Archive for the 'Graphics' Category

Canonical takes the NIH syndrome to the next stage

Published on May 17, 2012 in Fonts and Graphics. 0 Comments

This blog entry had tons of sarcasm prior to posting, but I edited it all out. I’m not a complete monster, you know.

So, I was googling for something today and stumbled upon a 3 weeks old (that is, nobody cares about it anymore) interview with Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical.

As a person currently employed in marketing, I certainly know how important it is to focus on good things that your company does when you are spreading PR with a big shovel. It’s more or less OK to make controversial statements, if you can keep the game on, but telling outright lies? No, I don’t think so.

Here is an interesting excerpt:

“The fact that GNOME and other projects now value design,” Silber stops, perhaps to reconsider the boldness of what she is about to say. “If you go back three years ago nobody was talking about design, nobody was doing user research. It is actually something we have had great influence on, by calling attention to it and putting our efforts there. I think, whether you like Unity or not, its existence has helped raise the bar across a number of projects. That is something that we feel good about; you can attribute that to our leadership in that area, even if it’s not our code and our design.”

Can you see what’s wrong with it? Let’s chop it up into smaller bits.

The fact that GNOME and other projects now value design

*sigh* She just had to say that, yeah?

If you go back three years ago nobody was talking about design

Dear Ms. Silber, I suggest you go five years ago, or even more, and discover Tango project. In 2007 I did an interview with them for GNOME Journal. It is real, and there is proof.

Probably you would  also like to find out that Ascender Corp. was comissioned by Redhat to create Liberation fonts and delivered them in early 2007. That  was just how many years prior to Ubuntu font family?

nobody was doing user research

How about Sun having done a usability study of GNOME in 2001, several years before Canonical was even conceived?

I think, whether you like Unity or not, its existence has helped raise the bar across a number of projects.

That, at least, is true.

That is something that we feel good about; you can attribute that to our leadership in that area,

And this is what it was all about: leadership.

I don’t believe that anyone who’s been with the company since 2004 could possibly not know all of that. So what was that? Canonical claims to have invented design and user research in free software? When did they start acting in the worst traditions of Microsoft et al.?

The importance of a project definition

Published on March 4, 2012 in Development and Graphics. 2 Comments

One of the most important things for any project is the way they are defined. Even though people like things to be familiar, they don’t necessarily need that. Just for the heck of it, I remember once reading someone stating (a quote from memory): “I didn’t know I needed GNOME Shell an iPod until I got one”.

So, in software development you don’t actually need “vector graphics editor like Illustrator, but gratis” or “instant messenger like Miranda IM, but for Linux”. Yes, people ask for those every frigging day. What happens however, is when you define the project that way, you start meeting requests to make 100% copy of UI or features or both.

And this is when things go terribly wrong.

Since you don’t have the resources of a big company, your copy is never better, and you end up with software that sucks, and users who absolutely hate it. And they never ever forgive you attempts to make something original, because it’s not how you positioned your project. So you become a grumpy overworked monster who is never happy.

I think Sven had more or less that idea in mind regarding GIMP and Photoshop when he wrote: “We need to define our goals but we should by all means avoid to define our goals in terms of competitors.”. And the final product vision, as you can see, honors that view.

But when you fail to understand that you need to make your software appealing on its own, all you can do is define your own project via disadvantages of other projects (imaginary and obsolete at that, too).

So whoever is reading this and thinking about starting his/her own project, if you expect this project to take off, think about how you present it.

  • Are you solving an issue bigger than “Oh noez, they killed Amarok with this new UI, we need a new player”?
  • Can you explain the point of your software in one short phrase?
  • Are you able to talk to your potential users in the language they understand?

It’s really important to pick the right words and explain the core idea without abusing buzzwords. I, for one, was particularly stubborn when it came to Novacut first, partially because they did not immediately deliver a definition that was understandable (and partially because I’m just very stubborn on my own). But after I listened to them long enough, things began to make sense. I am now confident that what Jason, Tara et al. are trying to achieve is a serious project.

Also, think of the technical side. Will your software blend into the mix? Does it have an architecture that’s not like a fractal sandwich? What does it take to install and try it?

At this point you might discover yourself balancing between software development, project management, QA, marketing, PR and copywriting. And it’s good. It means your brain is actually trying to work. It means you are discovering new angles to look at things from.

This also means that the existing intro text at inkscape.org is going away any time now. In a manner of speaking, Inkscape is much like Adobe Illustrator or Corel DRAW. But that’s not the point, you see :)

Why proprietary software evangelists are way ahead of free software evangelists

Published on March 2, 2012 in Graphics. 1 Comment

To be honest (as if sometimes I am not), the title is an utter and deliberate trolling, but this, people, can make any real contributor’s blood boil:

http://www.unixmen.com/why-inkscape-is-way-ahead-of-adobe-illustrator/

There are some pretty basic rules of good copywriting, and one of them is: the title is a promise that the body text should keep. Proprietary folks can hire decent copywriters, which is why any power AI user would expect a more or less detailed comparison of features or, at the very least, a half-hearted attempt at PR with some factual info. What we get instead is a freetard bullshit.

