I don't think that a power tool such as GIMP has to be complicated to use for simple functions. I should only have to RTFM for power user features not how to draw a line.
Complex operations may require complex and indepth knowledge. But simple tasks should not. Unless you want to stay limitted to a very small niche market.
I basically needed to do two things. One is make the image have a transparent background. And modify some colors. MS Paint was easy enough to draw and do the color changes. Unfortunately it has no ability to deal with transparency. So I thought of GIMP as I knew it handled transparency
It took me a bit of digging to figure out the alpha channel and all. That was expected. What wasn't expect is that when I clicked to draw and had a forground color of white that I got gray. As I mentioned, I'm sure there's some rational behind this, but it escaped me.
For my 10 minute task, I didn't want to have to read 5 hours worth of documentation just to figure out how to do that 10 minute task. That's a common problem among open source solutions. They're often powerful but have a high price to pay to use.
So I ended up using MS Paint to make the drawing mods and switching to GIMP to set transparency. It just seems silly to have to switch like that when I know GIMP surely could do the drawing that I needed. I just couldn't justify the learning time for the tiny task at hand.
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Re:I was thinking the same. Only what about Nvu?
Posted by: purevirtual on March 01, 2005 02:25 AMComplex operations may require complex and indepth knowledge. But simple tasks should not. Unless you want to stay limitted to a very small niche market.
I basically needed to do two things. One is make the image have a transparent background. And modify some colors. MS Paint was easy enough to draw and do the color changes. Unfortunately it has no ability to deal with transparency. So I thought of GIMP as I knew it handled transparency
It took me a bit of digging to figure out the alpha channel and all. That was expected. What wasn't expect is that when I clicked to draw and had a forground color of white that I got gray. As I mentioned, I'm sure there's some rational behind this, but it escaped me.
For my 10 minute task, I didn't want to have to read 5 hours worth of documentation just to figure out how to do that 10 minute task. That's a common problem among open source solutions. They're often powerful but have a high price to pay to use.
So I ended up using MS Paint to make the drawing mods and switching to GIMP to set transparency. It just seems silly to have to switch like that when I know GIMP surely could do the drawing that I needed. I just couldn't justify the learning time for the tiny task at hand.
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