
GIMP is Now a Self-Contained Native App for Mac OS X - maciej
http://www.petapixel.com/2012/08/29/gimp-is-now-a-self-contained-native-app-for-mac-os-x/
======
jfaucett
I love it! GIMP is one of those tools that's "almost" a photohop killer, not
quite yet, but this is a big step in the right direction. Good job GIMP team!
As an asside, I think the plugin API and scheme joice is great and a blast to
develope with I'd just like to see others jump on board.

EDIT: I thought I'd add this since there seems to be a large discussion below
as to the type of user for which GIMP is applicable. I'm a software dev, in
the past couple of years though mainly web apps where I've had to at times do
graphics, for this GIMP worked fine for me (that's my pitch in the
discussion). I think GIMP shines (as well as the traditional imagemagick) for
batch processing, the scripting is easy, clean, fast - and lispy :) Some links
for those interested: <http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Basic_Batch/>
<http://www.squidoo.com/gimp-how-to-write-a-script-fu-macro>

~~~
rcgs
As someone who uses Photoshop almost every day, it's nowhere near a "photoshop
killer". The workflow is still one of the worst I have stumbled across.

~~~
DanBC
For people who need to put some text on an image[1] or who need to tweak some
minor stuff gimp is a "photoshop killer" - and it's nice to push people to
legally free software rather than a pirate download of Photoshop.

[1] But see this gimp document - the first returned hit in a search for [gimp
drop shadow text] - which appears to be weirdly complex.

<http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/The_Basics/>

~~~
eridius
If you need to do basic image editing on OS X I'd say use Acorn[1] or
Pixelmator[2].

[1]: <http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/>

[2]: <http://www.pixelmator.com>

~~~
ams6110
I like LiveQuartz

<http://www.rhapsoft.com/>

~~~
barbs
I like Paintbrush

<http://paintbrush.sourceforge.net/>

...what?

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wtallis
So, is this an app that bundles it's own X11, or is it using a Quartz/Cocoa
backend for GTK?

EDIT: I downloaded it, and the app bundle doesn't seem to have an X11, so
that's nice. However, upon firing it up, it throws up a splash screen in front
of all other applications. Who still thinks that's acceptable behavior on a
multitasking operating system? Also, the app quits when the last window is
closed, which isn't how OS X apps are supposed to behave.

~~~
forgotusername
I'm confused. You double clicked an application icon, and the application
opened? You seem to be conflating the popular hate for focus being stolen due
to some non-consensual event, and the consensual starting of an app. If GIMP
didn't have a splash screen, there'd be no indication it was loading at all
(and it's one big fat app.. several generations of code including a huge chunk
of Python loaded at boot).

~~~
adgar
It sounds like your parent poster is saying it shows the splash screen over
all applications and there's nothing you can do about it. Which is needlessly
inconsiderate.

~~~
kstenerud
acidblue, your account has been hellbanned since 149 days ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3790146>

~~~
ChuckMcM

       Do: email pg if you're hellbanned.
       Do: Be civil and respond politely.
       Don't: create a throwaway account and whine about being    hellbanned.
       Don't: create a new account without talking to pg first.
       Don't: take it personally.

~~~
tripzilch
Is that from the guidelines? The whole _point_ of hellbanning is that the
affected user doesn't _know_ they're hellbanned (HN appears to them as if they
aren't). So they can't do nr.1 unless someone tells them.

This is a great article that explains very clearly why hellbanning is in 99.5%
of the cases the absolute wrong choice as it's being used on HN:
[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-
or-h...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-
hellban.html)

In addition, the guidelines can say "don't take it personally" all they want,
but when someone wastes my time for 150 days when there are so many _perfectly
reasonable_ ways of solving the problem in common usage on successful
discussion forums all over the web, yeah I would probably be a little bit
miffed, myself.

It's one of the main reasons I keep an eye on my karma score, if it sometimes
doesn't go up for a few days, I get nervous and check if I can still see my
own comments via a proxy. It's absolutely ridiculous that I have to do it that
way, but I've seen people get hellbanned for such petty things that yes, I
really couldn't say I never will be one of "those people" that catch the wrong
mod's attention at the wrong time before their coffee hit.

