Submitted by “Pixel (formerly Pixel32) is an image editing program, similar to Photoshop or Gimp, that runs on a large variety of platforms: Linux, FreeBSD, Zeta, OS X, SkyOS and more. In an 8 year period, it has grown to become a very pleasant-looking and usefull application. Unlike Gimp, it has support for CMYK and uses its own GUI toolkit called eLiquid. Pixel can work with PSD files and work is being done to improve this feature. Pavel agreed to answer some of our questions regarding Pixel.”
Pavel appears to be another of those coding machines that are unstoppable! He has created a great graphics editor single-handed; something I marvel at! Perhaps he and Robert (SkyOS) should collaborate
I’d be very interested to hear more about eLiquid; it would be very useful having access to something like that for cross platform development. The current selection (WX, GTK, Qt etc) is great, but never quite looks great on all platforms. So Pavel, if you have the time and are interested, I’d love to read more on the hows, wheres and whys.
Even more WX, GTK, Qt etc only has been ported to linuxes, windows and Macos but not other alternative OS.With eliquid, you have a bonus it also has been ported to Beos/zeta, Skyos, Morphos
You are wrong about GTK+ and alternative OS’es. It has been ported to several alternative OS’es incl. SkyOS.
GTK+ quality outside Linux, Windows, BSD and OSX is just horrible, not really usable
Now, the quality of the ports is a different thing. However, I’m not sure you are entirely correct for all platforms.
GTK+ quality outside Linux, Windows, BSD and OSX is just horrible, not really usable
It’s not so good on Windows either.
Try running GtkWimp in 8 bit colour – it’s dreadful.
And if you see how glib implements socket channels in Windows, you’ll never want to use them in your own code ;-). They have a thread per socket, that polls it for I/O availability and signals an event…
But it’s nether free or opensource and I’d wouldn’t call GIMP not useful. It’s basically a copy of Photoshop with the UI being almost identical.
Atleast the GIMP is bold enough to be different and I find the UI good enough to do what it supposed to do.
That’s exactly what I hate about Gimp and is totaly useless to me. Almost every professional designer or other that do serious work with images, use Photoshop. People are used to that GUI and if you ask me, it’s really great. Similar GUI is used by other applications (Illustrator, Freehand, Corel, PsP, …). But when you open up Gimp, you get lost, too confusing, too many floating windows everywhere, I never know where to click or anything. Typical “made by geek” project. Since I found it useless, I bough Pixel, which is great, also costs only $25 (I think). There could me more updates, but overall, for me, it’s way better than Gimp.
Ever tried Krita?
I prefer Gnome, so I’ve never seen this one. I’ll check it out, thank you.
Krita is slow in many operations (include resize the photo) compare with gimp, photoshop, pixel, gthumb.
I just use gimp and pixel for normal usage
A bad craftsman always blames his tools and who said anything about professional designer?
Fact is people want a photoshop just to draw their stick men and professional designers like the features of GIMP. One of these being the separate canvas rather than being inside the main window.
I agree.
What is more, I really cannot understand that omnipresent bashing of GIMP UI – it is a perfect UI for traditional X window manager behaviour (focus follows mouse, click doesn’t raise window to front). For me much more productive (considering UI) than anything Photoshop and clones could ever provide. But for those with experience limited to eXPperience – well, this could be pain to use…
I think a lot of it is people just expect a ms paint interface, want to draw a few circles and a box or two and paste some text on it, the gimp is not real intuitive for that and neither is, painter, freehand or photoshop.
This is going away from topic and I even don’t understand what the hell you’re trying to prove but…I’m sorry I guess I got it all wrong, Gimp’s main goal is to become a “drawing tool” like MS Paint for average Joe to draw trees and stuff? My guess is this ain’t Pixel’s goal either, since you don’t earn jack from “amateurs”.
