GIMP 2.2 Splash Screen Competition

Lalakis writes "The GIMP 2.2 Splash Contest is now officially open! Competition entries should be attached to the live.gnome.org wiki before midnight next Sunday. Submit your work and get the glory (there may be a small prize sponsored, too)."

My Favorite Splash Screen

[stecoop]

The only good Splash Screen is a dead one.

How about having no splash screen as an option and let everyone else stare at the pretty picture for N seconds. I have so many windows open that I don't need to have something else occupying my desktop. To me, splash screens are annoying like browser popups - which I haven't seen in months thanks Mozzy that also has the alias & shortcut command option of nosplash.

How many windows?

[nurb432]

How many windows can you have open when your desktop is just starting?

What would be better

[oexeo]

This competition is great, but maybe a "design GIMP a decent fucking GUI" contest would be better?

Re:My Favorite Splash Screen

[stecoop]

There should be a universal standard for all application in the development community where the command --nosplash will disable splash screens.

how about...

[flacco]

...one that says "*Still* only 8-bit color!"

Re:My Favorite Splash Screen

[oexeo]

> The only good Splash Screen is a dead one.

They do have a purpose though, they hide the fact the program takes forever to initialize

Re:My Favorite Splash Screen

[shufler]

An environment variable would be a better option, because really -- if you disable the splash screen on one program, don't you also want to disable it on all programs?

Java Programs Need Them

[the_mighty_$]

Actually, some splash screens are good for something. Think about Java programs that have to be runtime compiled, they usually take long times to load. In a case like that, a splash screen is extremely useful.

background load while using it would be nice

[jago25_98]

I'd prefer to be able to use it while it loads the bigger things like plugins in the background.

Waiting (about 30 seconds?) is a pain when you only want to edit an 16 pixel icon especially.

p.s. aren't message boxes also awful too, interrupting work and stealing focus... oh, I had typed more but lost it all after gimp loaded up and changed focus while I was typing and looking at keyboard.

Re:What would be better

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll add my 2c here in agreement.

I started out in graphics with gimp. I had enough interest in pixelling to want to continue, to learn the roped and put up with the difficulties. I'd been TOLD that graphics was hard, and it was tedious indeed.

Then I used Photoshop, ready to scoff at the proprietary solution costing so many thousands and doing no more than gimp. Within 2 weeks I'd gone out and bought photoshop because no matter how much you listen to someone else's experience with a program, there is nothing more revealing than using it yourself. Gimp feels nearly feature complete, but in the same way a large rock is feature complete with a set of six various sized hammers. When you need to hit something and do it right, the hammers let you do it exactly how you want to.

Photoshop is a set of hammers.

Re:What would be better

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just like saying that the Java people should work on building a language more like Python, instead of polishing Java. Just like some people like Java, some people think Gimp's GUI is better than Photoshop's, so please let them keep it.

This whole debate/troll about Gimp's GUI is not about bugs or incompleteness, it's about choices that have been made. This GUI is not buggy, it doesn't lack important features, but they made the choice to not copy Photoshop, and that's what it's all about. Don't like these choices ? Fork it and make a Photshop-like GUI. But don't remove the ability to like Gimp from us.

Re:My Favorite Splash Screen

[DocSnyder]

A status bar or a progress window would serve better than any nice picture.

Why not delegate splash screens to a special daemon which can be decorated with skins, docked into the KDE/GNOME panel or just deactivated?

Re:how about...

[Queuetue]

Could you point towards a roadmap for Gimp development? (And please tell me they are working to improve the text layer tools! :) )

My Favorite Splash Screen-GConf.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Gee, its too bad Linux doesn't have a single, consolidated tree-based system for storing type-specific environment variables. It would be handy for registryng such things."

Like GConf?

What The Gimp really needs for professionals

[SpamJunkie]

...is a new name.

Few management types are going to approve of using a BDSM-themed program no matter how free it is.

The attempt at making a cute raccoon-like animal the mascot doesn't help. We all know that he's wearing nothing but leather and pain below the neck.

Re:What would be better

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

There's a difference between doing occasional jobs in Gimp and trying to use it professionally i.e. for 10 hours a day. I pity anyone who works for a company that refuses to pay for Photoshop and makes their employees use Gimp. The underlying engine in Gimp is probably good enough for a lot of work but the user interface is just plain horrible when compared to Photoshop.

How about a logo contest

[bcarl314]

I mean really, what is that brown pointy haired beast anyway? Is it a rat, or some twisted BSD ripoff?

Re:How many windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is GIMP, not Gnome.

A serious question about Gimp.

[SharpFang]

Let me put it simply: Airbrush sucks. I need something better.
The task is preparing gray-to-heightmap images from photos for later 3D engraving using a CNC engraving machine. I "spray" more white using airbrush where the image in the background is higher, leave dark where the bottom should stay deep. The effect is very neat for small details or simple shapes. But it really sucks when it comes to large areas. The fact that the output is slightly grainy is not that bad - a single pass of blur and the "grains" are gone. Much harder is achieving bigger smoothly curved surfaces - just try to spray a regular flat gray area (using white), it's just as hard as to get a smooth gradient - you get low-depth, several pixels wide depressions, bumps etc that are very hard to remove.
Regular "gradient" is not an option either - I need shapes much more sophisticated than regular "spherical" or "shapeburst" - maybe something like Bezier curved gradients could help...?

Any ideas, suggestions?

(no, don't suggest Photoshop. It does exactly the same.)

What is it that people don't like about the GIMP?

[dpol]

The GIMP seems to be the project that Slashdot users love to hate. People go on and on about the horrendous user interface, yet fail to back this up with anything substantial. Why all the hostility toward the GIMP? If you hate the interface, what is it about it that you don't like?

I, for one, can't really see what people dislike so much about the project. The application was perfectly usable before 2.x, yet got a huge boost when 2.0 was released. The GIMP has done the most of any project when it comes to building new widgets on top of the GTK toolkit.

The GIMP is no Photoshop. It doesn't have adjustment layers, color management, the healing brush, all the cool plug-ins for digital photographers that Photoshop CS introduced, and lots of other features. Photoshop is a remarkable application, there's no question about it, but the GIMP is eminently usable -- it's a remarkable project, and it is making great strides.

So the next time, if you feel the need to complain, please try to be a little bit more specific and use less inflammatory language.

Re:What would be better

[jejones]

Perhaps a good first step towards that would be if people sharing that opinion would post something more informative and detailed than "GIMP UI sux0rs" and "Photoshop UI rules."