On 1/22/10, Jay Smith wrote: > While long-time users and the developers of Gimp may not feel like Gimp > should be treated as a "product", the reality is that any new user > looking at Gimp is going to make choices and decisions that are "product > choice" decisions. Denial of that fact is complete denial of reality.
And who denies it? :) > It is my opinion that many in the open source / free software (OS/FS) > arena have long ago forgotten that truism. In my experience the OS/FS > world pretty much tells new users that if they are not patient enough or > smart enough to figure out the secrets of whatever software, they don't > deserve to use it. How does it relate to GIMP? > I feel that is completely backward. The OS/FS community should focus on > (as much as software development) the education of new users and > bringing them into the community. Agreed. > As an example, while I have not looked for it, I am sure that there must > at least be some book or maybe a website here or there that specifically > addresses "How to smoothly migrate from using Photoshop to using Gimp -- > the benefits, challenges, and differences of using Gimp". Such content > should be right up front in the whole Gimp documentation, Gimp websites, > etc., etc. Not a book and not a website, but something I started a while ago in Russian and haven't finished translating into English yet. http://wiki.libregraphicsworld.org/doku.php?id=migration-ps-to-gimp Basically it covers status of support for file formats (needs updating a bit), table of tools and their keyboard shortcuts mapping, table of functionality mapping I'll see if I can finish it this week. > could do a lot better at this. And if somebody says "we don't care > about getting more users", I would ask them "then, why make Gimp at all?" And does anyone actually say that? > As an aside, I really think that the documentation issue is going to > become critical in the next couple of years. As I understand it (and > please correct me if I am wrong), anybody can contribute to the > documentation effort, but it takes significant training and skills in > the special process involved with maintaining documentation versioning, > etc., etc., etc. I don't begin to understand all of that and I DON'T > WANT TO have to become an expert in all that stuff -- I just want to > help improve the documentation. I understand your feelings, but GIMP documentation is a single-source effort that isn't well supported by current wiki engines. Alexandre _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
