Re: [gimp-devel] Motif vs. GTK

[Pavel Greenfield <pavel riskdevel ml com>]

To me this is the most constructive message so far... May I be your
friend, Greg?!

> I like GTK because those are my initials.
> 
> Greg
> 

On a serious note, I'd like to voice my opinion here. I'm afraid I was the
one who started the Motif vs. GTK debate, which I did not have in mind at
all. All I wanted to know is which one was a better GUI, since I wanted to
write an interactive gnuplot type application (that's been partially
accomplished over the weekend with...  GTK!) A bit of Zen: merit of a GUI
can be considered independent of whether it's free or not.

Now there's no doubt in my mind that GTK/GIMP is the way to go. Yes,
because they are free and THEREFORE will be better.
Example, I'm a lousy programmer (if one at all), yet I've been able (with
a fair amount effort, true) to hack up a couple of plug-ins (Filter Pack
and Colormap Rotation) which are better than their Photoshop and XV
counterparts (though buggy they maybe). The Photoshop FilterPack
equivalent - called Variationi - plain old sucks; but let's not waste our
time talking about what sucks, but rather how to make the GIMP and GTK
better.

Moral (in case I was vague about it): No application will ever be 100% to
your liking. Stuff like GIMP/GTK you can ADJUST to your liking with
moderate to minimal programming skills.

Not to mention that in my humble opinion GTK/GIMP are increadibly flexible
and have tremendous infrastructure and potential!

So let's turn GTK/GIMP's strengths into a quality state-of-the-art system!
And that's what disconcerts me just a bit... Where are the new plug-ins
pouring in!? Where are the new versions of GTK/GIMP popping up one after
another!? What should we do to make that happen!? I invision the time with
a new plug-in announcement every day - is that so unreasonable; What do we
get now, one a week? There are thousands of students worldwide taking
computer and computer graphics (and photography and art! - me:) ) courses.
We should provide them with an opportunity to turn writing a plug-in into
a project, or something like that....

We need more manuals, tutorials! Let's make a list of things we need to do
and go at it!

Finally, I wonna say that I'm still completely blown away by the effort
put in by Peter and Spencer and other core developer. They are completely
nuts! Let's bow our heads to the van Gogh's of computer graphics and stop
bashing the apparent lack of progress. They've done and countinually doing
an amazing job! However, I think that we (other developers, users) deserve
some sort of a comprehensive announcement as to the timeframe of future
events. We're sort of hanging in the air...

Pavel

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  Pavel Grinfeld      |   www.geocities.com/SoHo/5277
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