My Technophilic Musings

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Everywhere you go, any building you enter, any OS you operate, any settings window you open, one rule remains set in stone, “THE ESCAPE DOOR”. Always give an exit path, a way to make it all go away, make it look like nothing happened. But Gnome seems to think otherwise. Any settings window you open, all you see is a “close” button.

I made a few changes and then tried to “undo” them by using the following methods:

1. Pressing the “close” button.
2. Pressing the little “x” on the upper right corner.
3. Pressing the “Escape” key.
4. Pressing “Alt+F4”.

But no dice. Every method leads to saving of changes. The same thing occurs with EVERY dialogue box you can find in Gnome. I hate to say that this is something Windows seems to have got right (Maybe their UI designers are better than their OS programmers). What’s even more surprising is that even cross-platform apps (e.g. Firefox) give the “Apply” and “Cancel” buttons in Windows but not in Linux.

I hope Gnome developers listen and patch this up, or if there is any “hidden” tricks up your sleeve that will allow me to “go back in time”, please do let me know.

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Quote of the day: Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. - Kierkegaard

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: apply, cancel, close, gnome, linux, UI, windows

My Sites: My Blog | My Tech Blog | Follow me on Twitter
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Some of you might know that I was in the hunt for a decent mspaint alternative recently. Note that I didn’t go for GIMP / Inkscape etc because they were overkill for what I wanted to do. Many a times, I just wanted to touch up a screenshot or make a simple flow image by drawing a few boxes, use a few pointing arrows, and add some text here and there. All this could be done with the previous mentioned programs as well but took a bit more steps than I wanted (stroking the selections / paths for lines, boxes, circles, and even then, no arrows). I didn’t find an adequate replacement at the time but got it now, so thought of writing about it. Basically I came across 4 apps: tuxpaint, gpaint, kolourpaint and mtpaint. Won’t discuss tuxpaint here cuz I found it a little too kiddish.

• gpaint: (Available in Ubuntu repositories) gpaint is a very simplistic program that has a mspaint look and feel but feels a bit lacking. It can do basic procedures like basic shape selections, lines, boxes but that’s it. No polygon selections, brush, color picker, etc, and yeah no arrows. Moreover, it saves only in pngs.

• kolourpaint: (Available in Ubuntu Repositories) kolourpaint is very close to mspaint. Infact it does a bit more than mspaint. It has all the things that I mentioned as missing in gpaint, plus has basic image manipulation effects as well. I liked it quite a bit, but it had 2 drawbacks for me, still no arrows, and it depends on KDE/Qt libraries.

• mtpaint: (Available in Ubuntu Repositories from Gutsy onwards. Rest of the folks can search for a package on net, or find a suitable package or source here) This is the software that got me most excited. It is actually a kind of lower-intermediate package that lies somewhere between mspaint and a very basic, poor man’s GIMP. It has all the features ok kolourpaint, (plus arrows at last ), a small smattering of basic effects (gaussian, edge detection, blur, embossing), can work with gifs also (handles transparency and animation quite well). So, this is the one I would be sticking to for now.

I am using mtpaint now for my basic needs. Hope the article benefitted you as well. If I missed out on some package, then do let me know.

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Quote of the day: “Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time… The wait is simply too long.” - Leonard Bernstein

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: GIMP, gnome, gpaint, Gutsy, Inkscape, KDE, kolourpaint, linux, mspaint, mtpaint, tuxpaint, ubuntu, windows

My Sites: My Blog | My Tech Blog | Follow me on Twitter
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Have been in the hunt for a good basic paint program for linux for so long. I’m running a Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (amd64) box (yeah, yeah I didn’t upgrade to Gutsy because it sneaked up too quickly onto me and the impending loom of LTS goodness of Hardy was also there). Have been suggested various things so far like GPaint, Kolourpaint, tuxpaint etc but none of them cuts it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love GIMP but its an overkill when I have to go through 2 menus, a dialogue box and several clicks, just to make a silly rectangle, but I don’t hold anything against it cuz afterall its an “Image Manipulation” program, not a painting one.

So, what do you use/recommend when you have to draw a few basic shapes, connect them through lines and arrows, put in a mashup of few silly pics and colorize it a bit with basic effects? And are there any gnome native ones or do I ultimately have to give in to install KDE dependencies?

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If you liked this post, then you can Subscribe to my feed
Quote of the day: Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. - Kierkegaard

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: draw, feisty, GIMP, gnome, gpaint, Gutsy, Hardy, KDE, kolourpaint, linux, paint, tuxpaint, ubuntu