------
city41
There is also McGimp, which is a fully OSX native version of Gimp:
<http://www.partha.com/>

~~~
nimrody
Can you summarize the main advantages/disadvantages?

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crazygringo
This is a great move.

Serious question: how did this not happen 5 years ago? Is there some technical
reason? It's so hard for me to understand why the creators wouldn't have
always had this as the #1 feature improvement to make ASAP.

~~~
armored_mammal
I doubt most GIMP developers care(d?) about Mac. Or had Macs. Open source
stuff tends to live in a special universe where everyone uses Linux.

(In fact, based on another post, it sounds like the windowing toolkit picked
up Mac support, rather than Gimp doing anything super special.)

~~~
fosap
Also GIMP is in desperate need of manpower.

------
jon6
OT but is this an official signed application that can work with gatekeeper on
10.8? I recently discovered that my open source project won't work by default
on osx 10.8 without me paying $99 to get an apple certificate, which I'm not
very interested in doing.

What are open source/free projects supposed to do about gatekeeper?

~~~
plorkyeran
Tell users how to turn it off. I've never seen a user object to doing so,
possibly because they don't understand what it's doing in the first place.

~~~
stephen_g
You don't have to turn it off. Just Command click the application and click
open the first time. It's automatically added to a whitelist.

------
captaincrowbar
Now if only Inkscape would follow suit. There are plenty of good bitmap image
editors for the Mac, but I could really use a good vector editor.

~~~
Flow
I like Sketch, it's cheap, very good and is aware of pixels.

<http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/>

------
delackner
Some day in the distant future perhaps there will actually be a non-photoshop
100% psd compatible editor. I thought I could just tell my designer to do File
-> Export Layers as PNG, but that command in Photoshop is intentionally
broken, churning for several minutes before producing even the first of many
output files. In the meantime, while I like seeing how far Gimp has come, it
just isn't an option for me.

------
jamesu
I have to say, i'm impressed. One of the biggest reasons I never really used
GIMP on OSX was that the X11 version never really felt right.

This version in comparison feels a lot better, though there are still a few
annoying things about it, such as the image editing itself seems a bit laggy.

Still, a good step in the right direction IMO!

------
armored_mammal
Since it's 2.8 series it should have single-window mode, no?

~~~
dguaraglia
Yep, it does Windows->Single-Window Mode.

So. Much. Better.

~~~
armored_mammal
Yeah, the multi-window thing only ever made sense for tiling window managers.
And even with that it was a bit of a stretch.

That said, I don't think there's a more under-estimated or misunderstood
program around.

~~~
Avshalom
I'm actually pretty sure it was a adopted from the original multi-window
interface of Photoshop on Mac.

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mmphosis
GIMP Crashes on launching 32bit CPU

<https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=682913>

    
    
      $ file GIMP.app/Contents/MacOS/GIMP-bin
      GIMP.app/Contents/MacOS/GIMP-bin: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64

------
jyap
TIP:

I've been a long time GIMP for Mac OS X user (being a former laptop Linux
users).

New GIMP crashed in me on the first run. It then hung on start up on the 2nd
run.

I just deleted my old GIMP configuration directories and it started up fine:

rm -fr ~/Library/Application\ Support/Gimp/

------
tcc619
This feature along with the single window view makes GIMP very usable on the
mac.

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unwind
There was some confusion about whether this release (which wasn't done by the
"ordinary" Mac OS X package maintainer) meant that the role had been appointed
to someone else: [https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-developer-
list/2012-Aug...](https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-developer-
list/2012-August/msg00217.html).

I hope that is getting resolved, it's always painful to see large projects
like GIMP suffer from "people problems" and developers become disgruntled as a
result.

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devindotcom
Thank god, maybe I can finally leave behind Pixelmator.

------
larrywright
The excellent Pixelmator is only $14.99 in the Mac App Store. I'm not sure how
much use their is for Gimp on OS X any more.

