Shahid Online - Tech Corner

A while back I mentioned about The GIMP being a worth open source alternative to Photoshop. Yes, it is very good and I have used it even for video production. There will be doubters who will still sing praises of Photoshop and not understand that they are encouraging software piracy. So on with the show of encouraging users to pick up free/open source alternatives. The one issue I have (which I consider a limitation) is native Mac OS support, or rather the lack of it. In order to use it you are required to install X11 to utilise this app. However, I did not find it stable and often it crashed out for me on my MacBook Pro quite regularly - a problem which I never faced when using on Linux or Windows. However, it has come to my attention that some Samaritans have saved the day for me and published McGIMP 2.8, which is GIMP 2.8 ported natively for Mac OS X. I have had the pleasure of playing around with it and using it in single window mode. Head over to Partha's Place ( www.pa...

The open source image editor GIMP has reached a milestone release of version 2.6, with the Windows installer now available. This major release includes improvements on the user interface, tools and plugins. There are also some under the hood changes. Some of the new features are: The toolbox menubar has been removed and merged with the image window menubar. It is now possible to pan beyond the image border, making image window navigation much less constrained Improved free select tool Brush dynamics and more ... The Windows installer is available from here

Many people think that Open Source software is only for the home user. How wrong can they be? Very. I remember many years ago of how many charities and companies started to migrate to the Linux platform, in order to use open source software. The fundamental reason for this was that the software is free and the second reason was that there was not much open source software on the Windows operating system. Being free software, companies can reduce their overheads and not worry about the licensing restrictions that big companies impose. The big problem with commercial software is that there are so many features making them require higher spec machines. So you're stuck with your existing software or forced to upgrade your PC. By reading my previous posts you can tell that I am an Open Source advocate. But I really believe (among others) that Open Source software has left the bedroom a long time ago and you can really run a business using Open Source. Just don't forget to make a con...