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William Fidell wrote: | | I am not so sure about Gimp, | although I use it (and I don't want to start a flame war)
Informed flame wars can be useful... it is just the religious ones that waste time.
| I don't think that it is a good enough to rival the commerical competitors.
Some commercial groups do use the Gimp, so don't underestimate it, I fear the problem is its interface. Once I finally figured out how to make it do "web banners", I found I created some quite good ones (well "okay ones" but it was my lack of artistic ability not the tool that held me back once started), very quickly, with some very sophisticated special effects. Okay they would have swallowed 300Kb each - maybe I went overboard on the shading from one colour to another - again me not the tool.
On the other hand I work for a company whose online web page builder is regularly abused to produce web page banner for third party sites, from almost trivially simple (but lovingly drawn and rendered) templates, and the text, fonts and colours of your choosing. So I guess most people making websites would be happy with something far simpler than Gimp for most of their graphics needs. Of course many of these types of graphics should be done as vector graphics, not raster images anyway.
| Plus, personally, I don't think that it is the most user | friendly piece of software in the world.
Agreed - although I think many product of it type are not as easy to use as they should be. Gradient editors all mimic ones and other, and none of them make much sense to me.
Gimp 2 has gained a more sensible menuing system, but still a way to go before the worst of the original interface is sorted.
Note that GIMP can be slow to start on Windows, I think this is the GTK stuff loading (GNOME has it loaded already of course).
| Gaim and a bittorrent client might be worth including. They certainly | might get used.
I'm not convinced on GAIM, unless the Windows version is radically different. I use AMSN for MSN because it implements features of the protocol I use, and have found other features of other protocols sadly lacking (or even crashing) GAIM.
Unless you have an objection to proprietary software (some here do), most of the popular IM clients are available gratis on Windows, so you may as well use the vendors own client and get the full feature set. Sure setting logging and other parameters for N different clients is a bit tedious, but none of them are that hard to use, and you have to set per protocol settings in GAIM anyway.
So I see GAIM as a sticking plaster till everyone goes to free software for their IM/audio/video conferencing needs. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
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