~~~
niels_olson
I like using GIMP because it's what I use on Ubuntu and Suse and I use a lot
of different machines (two XP boxes on different networks at work, several
OSes at home, and I change jobs every couple of years). Photoshop isn't cross-
platform, and the licensing would be prohibitive for my needs. For my brother,
a professional artist with his own studio, Photoshop is the only way to go.
For my daughter on a Cr-48, GIMP is great.

------
viraj_shah
The interface looks significantly better, at least from the last time I messed
around with it (which was a while ago).

~~~
jaytaylor
Agreed. This is a huge step forward for Gimp!

------
DenisM
Any thoughts on this new GIMP vis-a-vis Photoshop Elements?

I don't mind paying <$100 for a decent graphics editor. My primary use case is
tweaking screenshots, app icons, buttons, and the like for my iOS apps and the
web site. I want to get in and out as quick as possible, so I can get back to
my other work.

~~~
bazzargh
I'm a gimp user. My mum (who has a mac, but isnt a confident computer user)
asked for 'photoshop' for christmas after seeing what I'd done fixing up
family photos.

I knew if I just gave her Gimp (or Photoshop for that matter) she'd just get
stuck - they aren't very user friendly. I had a look at all the image editors
I could - Acorn, Seashore, Pixelmator, etc and came to the conclusion that
Photoshop Elements beat them all for ease of use.

Specific things that help are the guided actions (in the panel on the right)
that act like wizards for performing common actions, but also teach you how to
do these things; and the selection & healing tools are miles better than those
in the other tools. Take a look at the demo on the top left here:
[http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-
elements/features.ht...](http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-
elements/features.html)

... it's talking about the smart brush, which I don't bother with, but what
you're looking at is how well it manages to select within a picture.

I still prefer using Gimp, but for quick photo edits, I tend to use PE now.
However, I tend to work with photos not eg icons as you do - not sure if PE is
any use for that.

------
bigfrakkinghero
This is awesome! One of my biggest gripes with using OSX was how terrible the
GIMP experience was.

------
Kilimanjaro
I've been using the outdated Seashore for my basic crop/resize needs. Will try
asap.

------
MikeCapone
Slightly off-topic (but I know very savvy people are here, so I can't help but
ask):

Anyone knows where I could find a JPEG-2000 plug-in for GIMP that works on
this Mac version, along with instructions on how to install it?

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calgaryeng
Is there a way to permanently dock the toolbar in the Mac version? I had this
in the old version.... Now I get floating docks over top of other applications
even when Gimp is in the background!

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scoofy
Why can't i move a selection within a layer? This has to be the most
persistent problem in the mac version that hasn't been fixed. With every new
GIMP version i curse this bug.

~~~
armored_mammal
It's a GIMP thing, unless I'm misunderstanding you:
<http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-using-selections.html>

~~~
scoofy
>>hold down Ctrl+Alt keys and click-and-drag the selection. This makes the
original place empty. A floating selection is created. The required key
commands may differ on your system, look in the status bar to see if another
combination is specified; for example, Shift+Ctrl+Alt.

This does not function on mac as far as i know. You cannot even manually do it
in the selection options.

~~~
stuaxo
Maybe substitute ctrl for command?

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fuzionmonkey
Does it have Retina display support? I'd download this in a heartbeat.

It's frustrating how long it is taken Adobe to update their software for Hi-
DPI.

~~~
llimllib
No: <http://i.imgur.com/5AMU4.jpg>

(Edit: that's Gimp and Acorn in the screenshot, respectively, in case you
weren't clear what was going on.)

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Cyranix
The primary download link is getting hammered at the moment; check for a
mirror that has an OSX directory for fast access.

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akldfgj
Doesn't come with decent-looking fonts included, though.

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joejohnson
I wish it were available from the App Store.

~~~
d0ugal
Why?

~~~
jyap
GIMP would most likely reach a larger audience of users.

Simple app updates that are integrated at the OS level.

