MacGimp

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friday04

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I just read that MacGimp is available for purchase on CD. It's supposed to contain an installer which installs in a snap. The CD is $24.95 and I know that the Gimp is free in Linux world. Has anyone used this CD? or doesn anyone know if it'd be worth the $24.95 for MacGimp? I am a professional designer and I use Photoshop but I'm growing tired of Adobe's excuses for not porting anything to OS X yet.

Any advice is appreciated.
Thanks,
Friday04
 
I have had a MacGimp CD for over 2 months now and have used it to touch up a few photos. First, it is an easy install. It puts XFree86 4.0.3, XDarwin, and GIMP on your computer. XDarwin is an application that allows for OS X and X86 to run concurrently. I have not seen a complete version of GIMP running native in OS X. Place the XDarwin icon in the dock and click on it. It starts up X86 which takes over the screen. Once the three windows for X86 appear all you do is type "gimp" in one of them and the application boots. I'm not heavy into photo/graphic manipulation but for $25 it suits my needs and I, too, am pissed at Adobe for dragging their feet and ignoring the fact that if it wasn't for Apple they probably wouldn't even be around. I digress, once in the X86 environment all you do to get back to OS X is press the Option/Command + A keys and, poof, your back in OS X. Getting back to X86 is simple as punching the big X icon in the dock.

GIMP may not be as intuitive to use as Photoshop nor have all the features of Photoshop (yet) but it is free. You can spend your time downloading and unpacking tar balls for X86 and GIMP but the $25 CD is well worth not having to put up with that hassle.
 
Thank you for that in-depth response. I have never used x86 or the Gimp but I think I'll give it a shot through this CD. If I could do some photo work without having to go into classic, that'd be great. Classic just doesn't cut it as a real-world option. If Adobe and Macromedia were fully on board with OS X, I'd be in this OS full-time.

Thanks again.
 
When are they going get off their arse and produce a quartz version so we don't need to waste time with this ancient X11 stuff?
 
X11 is certainly less ancient than mac OS, I don't see how you could call it ancient at all as it;s updated very regularly. Furthemore it's not a waste, it is very powerful and useful. A tremendous addition and feature for our beloved Mac OS.
 
Wasn't it originally designed to display a clock (xclock) on a computer screen? Also speaking to a friend of mine (Linux geek) the X layer will be redundant as soon as the KDE (and Qt) developers can get their window manager to talk directly to the graphics device.

The only reason it may be needed in Mac OS X is if you work in a unix environment and need to export the displays to run GUI tools from other hosts.

However, this is all off topic. GIMP is the best freeware graphics app around - even if it is tied up with the X layer
 
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