Dave Girard from Ars Technica has written a very realistic and thorough review of the GIMP 2.6.4 “Suite freedom: a review of GIMP 2.6.4”. It’s a couple of pages long, but any graphic designers out there that are pirating Photoshop for their home computers should take a look. It’s refreshing to see a designer’s perspective on the GIMP after actually using it.
My only gripe is his comment on GIMP’s image slicing capabilities. He sort of makes it sound like state-of-the-art web designers are still routinely slicing their raster image layouts into pieces to be reassembled in HTML <tables>.
The only time I use that technique now is for the backwards medium of HTML emails. Never mind the importance of meaningful, semantic markup, but with the prominent support of CSS in modern browsers (and even Internet Explorer 6), slicing images like this, though it is a nice feature, isn’t all that important. It wouldn’t hurt to have Photoshop’s functionality, but it’s not a deal-breaker.
BONUS
On the last page of the review I was delighted to see a link to my how-to “X11: Switch Control Key To Apple/Command Key” as a clever hack to switch the X11 modifier key from Control to Command for Mac OSX users. I’m pretty stoked!