You see, anyone who ever used both AI and Inkscape, and I mean really used, knows where both of them fail, badly fail. But the guy wants Inkscape to be better so much that he doesn’t even bother coming up with some sensible arguments.

So here is a plea. If you are thinking about covering some free application, pretty please do your research and come up with argumentation that isn’t flawed. Otherwise people who actually know right from wrong will just think that you are a clueless moron.

And bloody well post some pictures as a proof. If you can’t do real stuff, but do loud claims and draw stupid conclusions publicly, GTFO. Seriously. Because you are not helping. Alternatively, study copywriting and excel at it.

Die Hard 5: with kernels

Published on January 19, 2012 in Development, Graphics and Music. 0 Comments Tags: .

It’s been a while since I last posted some opinionated crap. How could that possibly happen? :)

Last week Bitwig folks finally announced upcoming beta of Bitwig Studio, a new commercial DAW for Win, Mac and Linux. As it often happens, some folks in the community started speculating how this is going to affect existing free software and the community itself. After all, it’s not that we’ve got huge teams slaving away to make music production a breeze on Linux, eh?

Well, one thing I really liked in the LAU thread is that most folks who cared to comment didn’t express extreme views. I seriously hope that it’s a sign of the community becoming mature enough to treat things in a relaxed, no-fanatic way.

What I’ve been seeing on the desktop layer is that free/libre and commercial software can perfectly coexist without kicking each other in the nadgers and turning half the city to ruins. Just a few examples:

  • Bibble Pro (Corel AfterShot Pro since last week, btw) didn’t make any existing free software die. Instead we got darktable.
  • A month ago BrainDistrict announced PaintSupreme. Can you see Pinta folks crying in despair, because noone’s gonna use it again?
  • BrainDistrict has also been resurrecting MainActor, and yet commits to Kdenlive, PiTiVi, Novacut and OpenShot keep piling up.
  • Renoise didn’t kill any free software project, and they even added support for DSSI, a (currently outdated) free API for virtual instruments.
  • Mixbus folks have been contributing to upstream Ardour project for a couple of years now already, and aren’t they proprietary guys?
  • Loomer is busy porting their commercial synths and effects to LV2, the state of the art free API for virtual instruments and effects.
  • linuxDSP started with Linux support from ground up and has been supporting LV2 since day one.
  • ..and the list can go on.

The only fluctuation I can think of is the 8 years old story with Jorg Anders overreacting and abandoning NoteEdit after hearing about a, frankly speaking, fantom possibility of Finale port to Linux. And he started NtEd few years later anyway. That he doesn’t get much acknowledgment for NtEd either is a whole different story.

And even if you could recall all the epic OMG!Ubuntu threads about likewise phantom possibility of Photoshop port for Linux, you’d soon figure out that most people who expressed their interest weren’t going to use GIMP anyway. No love lost.

So if you think that some proprietary app suddenly available for Linux is going to do BLOOD NEEDLESS VIOLENCE GUTS OUTSIDE CITY TAKEN OVER DEAD BODIES ALL AROUND to your favourite free application, stop worrying. Fire up that free app and do something awesome with it. Work on your skills, become damn good at using free software, and then share what you know. This is how you become your own John McClane.

Zero tolerance

Published on November 14, 2011 in Development and Graphics. 1 Comment

As LGW owner and primary contributor I’m supposed to be neutral to various projects and try to be at least in good relations with everyone. That, however, doesn’t mean that I should like bigotry.

I haven’t covered Oyranos and related apps in a while simply because I found it increasingly difficult to explain why anyone would need them in real life, except ICC Examin which is a nice ICC inspection software (fails to work on Intel GPU, but that’s another story). However, the more I observe the whole colord/oyranos situation, the less I wish to have anything to do with Oyranos. Here is why:

Colord developer on Oyranos:

I don’t think it’s likely we’re ever going to see any interoperability between the colord and Oyranos projects in the future. Not for any huge ideological reason, but just because the feature overlap of the two projects is too small. Colord is of very limited scope, is installed by default and tries to make things just work. Oyranos is a project of huge scope that wraps many other libraries and tries to be involved in every part of the color workflow. It’s kind-of orthogonal to what colord is trying to be, and that’s the main reason I chose to start a new project rather than trying to fix Oyranos.

Note the courteous tone.

And now Oyranos developer:

What counts today is a very different understanding about, what makes a good colour management system. The colord author has failed to meet many criteria and was so far not very cooperative to accept some very common demands from various people in the colour community…

Beside that I believe, Oyranos is from a architectural level much better designed, because it relies as good as possible on existing standards, which colord does not care about.

Here is a clue. Colord is catering to Linux users who want color management to just work and not be pain in the arse. Oyranos is trying to work on all possible platforms and support all kinds of workflows. Which is why colord is now becoming mainstream (recent Fedora and Ubuntu relases have it), while Oyranos can mostly be found in the upcoming new version of OpenSUSE. Hence the bitching.

This kind of childish behavior is precisely the reason I’m getting less and less involved with some projects lately.

Switching CMS and moving on

Published on October 6, 2011 in Graphics. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Last week we switched Libre Graphics World to a new CMS. Most important 301 redirects are in place, XML sitemap is coming, there’s still a bunch of work to do, but new material is already pouring in. Here is some of the latest stuff:

More is coming.

Forums and software directory will be merged later as least important parts of the project.

“Excuse me, sir/madam”

Published on September 15, 2011 in Graphics. 2 Comments Tags: , .

Nearly forgot how I love taking interviews, so started doing it more often than usual:

  • A talk to Thomas Krijnen on IFC based workflows, Blender and architecture
  • An interview with a LibreOffice GSoC student and her mentor on implementing support for Visio files
  • Short interview with folks from Argentina who customized MyPaint for their open movie project

Some more interviews, articles and tuts are coming :)

The endless GIMP name debate

Published on August 25, 2011 in Development and Graphics. 4 Comments

— I’m sorry, son, there’s something we’ve got to tell ya.
— Er, mom? Dad? Granpa in hospital again?
— No, not as such. It’s about your name.
­— What about it?
— Well, the thing is… It’s not good. We’ve got to change it.
— What’s wrong with the name Boyo? I’ve been a Boyo 15 years of my life. I love it!
­— Apparently in Chinese it means few different things, not all of them nice.
— Exactly how not nice?
— I’m not sure you’re old enough to know.
— But old enough to have my name replaced because of what some people in China could think?
— It’s, you know, down to marketing.
— Er, WHAT? Are you up to selling me to China???!!!
— Sorry, son, the times are harsh.
— And what will my new name be, may I ask?
— I don’t really know. We had a family meeting, and no single person agreed with anybody else, so you don’t have any new name, but that’s all right, ’cause we are all just one big loving family, aren’t we? Aren’t we?

*sound of a falling body*

— Son?

*curtain falls*

On Cinepaint, GIMP and GEGL

Published on August 17, 2011 in Development and Graphics. 4 Comments

The Cinepaint/GIMP crusade will probably never die. Sad but true. I keep reading the same bullshit over and over again, for years, so I thought I should probably write about it once and never get back to it again.

The legend runs, as an ill-informed Phoronix user recently suggested, as this: “Just think, its only been 11 years since the functionality was handed to them on a silver platter and they rejected it unanimously in favor of vapor ware. It has got to be one of the biggest boneheaded moves in software development.”

It has got to be one of the biggest boneheaded moves in software development indeed, except the author of the statement is out of touch with reality. Let’s go back in history.

Cinepaint is a new name of FilmGIMP, the project born out of “Hollywood” branch of GIMP which was started in 1997. The first commit by the joint username “People doing a 16 bpc version of gimp” (more on that later) was done on December 15, 1997, and the last commit was done on August 27, 2002. Got the dates?

Now move to GEGL’s commit log. It starts on January 2, 2000, with commit of the very same username, “People doing a 16 bpc version of gimp”. The last commit from that username in GEGL was done on December 22, 2003.

So the idea that the pro-Cinepaint folks are trying to sell is that GIMP developers refused FilmGIMP developed by R&H developers in favour of vaporware GEGL developed by the very same R&H developers. Amazing, isn’t it? That’s some unbeatable logic if I ever saw one.

And yes — “People doing a 16 bpc version of gimp” is the joint username of Jonathan Cohen, Calvin Williamson and Caroline Dahllöf, all of them being developers at the famous Rhythm and Hues company at the time.

If you really want to understand how the actual FilmGIMP/GEGL developers (not either project leads) felt around 2002 when the whole unpleasantness was unleashed, read Jonathan’s mail to gimp-developer from early December 2002. It also answers the “why projects did not converge” concern re Cinepaint/FilmGIMP and GIMP. Then compare it to what you thought you knew.

You can choose to believe, or you can choose to find out what things really are—it’s entirely up to you. Either way, don’t fall for politics. And it’s the best advice I can give you at this time in the morning :)

Graphics tablets configuration in GNOME

Published on July 27, 2011 in Development, Graphics and Uncategorized. 1 Comment

I was actually going to blog on Novacut, but thought better of it. I think there’s enough tension growing already :) Instead I’d like to draw your attention to planned graphic tablets configuration tool for GNOME 3. It needs some work to get included upstream.

There already is some design/UX work done by Jimmac, with some useful comments from Hylke Bons to take into consideration.

What’s more important, there already is real code by Peter Hutterer that basically lacks calibration part. So all it needs is someone (yes, jonnor, I’m looking at you) willing to take existing code and add few missing things.

Then we can all make artsy types much happier users of GNOME. Because you can’t possibly dive into matrix calculation and come out a happy (or sane) person :)