second brew (red ale), part 9

The serendipity of both the red ale and the Arizona Cardinals being properly conditioned for Superbowl XLIII (and for the first time in the history of the universe) led to the obvious christening of the second brew as Tipsy Bird.

Photoshop 7.0 does not run at all on Mac OS X 10.5 and the fine folks at Adobe refuse to fix it so I have been without a really good photo editor for quite some time. I almost reinstalled it on the last Tiger box in the house but decided instead to give GIMP a try. I've poked at it a time or two before but never had the motivation to get past its annoyances. It's still no Photoshop but it mostly did what I wanted and I became moderately comfortable with it over a couple of hours. My main gripes in this limited engagement were that window management is awful, text capabilities are very limited, and handling of selections and layers is awkward. Oh, and the first use of a drawing tool is often accompanied by an infuriating delay.

I also tried the online SUMO Paint but found it unstable enough to prevent me from discovering very much about its capabilities. And I poked at Seashore but it crashed in short order.

In any event, GIMP let me produce something good enough for this bit of silliness and now I feel a little more comfortable turning to it for quick image editing tasks.