Just wanted to thank you for the links. I was especially pleased to find that Python is supported!
Thank you! You've given me reason to sit up and pay attention when 3 rolls around, I appreciate that.
I would recommend against showing the more diehard Photoshop fans that link, though. It won't get you anywhere because what it really needs to be is a list like this:
- GIMP has a plugin/feature for automatically generating normal maps from elevation data.
- GIMP has a perspective correction feature that is superior to Photoshops in that it...
- GIMP's 'save all layers' button saves all of the layers in your file into seperate files.
5 is horribly overrated. Lots of artists can script, but few (if any) can make actual plugins or modify the source code. (Even if they do dig in to the code how do they maintain those features when a new version of GIMP comes along?) I do want to mention, though, that there's another reply to my original post that seems to have covered the scripting point. I haven't checked it out yet but given that scripting is something I do, I'm certainly interested in trying that out.
6 needs an extra line, something like: "its better than Photoshop's Batch feature because...."
10... actually this is a really good one. In fact, just before this thread started, I went and found the portable version and downloaded in. Why? Welp, if the scripting that Culture20 posted a link to turns out to be worthwhile for me, coupling that with a portable version of GIMP is *awesome*. What that means is I will be able to automate certain tasks AND keep a fresh install on my DropBox account so I can even use it off-site. This is 1 out of 9.5 (I gave partial credit to the source-code bit) and, as you can already see from other replies you've gotten, most are refutable.
I'm a little worried you might read my post and think that I'm trying to perpetuate the GIMP vs. Photoshop debate. I'm not, instead I'm trying to explain what needs to happen explanation-wise to get more Photoshop people to try GIMP out. I think there's this mentality that people should switch to GIMP and that's simply not true. If you got the professional Photoshop users to start using GIMP for certain tasks, you may find that some studios may find it worth their time to invest some development time into improving it. Given how Adobe has been dicking around with the licensing, this would be a good time to get that ball rolling. Start touting the unique features it has that shave man-hours off a project. If those features don't exist, then the team needs to start talking to people like me and finding out what else they need.
Care to run off a list of ways that "GIMP doesn't come close"? If it's really so bad, it shouldn't be that difficult to name at least a dozen or so... In actuality, I expect that enumerating the shortcomings of GIMP will not be in quantity, but in terms of a relatively small number of particularly desirable features that many may perceive as critically important in such software.
Hi, professional artist here. Your latter point, at least from my perspective, is correct. I know Photoshop really well, but since I make my living doing this work I am not biased in a way that'd prevent me from using a free tool. Let me be extra clear: It would hurt me to be fanboyishly loyal to be any particular app. I do pick up and mess with GIMP from time to time, but it has two critical omissions from Photoshop that make it unusable in my field. First, it lacks adjustment layers. Second, it lacks Smart Objects.
These are both features intended to do non-destructive editing of imagery. Let's say you have a tree with green leaves. You can create a Hue/Saturation 'adjustment layer' that will turn all the green pixels beneath it blue. If you put a picture of a different tree below that layer, its leaves would turn blue, too. If you took that tree and made it a 'smart object', you'd effectively be snapshotting that image and every operation you do causes it to regenerate itself. In other words, if you shrank a Smart Object down, then scaled it back up again, you'd get all its original detail back.
If you're creating imagery it doesn't take long for these two features to change your workflow in such a way that you gain a HUGE time savings. In fact I have created several templates to speed up the generation of images I do that I just plain cannot do in GIMP. Realistically speaking that is enough man-hours lost that I'd actually make a greater profit paying for Photoshop than I would saving the cost of the license in favor of GIMP.
With that said, I'd be *very* happy if you told me that version 3 would add these features. I'd also be very happy if somebody could tell me what GIMP does that Photoshop doesn't. It's free. if it shaves man-hours off my work, then load me up with the tips. I ain't gonna switch, but I ain't above using both.
Currently I am using the local calendar adapter for Google calendar, from F-droid. Works well. There is a similar CalDAV adapter too - doesn't it work nicely with owncloud? I was hoping to use it some day.
The issue I'be had with it is that it doesn't really do merging, it does 'server always wins'. This means that if you delete an event locally, on the next sync it will reappear. It's fine for new events created on the device and for events created elsewhere if you just want to view them on the device. I use owncloud on the server and iCal on my laptop and editing things on either of those is fine.
Anyway, that was my point. Google and the other big 4, really do good UI - much as I hate to expose my data for their inspection.
The reason I stopped using the search engine was that they made a UI that pissed me off enough to make me quit. I've not found Google UIs to be particularly well designed in general - I could file a few hundred UI bug reports on the general Android system, including a lot that are regressions.
One use case that's often touted for this kind of thing is having appliances that can work on spot pricing for electricity. Over the course of the day, you get spikes from solar and wind (and tidal and so on) production when electricity is cheap. You get periods when power plants need to reduce capacity for maintenance when it is expensive. There are massive power storage facilities that profit from this: there is one near where I used to live that pumps water up a hill into a reservoir when electricity is cheap and then lets it flow down again and generate power when it's expensive. Now imagine if your fridge or freezer could get this information in real time and could run the compressor a bit more when electricity is very cheap, then use the cooled coolant to keep your food cold when the price goes up.
Almost 50% of the electricity generated in the USA is wasted because the supply can't adapt to demand fast enough. There are some very big savings to be made by having demand adapt to supply.
It's not abusing anything Google apps work better and use less resources than the competitors which is 1 reason why they are doing this.
Really? About the only Google app that I haven't replaced with something better (and open source, so money / distribution rights are not an issue) is Google Play, and that's only because my bank and a few other companies only make their app available via Google Play.
Oh it parses it just fine. It was just a dumb idea to parse it in the first place.
Re-read the latest CVEs. There are bugs in the parsers that can be exploited, so even if you're never invoking the functions they're already run through the parser and the parser is breaking things for you.
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion