So, is someone going to do a startup to obliterate Adobe's print and graphics production monopoly, or what?
I am also working on something in the domain. Hoping to show it to the world very soon!
http://gimp.lisanet.de/Website/Download.html
The official 2.8 release was what, a week ago? I don't think it's a big deal if it comes out on one platform a few days late. :)
I'm excited about the unified interface and the new transform tool, so here's hoping it is just a couple more days.
They only seem to offer links to 2.8 for Snow Leopard and Lion, so that could also be an issue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth#Deep_color_.2830.2F...
GIMP 2.10’s core will be 100% ported to GEGL, and
all of the legacy pixel fiddling API for plug-ins
is going to be deprecated. Once the core is completely
ported, it will be a minor effort to simply “switch on”
high bit depths and whatever color models we’d
like to see.Also: your comment was arrogant and impolite towards the GIMP team.
In fact, I use quite a lot of software from their development repositories, e.g. GCC and Blender. It is a very rare occasion that I come by a bug as most open source projects have sane version management practices and branching processes.
Sure, they would just have to build a compelling set of apps, for Windows and Mac at the least, that have 90% of those features that Adobe has built to their apps since 1990.
There DO exist competing products for Adobe stuff, but they are disparate. The best of them is Quark (vs InDesign). Final Cut Pro/Avid et co do a nice work against Premiere. Inscape is quite good to replace Illustrator, maybe Corel Draw too. Gimp is not there yet, but Corel Photo-Paint and Painter combined would make a compelling proposal. So, you have parts here and there, but not streamlined nor combined. And for all the "bloat talk", Photoshop can handle huge images with ease whereas lesser programs throw the towel even at 200MB or so.
(We have tons of 20% solutions -- they are not any good for professional printing and graphics work with the ease and breadth current designers are used to, even missing extremely critical parts, like CMYK in some cases).
Yes, that's the real problem.
None of the OSS offerings is really anywhere close to the equivalent CS tool yet: not Inkscape, not the GIMP, not Scribus.
Quark and Corel should have the pedigree, but last time I had this conversation I looked up the latest features in Corel's graphics software, and it's basically a second-tier player these days. I've never used Quark, but the picture painted by others looks similar.
The thing that puzzles me is why no-one has yet come up with a credible competitor to CS (or, similarly, to MS Office). Two of the most successful software companies on the planet make a very significant chunk of their profits on these product lines, and they are certainly open to disruption by competition based on usability and/or quality/reliability as well as functionality and workflow. Of course there's a substantial barrier to entry, but it's not that unassailable in software terms.
That was Corel's problem - not matter how good a tool they made, printers either could not open the files, or were scared off by bad experiences with previous versions.
Google docs has only succeed because "close enough" formatting was good enough for business docs and spreadsheets. Not so in graphic design.
Quark became more and more user-hostile through the 90s, basking in the dominant market share of their (essentially) single product. Prices went up, the feature set stagnated, anti-piracy measures punished the honest, and Quark tried to push ill-conceived "multimedia" and web features into the product. Focus was lacking not only in their product, but in how the company was run: development and support were moved to India, and then a few years later moved right back. And despite all this, in terms of dominance Quark XPress was like the Photoshop of its time: with all the professional workflow based on the product, the ecosystem of expensive plug-ins, and the people whose jobs were practically defined by their Quark expertise, it was difficult to imagine how any competitor could gain traction.
But Quark's unpopularity with its captive customers created a fertile field of potential good will for anyone with the gumption to try jumping in. And the nimble upstart who finally gained traction was of course Adobe. InDesign was cheap, good, addressed many of the long-term unresolved Quark pain points, and, despite bugs and shortcomings, held the promise of a future outside Quark's cloak.
A decade later, where are we?
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Granted it's only image editing. And it's mac only. But I've pretty much stopped using Photoshop because of it. Though, I've never use any of the advanced Photoshop tools.
Many graphics folk on Photoshop are stuck cause they can't see any other product filling Photoshop's role.