Resend the Vote!
From the LA Times:
...because the teachers are obviously doing such a great job...
umm guys, did you mean rescind? Our tax dollars are hard at work here.
Phenomenon – I Can Has Cheezburger?
I'm going to start the Internet Phenomena entries with a biggie. I Can Has Cheezburger has been around for a while, and is responsible for the huge popularity in LOLcats (pictures of cats doing funny stuff with captions of what is going through their heads)
Back to GIMP?
When I installed Windows 7 RC1, I noticed that MS Paint was given a facelift, with some new shiny features that looked like they would be useful for making these "comics" of mine. Here's what I liked and didn't really care for. I do recognize that Paint has and will always be a simple drawing program, with the purpose being to make it easy to quickly create a drawing, but with so much free software available (GIMP being the most common) you would think Microsoft would either make something really useful or just ditch the whole effort.
What I liked:
- Ability to save in different file formats - It's awesome to be able to not have to save to a Bitmap (BMP) file then convert it to something useful in another program. Checking on it, it looks like this feature was included in Windows Vista, I guess I never got around to using it for the brief time that I had Vista installed.
- Templates for making new shapes - the speech bubble is integral for comics, and it's great that they included this, as well as some of the arrow and star shapes. It would be nice to see this expanded on, with the ability to create your own shapes.
- Tablet Support - my Wacom Bamboo tablet worked right away when I plugged it in after installing Windows 7. That was nice.
What I didn't like:
- No layers - like I said above, I do recognize that this is a simple program, and layers are a headache to most people, but hey, this is my review and I like the ability to change something in one layer without it affecting other parts of the drawing.
- Once an object is placed, you can't go back and edit it. I placed a couple speech bubbles on the page, but when I decided I wanted to change the size, I couldn't. Furthermore, I had done a few actions since, so I couldn't just undo back to the point where I placed them in. This was the same for text boxes, I couldn't edit the text in one once I clicked away from it. In fact, GIMP isn't very good about letting you move objects once they've been placed, either. The best implementation of this is in Macromedia (now Adobe) Fireworks, where each object retains its object properties without immediately rasterizing it. If you want to move something, you can select around it, but if it overlaps another object, you'll end up moving both. Another instance where layers would have been handy.
- Tablet support is limited - I realize this probably wasn't high on Microsoft's priority list, but it's nice to be able to use the eraser end of the table as a different brush than the head. Now that I think about it, this may be a driver issue; I'll investigate further.
In conclusion, If you sucked at drawing with the old paint, you will suck at drawing with the new paint, but some of the new features will make your life easier.
Or maybe I just need to practice more.
