For those who found the interfaces confusing, there are indeph manuals under “help” with tutorials and the like. It’ll take several hours to read through, but hey, 3 hours or 1000 + bucks?

here are a few sites:

spencerthegardener(dot)com
potomitan(dot)net
paigewilsonarts(dot)com

Of course, I’d still have to use adobe Flash (once I learn it adequately). Would be nice to have an open source version of that!

Thoughts?

It’s not true, though, that open source can’t be much better than commercial stuff: most of the Internet was built on open source, and open source apps still run the Net–Perl, PHP, Apache, etc. and a lot of back-end stuff most people have no idea about.

What’s interesting is that until recently, the developers of open source software were geeks who only cared about the technical merits of their software, so user interfaces were horrible, and little effort went into anything that wasn’t extremely technical. But in the last few years there’s been a lot of work going into the user interface side, and more open source multimedia/graphic applications. In the next few years I’m sure we’ll see much stronger offerings from the open source front in those areas.

I actually think the future of software is all internet delivered (like Google Docs), and I’ve seen a few random internet image manipulation applications already. The technology is currently a million miles off Photoshop but if you’re talking about competition this is where I think it will come from. Give it a few years.

For me personally though buy the Adobe suite isn’t worth the money either, I hardly make use of it even if I have a couple of the students versions of a couple of the applications that’s the max I’ll ever invest in Adobe material.

Perhaps a couple of years from now the open source alternatives would be on a higher level which would give it more use, but for not it simply lacks behind. It tends to keep walking in the shadows of the commercial products rather than taking the leap ahead and coming with a GUI which works just as well, features which are equal or better in quality to that of the commercial products, usability, etcetera.

And when taking a look at photoshop or GIMP in example… I must say I haven’t checked gimpshop, but GIMP seriously lacks on the GUI completely and due to that accessibility isn’t present at all, rendering most features completely useless if you don’t want to spend days on figuring out where you can find everything.

Making a long story short: Open source has the potential of becoming something great, but it’s definitely far from there yet.

And I agree with Paul’s comment earlier about the programs needing to be intuitive. Adobe has far more resources to spend improving their suite in that way. However, it wasn’t always intuitive for any of us; I tutored many students when I was still in college that refused to learn the keyboard shortcuts for things like the move tool or the pen tool. It really slows you down when you don’t know them by heart! Hehe, but if you asked me what the specific keys were to select those various tools, I wouldn’t be able to tell you!! My mind knows what I want and my fingers just hit the right buttons

You are right, Aaron, in saying that the learning curve is just too steep for us to be willing to put the time into it. We already have something we know, and it’s not like we have to upgrade CS every time a new version comes out (though I hear that CS3 is quite a breakthrough and it uses far less system resources than CS2). These programs would probably be great for those who have ideas and not the money to buy CS. I was always teased about using a PC throughout school (everyone used a Mac naturally), but it’s not about the program or the platform, it’s about the ideas. Who cares how you execute them? Well, your printer might…