Me and The Gimp (and Four-Wheeled Cars)

I use The Gimp to create graphics for my projects. The main reason is because it's free (as in beer) - I usually don't warez software except old games that don't sell any more anyway. That goes doubly for software I use to create software. So Photoshop is out of the question. And The Gimp is a really good application.

But as anyone who uses The Gimp can tell you, its interface sucks. It has always sucked and continues to suck to this day. Interestingly, quite often some discussion pops up regarding this sucky interface, and whether anyone should do anything about it - or whether war is actually peace.

Just the other day there was this article linked on Slashdot about some academic-type dudes who have developed a modified gimp that collects usage data, to analyze how people use it and possible be able to improve the interface.

Ok, it's done at a university so I realize it's just someone's waste of time and government money, but still... Anyone who's ever used gimp can tell you that there's just one simple, outstanding issue that accounts for roughly half of its suckiness: The Windows (imagine that in place of "The Horror" from Apocalypse Now!). The Gimp opens gazillions of windows - and they're not contained in one parent window, like every other application in the world, no - they behave like independent application windows. You don't need academic studies to figure that out. So if you're editing the graphics to a web app for instance, you switch to Firefox to see the result, and then back to The Gimp, and you have to open like 8 separate windows to get your UI back to the state it was before switching to another application. This gets deadly tedious.

If I were tasked with designing a commercial car - and I'm a software engineer, mind you - when I got to the matter of how many wheels to equip the vehicle with, I would go with 4. Just like that - it's a no brainer. Every other car out there has 4 wheels. I think it must make structural sense, and people are used to cars having 4 wheels. A mechanical engineer or a car marketing specialist could probably tell you more. The gods know how many wheels The Gimp's designers would fit on their cars.

Guys! Don't go buying that Photoshop license just yet! I have a solution to the problem! (If you run Linux you can skip the rest of this paragraph.) Just use a virtual desktop manager - like the *nix guys do. I use one called Yod'm 3d. Unfortunately it's been bought up by some suspicious company and made commercial, but the last freeware version, 1.4, works good enough and can be downloaded (legally) for instance from The Pirate Bay. Just run The Gimp on a virtual desktop of its own. Linux people have been doing this for ages, but it's never been habit in the real world, although I heard the next version of Mac OS will have virtual desktops. Anyway, you can have it today, in your Windows. (I used to run only Linux for many years, so I got this habit of using virtual desktops extensively back then.)

There are still a few nuances to work out of The Gimp though. But it doesn't require a Ph.D. to figure them out. If you, like me, never start using Photoshop, then at least you won't be annoyed simply because The Gimp is different - it should be!

I wish it had a line drawing tool though.