Yeah, when doing something, tools are important, so your saying absolutely doesn’t fit here. After doing designs for 15 years (web, banners, catalogs, posters, logos), I think I know what tool I want and somehow know which are good. I’v never met any pro designer using Gimp, but maybe it’s just me. Acording to you, Wine, Crossover, Disney and other companies are throwing money away trying to get Photoshop to run best possible on Linux, huh? People bugging Adobe to port it to Linux are just noobs talking? People saying one application they miss the most on Linux being Photoshop don’t know sh!t, huh? Yeah, we all just want to give $1000 for a l337 program on our OS, simply to brag about it. I suggest you return to drawing animals in Gimp and don’t comment on things you don’t know much about. Thank you.
Edited 2006-10-18 14:35
It’s basically a copy of Photoshop with the UI being almost identical.
Then you’ve never used Photoshop professionally have you? GIMP does image manipulation somewhat well, to a degree. But it doesn’t do design, and it still is beat hands down by Photoshop. GIMP lacks good features in the following: text controls, layer styles, color management, layer manipulation, selection mechanisms, tablet support, brush system, tool set, filters, path options among many other things.
GIMP wouldn’t last 10 minutes in a professional workflow. I used to think it could, as I used gimp for years up until I started doing professional work, then I realized I needed Photoshop & Friends.
I occasionally try out the competition (of photoshop and illustrator), and am always frustrated by the lack of quality. I mean this about Pixel, GIMP, Inkscape, Xara and Krita.
I wish it weren’t true, because I hate being tied to Adobe, it is and I have to live with it.
Well you suggested “GIMP wouldn’t last ten minutes in a professional workflow” no one else did. Gimp does image manipulation well enough for the user and the UI is very like Photoshop.
By the way, this maybe off topic but Xara is Superior to illustrator in many ways, but thats vector graphics.
Open source or not, Pixel shows the power of Free Pascal in an excellent way:
* Write once, compile anywhere.
* Few dependancies, no library hell.
* Very fast startup, UI and operation.
WOW, time to give to Free Pascal another look.
Not only does Pixel look good, it works very well =) I’ve never liked Gimp that much, and I just hate all those windows it pops up on my desktop. Pixel only places one window on my taskbar. And I just find Pixel a lot more logical and easier. It’d be nice if it was free as in beer, but really, I think it’s worth the 27e the author asks for it. I guess I gotta buy it =)
EDIT: Forgot to mention that installation couldn’t really be any easier. This is the way to go with installers.
Edited 2006-10-18 12:13
I think it’s a pity Pixel isn’t available on Beos R5. It exists for Zeta, so I don’t see any reason for NOT releasing an R5 version. Otherwise I would have bought it a long time ago…. In my opninion this is the only drawback of this app not being open source. I like open source, but I understand that some people want to get paid for their effort.
Lots of people think that everything should be open sourced…. I don’t see why! Should all software be free? And how should developers earn their money? Must we all be making dull & uninteresting struts web applications for large enterprises? Like I am
If an R5 version existed I would immediatly buy it… It’s cheap!
Lots of people think that everything should be open sourced…. I don’t see why! Should all software be free? And how should developers earn their money? Must we all be making dull & uninteresting struts web applications for large enterprises? Like I am
You might get lucky and work on interesting applications for large enterprises. Very few people can live from selling their own software, so I don’t think that should be an argument for proprietary software. Besides, there will always be the short-lived, content-oriented entertainment software (games…) if you want to try it anyway. That should be more fun as well and you wouldn’t risk to lose your income to some new opensource application.
Pixel is an amazing piece of work.. That’s a shame the GUI doesn’t run natively.
I can’t wait to see it under Ha"iku
i also think that GIMP’s UI sucks, so i keep using my old PSP7. But maybee GIMPshop can help some http://www.gimpshop.net/
Wow, this looks really nice!
I got it to crash after 2 minutes of running though: go to the layer “live effects” ad an effect and then and click remove…
Might still be worth the $32 dollars though, if the interface is better than Gimps.
Edited 2006-10-18 13:10
The only problem I have with Pixel is it looks like a rip-off of Photoshop.
so?
