easy to find them. I like the idea of having the website be an
extension of the UI, however, do remember that not everybody has 24/7 web
access, and needing a web link to look up some feature quickly is not yet a
viable option I think.
Last thingy, about professional use of Gimp, isn't this a bit of a
chicken-and-egg thing? I can't imagine anyone using a program that doesn't do
CMYK, serious halftoning and easy font work (with the added note that my X
server crashes regularly on TrueType fonts rendered larger than 100 px or so)
for professional print graphics. Having worked together with those
professionals quite a bit lately I think Gimp needs to be quite a bit better
still.
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The new gimp.org will in all probability have more sections for more
parts of the community. So far, gimp.org has been the prototypical
Corporate Website, the folder-on-the-net. Address and product
information you can get, but if you want support, communities,
downloads, what have you, you will have to look elsewhere. Gimp.org
at least did one better than most other corporate sites by at least
linking to all the elsewheres.
Lastly, the mentality of we don't care if you use it, we develop GIMP
for us is the keystone of exclusivity and elitism,
There is nothing wrong with exclusivity and elitism per se...
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Maybe. I think that is your personal opinion. Me, I do it for my itch
to be scratched and because it looks good on my portfolio and because
I like the GIMP development community. In the end, you decide what is
rewarding for you.
I think the problem we have here is that there's quite a big difference
between the developers and the users of the program. The people who make open
source racing games probably do that because they like to play racing games
as well. The average Gimp developer seems to do it because they like to write
image manipulation software, things like writing filters and scripts and
stuff, not necessarily because they like making digital art. The users of the
program aren't very interested in the technology behind it all, they just
want something to help them create their images. What I think the new website
should do is explain to the programmers that doing something like this for
your CV is nice, but nobody will be impressed if the program isn't used by
anybody. And that the maintainers won't accept contributions that don't help
the users in some way. On the other hand, the users should know that there
are a bunch of developers who make it possible for them to use this great
program, and that that's where they should go with feature requests and
proposals for improvement of the program. Or in other words, these two groups
of people, developers and users, should become one group of Gimp enthusiasts.
I'd like to suggest a way to try and achieve this. About three years ago,
game development company Lionhead (www.lionhead.com) started a discussion
board on their website. There were different fora within the board, for
different subjects. Amongst others there was a programming board and a board
to discuss the (then upcoming) game BlackWhite. What happened was that the
programmers, who normally aren't that gamesy, started posting on the BW
board as well, discussing the game with the gamers, while the gamers ended up
on the programming board with questions such as hey, seen this screenshot,
how did they do that? and I'd like to start programming too! How?.
Ofcourse there are mailinglists for developers and users, but these are more
or less separate entities, just like the Gimp user community and the Gimp
developer community are separate entities. Web boards are a bit more
userfriendly than mailinglists (ie they are easier to grok for Jon Foo who
just yesterday bought his new computer at
