I'm a huge fan of open source software. All the same, I resisted moving to an open source operating system for a long time. The main reason was that there aren't any professional level graphics, audio and video editing programs for Linux. So, I stuck with Windows and Photoshop, Premiere and Cakewalk (easier for my simple needs than Cubase).

I switched to Linux about a year ago, and have committed myself to learning how to think like a Gimp graphic designer. GIMP is the open source graphics program that comes free on the Linux platform.

According to scuttlebutt, you can do everything on GIMP that you can on Photoshop -- if you can figure out how. Unfortunately, the GUI was designed by people who seem to have that typical geek Linux mentality -- if you can't figure it out on your own, you're too stupid to be using it. Sorry, but I like my interface to be simple and untuitive. If I can't figure out how to use your program by looking at the interface, it doesn't mean I'm a dumb user, it means you made a dumb interface.

How happy was I when a friend told me about a Slashdot article talking about GIMP usability! I ran to the site, and found a link to the OpenUsability project's page on the matter.

After having a look, I'm not sure participation with OpenUsability will bear much fruit. Just look at the page. Can you figure out where to go for relevant information on the matter. It took me a good five minutes to notice that the whole upper right shit brown area is a menu! It's the same color as the headings below, so I took it for a heading.

Finally I found the link to the Usability Reports and from there got to the Usability Test done back in October of last year (though you have to compare the date to the other dates in the list because they don't indicate the order of the numbers -- 2005 10 05 could be October 5 or 10 May -- standard tends to be year/month/day in the computing world).

The description is: This Report talks about the "Create a New Image" Dialog in the GIMP. It talks about the options presented and the issues it brings up.

Hmmm... Seems to me that good usability would make sure that your HTML mark up is correctly done and your quotes around "Create a New Image" come out right.

As the author didn't bother to upload the report in the OpenUsability XML fomat, you are forced to download the thing. So, I clicked on the Download report button, and, as it's a text file, my browser (as would most browsers on the market) simply displayed the single line of text -- in one long line with no line breaks so I have to scroll and scroll and scroll to read the single line of text.

That's the report? One sentence?

Unfortunately, we've still got a long way to go if we want to ween non-techie users off of expensive proprietary systems.

For an interesting article on why Photoshop still beats out GIMP, check here.

Here's another extremely useful thing about KDE. The Klipper (there's that 'K' again!) clipboard tool. It sits in the task bar, and with it you have advanced access to your clipboard. You can configure how far back to remember text you copy, and you can also set up actions that take the text you've copied as input. Useful for things like copying a URL and starting up the web browser, etc. I'm not sure if Gnome has a similar widget.

Okay, I know this is nerdy, but here goes anyway. I use Linux (Fedora Core) as my primary operating system. An entry on Slashdot mentioning Torvald's suggestion that people use the KDE desktop system as opposed to Gnome got me curious, so I've been taking KDE out for a test run. Installation was straightforward with yum. A simple yum install kde got the basics done. yum list available | grep kde gets you a list of all the packages available, and I also installed some interesting sounding ones, like the admin and config packages. I really like the desktop. It looks better -- cleaner and more polished. I like the configuration panel that puts all sorts of options in one place. I miss the drawers on the taskbar, though, and haven't found a replacement yet. Also, it was a pain to install the weather applet (though once I got it installed, I found that there are also useless but nonetheless satisfying applets for moon phase and world time!). You need to install kdetoys, which you can find by searching pbone. It was also a pain to get the screensaver working. I finally found out how to get the xscreensaver running (as opposed to the default kde screensaver, which never worked for me) by checking the xscreensaver manual here. The file manager is much better than Nautilus, Gnome's default manager. It is actually a Konquerer instance (one thing I hate is the tendency developers have to start their app's names with a K all the time, I think it's krazy), so it's much more robust and feature packed. Nothing else exciting comes to mind. More later, as things come up.