On Sun, 8 Jan 2006, Julian Oliver wrote:

excuse the triviality of the subject matter. it's been niggling so i bring it up.

i teach with the Gimp as part of broader university and masterclass coursework to design students. sometimes it features in FOSS game-development courses i give, where i use it as a texture editor, among other things. as an offshoot of my work, i also do a little advocacy - pushing for FOSS to take greater foothold in tertiary curriculums.

recently, on demonstrating the Gimp-2.2.10 to faculty members, several commented on the new splash screen, suggesting that it was "really amateur", one saying "..but it looks awful".

sadly, while i felt a few of the previous Splash's to be of a good standard, i have to agree with these impressions for the most part, thinking that the new splash does misrepresent the capabilities of the Gimp (i'm sure i've seen that 'dial' in the background on a photo-cd at some point!).

Like T Model Ford afficionados, there are the splash lovers and haters

See http://www.gimp.org/about/splash/ for the history of splashes

The reason for that splash was given at the time of 2.2.10 announcement

If you don't like it, roll your own. Great to start your demo off with--

Here's the Gimp

What a yukkie splash

Lets change it

There, that looks better

Thank goodness for FOSS, we can make things to suit ourselves

Yep, I agree that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but we all do it

Owen

On Sun, Jan 08, 2006 at 12:48:35AM +0100, Julian Oliver wrote:

excuse the triviality of the subject matter. it's been niggling so i bring it up.

i teach with the Gimp as part of broader university and masterclass coursework to design students. sometimes it features in FOSS game-development courses i give, where i use it as a texture editor, among other things. as an offshoot of my work, i also do a little advocacy - pushing for FOSS to take greater foothold in tertiary curriculums.

recently, on demonstrating the Gimp-2.2.10 to faculty members, several commented on the new splash screen, suggesting that it was "really amateur", one saying "..but it looks awful".

well, it is amateur. it was the product of a very fun contest that we had to celebrate the release 10 years ago of the gimp. it is a very special splash because of this.

when you open any gimp up the first time, you are using something completely different. if it had not been different, it might not still exist.

also, i am not certain that gimp is FOSS. if you want to encourage people to use FOSS stuff, it might be better to show them Open Office. this is software designed to replace Microsoft Office on more operating systems than just Macintosh and Windows (i think). GIMP was designed to work on linux and make graphics.

sadly, while i felt a few of the previous Splash's to be of a good standard, i have to agree with these impressions for the most part, thinking that the new splash does misrepresent the capabilities of the Gimp (i'm sure i've seen that 'dial' in the background on a photo-cd at some point!).

the outward appearance of the Gimp sometimes does make it a little hard to push in an educational setting at times, where the project clearly isn't interested in selling itself as a competitor to the likes of Photoshop (and why should it). that said, as opposed to developers, it's users which like to be inspired by the tools before them, and this goes beyond their raw capabilities. the choice of splash, therefore, plays an important role.

well, are you pushing gimp or something else?

maybe a little time spent understanding a low pressure contribution environment. also, where were you when i announced the plans for the contest?

i don't know what inspires you in life. i get so sick of everything being made to look so clean and sharp and so "we deem this as perfect" i cannot see how a "professional looking" (a very subjective phrase to begin with) is more inspiring than the splash that Sven chose. if you are pushing things on these people and none of you are ready to be honest, i don't think you are ready to use gimp yet. it doesn't work like its counterparts.

for this reason i'd like to suggest that in the next Splash contest users might want to be 'let in' to the voting process. users are often designers, and this alone may raise the standard - widening the acceptance of the Gimp as a valid contendor to proprietary alternatives (like Pixel and Photoshop) by posh arty types and smug university design departments ;)

no need to vote. posh artsy types and university design departments who take the splash very seriously can change it themselves: http://carol.gimp.org/gimp2/basics/gui/splashes/

you can do all of the voting at your own universities, actually. i don't have voting software, but we do have the web contest apparatus in a cvs module with gnome. "gimp-web".

i can give you the script that made the tutorial gallery for our splash contest here:
http://ircd.gimp.org/~carol/splash/

and if any of the people who think the splash image affects the use of the application, please have them explain how that works to me personally. i don't get it.

carol

Julian Oliver wrote:

do you see any harm in users being let into the voting process? or, do you think that this might result in a Splash that doesn't represent the Gimp the way you think it should ("everything being made to look so clean and sharp").

Yep, that's what I fear might happen. The approach we took in the last contest - have a small group of people decide about the final splash amongst their favorites - is the best one, IMO

surely that would make the contest even more fun ;)

.. you'd probably get a alot more entries too.