Not more than KOffice or OpenOffice are “rippoffs” of MS Office. If the interface is nice and you want the same features, why try to reinvent the wheel. It didn’t work so well for the Gimp. The simple fact that people went the path to writing GimpShop says it all.
I had to laugh when reading that separate canvas thing… With Photoshop you only have that problem on Windows, and that just because the Windows UI sucks. On the Mac (that’s where PS comes from, y’know) it has a separate canvas.
Indeed Mac Photoshop does have that, just shows how much people know and people think Window version is the proper UI, lol.
Actually either on mac or windows you can press ‘F’ in photoshop to cycle between windowed an full screen mode. You can have the tools either in the full view, or serparate from the doc.
Write once crash anywhere. I’ve haven’t been able to run Pixel on any of my Macs for more than a few minutes without crashing. I tried several versions. Useless at least for me.
And WTF is this crap with having all windows in one big Window? Windows 3.0 or what? Jeez get a clue of GUI design first…
Edited 2006-10-18 13:13
“That’s exactly what I hate about Gimp and is totaly useless to me. Almost every professional designer or other that do serious work with images, use Photoshop. People are used to that GUI and if you ask me, it’s really great.”
I didn’t know that using Photoshop’s interface was part of your genetic makeup. You weren’t born knowing how to use Photoshop; you learned Photoshop. You can just as easily learn Gimp, if you put your mind to it and take the time. They’re not that different. To justify using a $700.00+, proprietary program over a free, open source one with practically the equivalent feature set simply because you’re used to its user interface is ludicrous. Obviously you have more money than brains.
You weren’t born knowing how to use Photoshop; you learned Photoshop. You can just as easily learn Gimp, if you put your mind to it and take the time.
I never put my mind to working with most of the Photoshop stuff. I didn’t need to learn most of the stuff. It just works in an intuitive way. With Gimp on the other hand, that is not at all the case. It’s not at all intuitive, and therefore the learning curve is a lot higher.
Total nonsence, I used Photoshop for a long time and adjusted to GIMP in a small amount of time. Besides it’s easy enough to customize GIMP like PS anyway since the layout it almost identical, it just amazes me how many so called “designers” cannot use it.
Photoshop and Pixel are by no means easy since people can spend years learning them, so if you cannot use GIMP to do simple graphic editing then you really are useless.
Seeing the many comments either bashing or defending Gimp, I must say I don’t believe people are necessarily dumb, lazy or whatever.
Gimp and it’s alternatives are both ok.
It’s not about good or bad tools, it’s about tools that
a) fit your mind
b) fit the problem at hand
I’m certainly not dumb and tried to get used to Gimp for over an hour. After that I was so annoyed that I switched the computer off by simply pulling the plug and left the room.
But that doesn’t mean I’m bashing Gimp, I’m just saying Krita (and just about _every_ other program for that matter) works better for _me_.
I’d really need to rewire my whole brain to accomplish the most trivial task with gimp.
Remember: It’s all about choice
LOL, the developer of pixel says the same:
“It’s always good they can choose between more programs. One program can’t fit everybody.”
Edited 2006-10-18 14:01
“I’m certainly not dumb and tried to get used to Gimp for over an hour. After that I was so annoyed that I switched the computer off by simply pulling the plug and left the room.”
An hour is not sufficient time to learn a new application. The trick is to uninstall Photoshop and force yourself to do everything in the Gimp. When you get stuck, fire up Google, or check the forums. Yes, learning something new can be frustrating at first, but the rewards of your perseverance will be great indeed. First Gimp, then Linux, then you’ll literally be a free man. If nothing else, think of the money saved!
I am sorry to insist, but really. For one year I worked exclusively with Linux (before getting a mac in the end). Gimp had all the features I needed, and really for like two months I forced myself to use it, because I had the same theory as you did.
But no, the UI really puts to shame the nice engine behind it. I spent more time trying to get focus back to my document that any other thing.
I guess the GIMP was born as an RGB photo-editing application, so it comes as a perferct too for designing for the Web.
