Since it looks like we will be doing a little bit of graphics work for the English 313 class, I thought I’d take a moment to talk about one of my many favorite open source projects, The GIMP.
GIMP stands for the “GNU Image Manipulation Program” and is a free, open source graphics editing application with capabilities comparable to Adobe’s ~$700 Photoshop. While the feature set for the 2 applications may not be exactly the same, GIMP is more than powerful enough for the purposes of this class and the vast majority of most graphics editing tasks. The GIMP is available free of charge on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and pretty much any other platform you’d be interested in running it on.
If you are not familiar with the concept of open source software, I’ll take a moment to explain it here. An open source application, as compared to a commercial application, is not developed by a a company but by a community of people interested in the project who donate their time and talents to make the project better. The source code of the application is open to the public and can be seen and worked on by anyone. This system has several advantages over commercial software. Because the base of developers working on a project is usually much larger than a commercial equivalent (since the size of the team is not limited by budget restrictions), bugs in the software tend to be found and solved more quickly. If you have a problem with the program you can get support in a variety of channels or e-mail the developers directly. There is also an intangible element of open source software because it is a labor of love. While you might expect something that you don’t have to pay for to be of lower quality than something you have to pay a lot of money for, this is not the case in the world of software. Think of it in this way: Would you rather use a product made by a shirt and tie working for mega-corp in a cubicle who hates their job and is only outputting the minimum number of lines of code per day, or by a devoted computer geek who comes home each and every night looking forward to working on and improving their baby, their Mona Lisa of software, the thing that they love?
If you are interested in doing some photo editing or creating some graphics for class, download the GIMP from www.gimp.org and give it a try. Check out some of the screen shots below for pictures of the GIMP in action.
-isaiah
Last year I did web work on the weekends for WHO TV. We used gimp to create all of our web graphics. It’s a pretty straight forward and easy to use program but it did take a little getting used to. I definitely missed photoshop but I found GIMP to be a nice alternative for small tasks. It’s also really quick and easy to download when maybe your working somewhere that doesn’t have photoshop and need something a little more then Paint.