If you need a plugin to draw an arrow, you're beyond help.

To be fair, PS does seem to make some tasks inordinately difficult when they could/should be much easier!

I do use Lightroom.

He's whingeing about GIMP. I agree both programs could be easier. Photoshop has been bloated up with stupid computer tricks to justify frequent version releases, but it's hardly improved since version 6. Of course the difficulty with designing software is anticipating exactly what all users want to do, so do you make a few features that are really polished, or many features that are pretty rough around the edges? It's probably the latter that is going to win you over new customers, since you can't return the product for a refund, when you find out it's not all it was cracked up to be.

 

Like Windows, Photoshop has a big installed base of people who have invested years in learning how to use it, so Adobe doesn't have to really try to improve it -- unless some competition comes along (which is why they bought Macromedia).

No he wasn't:

The thing that gets me about PS is how they've butt-fucked the UI by forcing their own (rather ugly) UI instead of using the OS default, which is what most people with be used to and expect. Who do they think they are, Apple?

Draw me a nice simple arrow in GIMP please and give me a tutorial.

The problem there is that you're trying to use GIMP (and Photoshop) as a vector drawing program. They can both do it (GIMP with plugins) but they're shit at it. What you should've done is drawn an arrow in a vector prog and exported it as png and imported it into PS/GIMP.

Pete: That's a lovely owl, thank you (hug)

Well, like Apple, there's not much you can do to sex up the core functionality for a "new" release, except by troweling on the chrome.

Give Inkscape a go - it's a free vector drawing program and has a slightly 'unique' interface, but nowhere as terrible as GIMP. Even though it's a bit buggy and slow, and the UI is even less of a match for OS X, I still find it handles all my drawing needs (icons, logos etc. mainly).

Here's what I did: googled "arrow", selected Images, copied an arrow, pasted it into GIMP. Time needed: 10-seconds. Special GIMP knowledge needed: none.

I wish somebody would tart up GIMP, because its UI really is terrible. It's like someone tacked it on as an afterthought.

The next release is going to be in a single window, instead of bits floating around. There's lots to dislike about GIMP, it is what it is.

Yeah, it's a year in the other direction now. :S

Have they published an updated estimate for when it's actually coming?

I have it installed currently. You can install it currently if you like because it's open source.

You also have to remember that the team of developers working on GIMP is essentially this big: 1.

That'd help - Pixelmator on the Mac has floating windows and it annoys me there too. But, it's not just that - it's that the palette contents are so big.

Because it's all scriptable (right down to the UI) there are various re-hashes of GIMP. Including that one which re-arranges the UI to match PS as closely as possible. Which I don't use because it's just replacing one fucked UI with another.

I can't install it currently because it's open source, I can install it currently because a preview release is made available.

Things can be open source without having preview releases, and can have preview releases without being open source.

(And before you tell me I'm being pedantic there, it's not, it's being accurate. Pedantic would have been pointing out that GIMP is part of GNU and thus Free Software, which as you know is different to Open Source (and probably a contribution to why it's shit; I saw a video recently where RMS said he didn't care about software being good, which would have made me slap the twat if we were in the same room.))

Anyway only one person working on it is stupid. It's too big a package for that.

I also found this:
http://www.chromecode.com/2011/02/why-gimp-28-is-not-released-yet.html

Which can be summed up as "Gimp 2.8 isn't ready yet because we have a shit project structure which results in lots of developer turnover and nothing ever getting finished."

Which I guess is another reason.

Martin needs to fix the fucking source control, get a proper branch structure and make sure everyone follows the standard practise of feature branches, and revoke write access from anyone too stupid to follow such simple instructions.

I also found this, which is kinda cool (as a general progress tracking / what's left thing), and also suggests there's only two known bugs left, and thus the preview release should be pretty stable:
http://tasktaste.com/projects/Enselic/gimp-2-8

So I might actually go give it another try. Later, because I'm doing stuff now.

You can install it because it's open source. The source is open, you can download and compile it. This is what it means to be open source. The problem here is not that you're pedantic, it's that you are shit at it. Free Software is by definition open source. Not all open source software is Free Software. The Open Source Definition and what the FSF would term Free Software are pretty much completely compatible. They are not describing different things, they are describing the same thing from different perspectives, with different priorities. Which leads on to... I doubt very much he did. I suspect what he actually said was that functionality and features are not what he prioritises when determining what is 'good' software. For Stallman, Freedom comes first - it is a prerequisite for 'goodness' of software. He looks beyond the mechanical and has philosophical and political criteria for the 'goodness' of software.

Here is an Abe Lincoln Spider :C

While I agree that using raster applications for vector drawing is intrinsically illogical, the developers have to an extent fed that illogic, by including tools (such as text and drawing) that possibly shouldn't be there. The fact that they can't do it usably is the sin, not the expectation of users that it should 'work' intuitively.

 

And drawing a vector in one application, exporting as an intermediate file, and importing into another application is a PITA. A workable/non-crashable version of 'live update' is more usable, but the most intuitive approach is to have it all there, in one application.