During the last contest, the amount of entries was overwhelming - and a considerable number of really bad ones was included, too (e.g. just slapping a photo into the splash template).

This was the reason why we decided to raise the bar this time and have the contributors provide a tutorial with the image. The author of the winning one did so as well:

http://www.hydrophilus.com/gimp+splash+2.2.10+dialed-in+tutorial.html

There's a bit more to it than what's revealed on the first look.

Michael

On Sun, Jan 08, 2006 at 01:57:29PM +0100, Julian Oliver wrote:

thanks carol, for your verbose response.

yes of course the splash can be changed, but when software's being evaluated i guess uni's like to take what is offered, on the surface.

i for instance run gimp with --no-splash option, as the splash itself isn't all that important to me.

"FOSS" or not (your distinction seems a bit muddled there), what i'd like to see is students increasingly trained in free and open-alternatives, so they can legally afford to pursue work in the graphic design field. that they can do this on the Linux operating system and have the right to contribute patches and scripts is even better.

an application that starts life to be an almost seamless replacement for existing applications is different than one that started because the original code writers did not want to steal and had access to the same algorithms to manipulate pixels (and other things) with are two different things. OSS tends to be used to talk about a pool of software, many of which are very different than gimp. the distinction was already muddled in the acronym FOSS before i used it in this mail.

your complaints are part of the muddling that happened before this email is exchanged. if you would like to unmuddle it for me, feel free to do so.

really, for some projects a phrase like "this works just like _other_appliction_name_here_" is a compliment. for gimp, it is an accident (usually) and never intended. OSS does not differentiate between the two.

at some point, within a university structure, this does mean that the software needs to be offered up as a valid alternative to existing proprietary tools. "which software will we spend hundreds of hours teaching kids to use?", is the question that is asked.

well, if we can ever make it easier to install gimp than it is to steal photoshop, it will be a step in the right direction. teaching kids how to work starts long before they get to the university.

i know Gimp is a valid alternative, and more than just an alternative; i switched from Photoshop to the Gimp around 7 years ago. those that don't know this however will tend to rely on superficial impressions, as within the proprietary software world, such impressions are often sadly a measure of good software from bad. even after demonstrating the software and going through the Gimp book, several still arrived at the conclusion the Gimp "doesn't look like something professionals use".

well, if they do not like the splash there is a chance they will not like all of the online documentation or the gui or the _fillinthisblank_ either and should just keep on stealing photoshop. it is a personality thing.

a great advantage of open-source software is that it doesn't rely on marketing

i would like to know if there are any instances of people being paid to *not* work on gimp.

for it's success in distribution; lipstick on the packaging just isn't necessary for wide appeal.

regardless, open-source software as good as the Gimp inevitably comes up as an alternative to it's proprietary peers - the 'look' of the application would not normally matter if it weren't for the fact it's competing (passively) in the posh art and design arena. like it or not, that is where a large chunk of Gimp's future, and current, userbase lies.

interesting. can you define passive?

you know, you could have sold gimp to me so easily this way:

me> yuck! what is up with that splash you> yeah! you think that is bad, you should see the tutorial the guy submitted with it (then show this url with the quote at the beginning: http://ircd.gimp.org/~carol/splash/dialedin/) me> awesome! how do you install it

the winning splash was made by a complaining twit! it was perfect on so many levels! two developers had to email personally and request that the tutorial requirement be fullfilled. this gallery is full of real artists that way. every last one of them is a pita to deal with. it is all there. and with gimp, somedays, it is the best you are going to get.

the suit. the clean professional splash, all that -- it means "don't talk to me or question me?" or what?

perhaps i should ask the question from another direction:

do you see any harm in users being let into the voting process? or, do you think that this might result in a Splash that doesn't represent the Gimp the way you think it should ("everything being made to look so clean and sharp").

surely that would make the contest even more fun ;)

there was so much discussion elsewhere about how adding the requirement for the tutorial ended all fun and enthusiasm, it is difficult for me to think that being able to vote for splash would have overcome all of that fully justified critisism.

this is a special splash and a special release. it was picked by people who have been involved for almost the whole ten years. how many applications can have a celebration for 10 years like that?

i fully admit, i probably had the most fun of anyone with this contest. it involved a lot of not fun activities as well but overall, the way this group of people always has worked is to take what we got and use just that with no promises that cannot be lived up to.

.. you'd probably get a alot more entries too.

i am going to let you in on a staff secret. the rules of this contest and the way it worked were devised so that we would not have more than 20 or 30 things to look at. we failed. instead we got over eighty entries and mistakes were easier to make. as it is, i still have about 60 little archives there to look at.

did you miss the whole celebration?

carol