GIMP 2.2 splash screen contest

Fred puissante at lrc.puissante.com
Sat Dec 4 20:08:00 EST 2004


On Sat, 2004-12-04 at 04:38, Brian Chabot wrote:
...
> Many if not all of them look fabulous.

Ditto.

> My major concern though, is whether or when they will work on reducing 
> the load time and footprint for the plugins.  Making them load-on-demand 
> would certainly help, as would unloading them when not needed.
> 
> In advocating Linux to Windows users, I'm frequently asked, "Can I still 
> use Photoshop?"

That reminds me of the 80's where everyone asked "does it run Lotus?"
Since I was big on the Amiga back in those days, the question always
drove me nuts. Worse still is I was asked this question by those who
*never even used Lotus*.  

>   I want to introduce them to GIMP, but when you have a 
> ton of plugins to show off, it takes forever and a day to simply load.

Just run Photoshop for them using Crosstalk or some other PC environment
emulator / thunker / whatever.

My daughter uses Gimp, Photoshop, Corel, and anything else she can get
her grubby little hands on on both platforms. She exploits each paint
program for its strengths. 

Load times aren't that much of an issue, since you only do that once per
session, or can simply leave it up and running. But, it looks bad when
you are trying to sell'em on it. Just tell them it's preloading
everything so that it's there *instantly* for them when it really
counts. There is nothing more annoying than to wait for a tool to load
*when I need it*. 

> Sure it loads up fine with the basic install, but especially when 
> showing someone the Windows port, you get the GTK load to slow it down, 
> and with each and every plugin loading as well....

The Linux version loads OK for me, but then I am just using the standard
plugins it "ships" with. Gimp is a Unix/Linux app that probably has not
been optimized to run under Windows. And loading times have always been
an issue for Windows apps. It may be loading all the *interpreters* for
all the scripts at app launch, where they would simply be invoked upon
scrip run under Linux. Could be wrong about this, but I would not be
surprised, since Windows typically does not come bundled with Perl,
Python, and whatever else the scripts might be written in. 

> It's bad enough that the move from Photoshop to GIMP is a huge change in 
> GUI... At least if the folks developing GIMP could take a cue from the 
> folks over at OpenOffice.org things might improve in the advocacy arena...

I kinda like Gimp's GUI the way it is and would not want to see it
changed just to win over a handful of Photoshop lovers. I doubt if there
could be a one-for-one mapping without tremendous effort. GUIs are
*hard* to do. I'd personally much rather see the effort go into creating
more cool plugins for Gimp. Gimp is *not* for the Photoshop crowd, nor
would I want to see it lower itself to those standards. :-)

Of course, someone *could*, if they wanted to burn the energy, create a
Photoshop-looking front-end for Gimp. But I don't see the cost/benefit
advantage here.

> Brian
-- 
Fred -- fred at lrc.puissante.com -- place "[hey]" in your subject.
The mass of humans on planet Earth -- regard them as the ebbing 
seas in the winds of change. They ebb, they flow, they know not 
where to go.




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