Working with open-source
I had made a pretty nice template for a website that I’m working on in the office. Since I didn’t have any graphic editing software where I work (besides MS Paint), I created the graphics at home and brought in the final images. Today I ran into a problem. The graphics that I made a few months ago needed some modifications and I couldn’t just run home to work on them.
Enter The Gimp. The Gimp, (an acronym for the GNU Image Manipulation Program), is a very powerful graphic editing tool that has been around for a long time. You could compare it to Adobe Photoshop. Rather then paying six hundred, fifty dollars for commercial software and an extra one hundred, fifty dollars for each upgrade that comes out, you may download The Gimp free! It also works on many operating systems including windows.
Being familiar with the features of Photoshop, I knew what it was that I needed to accomplish. My primary problem is that I am not familiar with The Gimp. I was stumbling while trying to understand how to use its layers when pasting images from my clip board and moving them around. The GUI (Graphical User Interface) works much like applications do on Linux, such as the dialog for saving a file. There are many unfamiliarity’s that I’m just not used to. Some of the recent news on The Gimps’ support site is starting to focus on usability, so it may not be long before it gets easier for people like me to figure it out.
I think it is great that feature rich software is available like this. Another piece of software that I’m starting to work with at home is OpenOffice. Sun Microsystems donated the source code of StarOffice to the open-source community five years ago and the rest is history. You can still purchase StarOffice from Sun, or you can download the free OpenOffice sponsored and contributed to by Sun along with many other companies and developers.
From what I have read, Open Office 2.0 kicks Microsoft Office around the block. The review pretty much said that Open Office competed very well and perhaps much better as a word processor then Microsoft Office. Slide presentations are better in MS Office due to the availability of clip art. Spreadsheets are fine as long as you are not going back and forth between MS Office and Open Office.
Ever so slowly, I’m starting to move over to open-source applications. As each new version of current software comes out, I get really frugal and start asking myself if I really need to buy into it. What is offered that is not already available to me? Is the upgrade worth it? Do I need those new features? Is there another product that can already do this?
When it comes to graphic design and word processing, the need for new features really isn’t in too much demand. With each subsequent upgrade, I always find myself just using the same features that I originally had. A few tweaks do come in handy and are noticeable, but I would have been able to get the task completed without them. It seems that most software gets bogged down with features just so that you have more reason to buy into the next version when what you have is good enough.
October 24th, 2005 at 12:18 pm
I am going to try GIMP sooner or later, because there is no way that I’m going to fork over the cash for PhotoShop, and Microsoft Image Composer just isn’t cutting it… I still might try Acrylic though, but I heard it sucks.