I’ve been using both Photoshop and the GIMP for work (I’m a graphic designer) but I definitely started using The GIMP more frequently when Adobe brought those frigging changes to the post version 6.5 Photoshop interface. Some people are complaining about switching from Photoshop to The GIMP? Well switching from Photoshop 6.5 to later builts must have been traumatic in its own right. Tools and icons no longer were where they used to be!
When working with indexed PNG’s (< 256 colors) I’ve noticed that Photoshop usually does a better job. The GIMP on the other hand is better at compressing RGB PNG’s and definitely does a much better job with JPEG’s.
I also like to use the gimp because its PATH function is very precise. Try drawing a circular selection and converting it to a path on Photoshop, you will never get a perfect circle. Try that with The GIMP and you will do.
Also, I happen to take snapshots of application windows quite often. The GIMP selective capture tool comes very handy.
> The trick is to uninstall Photoshop and force yourself
> to do everything in the Gimp. When you get stuck, fire
> up Google, or check the forums. Yes, learning something
> new can be frustrating at first, but the rewards of
> your perseverance will be great indeed.
I think you should look up “intuitive” in a dictionary.
Man, I’d nearly forgotten about this app which I bought nearly a year ago. I liked the UI – what parts of it actually worked – but found the support and bug-tracking facilities truly horrible, not to mention the pain of licensing each new beta version for both my Windows and Linux installs.
When last I looked at it, it was pretty unusable: any vector tool operation caused an instant crash, and that’s what I was most interested in. This was the case for both Win and Lin versions. I was really concerned at the time that this product was purported to be moving towards a 1.0 release, when it still was utterly bug-ridden.
I’m moved to take another look at it now; here’s hoping the re-registration hell is a bit easier nowadays.
Thom & co., this 20-minute update rule is a right pain, may I say.
Well, mercifully the update process was easier than in the past. Just a case of re-entering my original acceptance code (the same one for entering the website Members’ area) and re-starting.
Then I create a new document (default settings). Then I draw an ellipse with the appropriate tool. Then I select the pointer tool and try to move it slightly. Then it crashes.
So that’s a glorious ~20-second uptime while trying to perform the most basic task imaginable. And that’s the exact thing I filed a bugreport about, oh, nearly a year ago. (Still waiting for a status on it.)
Yeah… great progress there, Pavel. Way to go.
I tried what you said and it worked for me on Linux with build 560.
I’m sure it works for plenty of people, but it doesn’t for me, and I paid my money but my bugreports have been roundly ignored.
I think the key problem here is library compatibility. He releases a binary that dynamically links against SDL, and a lot of other libs that he can’t statically link against, because of his own licensing terms. If he can’t do that, there’s very little he can do to guarantee compatibility on the breadth of Linux systems out there.
Having said that, a year ago I was having exactly the same crashes on Windows…
Well drawing an ellipse doesn’t sound like it has something to do with dynamically linked libraries. I guess it’something different going on.
It’s great to see independant developers still creating great applications.
Keep up the good work!
I’d like to congratulate Pavel on his excellent work, and his wonderful application to show for it.
Just to put into perspective how long he’s been working on this- I purchased this for DOS way back when. Still waiting for a 1.0 release, but he keeps adding OSes. Not that it’s a bad thing, but nothing has gotten finalised. It us-ed to work in R5, then yT convinced him ZETA was better, now it no longer runs in R5. Used to run well in eComStation – OS/2 as well, but now runs in ZETA better. This app is a moving target. As an early adopter (investor?), I’m not seeing any real fruit from the investment.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve spoken to Pavel on several occassions, and he’s a great guy. It’s just that it’s taken an awful long time, and there doesn’t seem to be any finalisation of features to get something stable that’ll run on the original operating system it was purchased for. No delivery, in essence.
Edited 2006-10-19 15:39
It worked on BeOS when BeOS was still being actively developed. Since it’s dead and moving nowhere, Pixel is targetted to Zeta users now, and when Haiku gets to usable state (networking), Pixel will support Haiku as well.