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  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @dhromed said:
    Can you provide details as to why Photoshop's Mac buttons are more clickable and its Mac keys more pressable than the Windows port?


    Apple have long provided a zoom widget in document window title bars, which signals the app to intelligently resize the window. Photoshop always sizes windows to fit into the gap between the palettes, so your work is never obscured by them. Mac Illustrator, at least as late as 9, works like Windows: the palettes just get in the way. There is, though, a solution for Windows: move the palette windows to the screen edges and resize the MDI window to fit in the gap manually.


    I zoom exclusively with the keyboard, and usually do not want the window to resize. When I do, I hold Alt while zooming. I also Fullscreen often, because then you have freedom to pan.

    Here's my palette setup, if you're interested.

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:
    The newest I've used, for a few seconds, is CS, and the newest I've used seriously is 7. I have 6 here right now, and that's all I need.


    I'm not sure I could live without layer sets or the "scale layer style" checkbox. :)

    Since 6, PS hasn't actually seen grandiose additions, but there's a cumulative effect of smaller things that makes me think CS{123} are lots better than 6.

    6 gave us fill layers and vector masks. Yay!
    7 gave us layer sets and the browser.
    8 gave us precious little, but still, layer sets of more than 1 depth.
    9 provided Smart Objects, which are really cool even if they bloat the PSD horribly; and multi-layer select: THANK YOU FSM.
    10 gives you... an "align layers" button in the Move tool options, and a better interface: Macromedia dockable palettes FTW.

    Thing that should be fixed:

    - a marquee line on a document edge cannot be shrunk.
    - CS3 still has a crazy low limit for set depth, and the layer palette is fast becoming unsuited for the amount for information in its width.
    - linkable smart objects. They're always embedded and it sucks! AI has had it for years. A case of team-mismanagement. Similar inconsistencies can be found between MS Office applications.



  • Great. That's one complex post to disentangle when all the HTML is car-crushed into a block. I'd say "Community Server FTL" but then it would just be going faster than light, and that's quite the opposite of reality.

    @dhromed said:

    I zoom exclusively with the keyboard, and usually do not want the window to resize.

    If the current view is larger than the screen, I want the window to be as big as I can make it. That said, I "only" have one screen and often I have a second or even third view of the document open at smaller zooms (e.g. 800% and 100%, or 800/100/25) so I have automatic resize turned off as much as it willl go, and then zoom the window when I need it bigger. In Windows I'd just maximise the document window, but then the palettes cover up lots of it. Someone finally explained that you just don't maximise the app itself (the MDI parent), and then move the palettes outside of that window.

    @dhromed said:

    I also Fullscreen often, because then you have freedom to pan.

    Fullscreen isn't a great use to me, as then I really can't view any other open documents or views, and I very often have multiple views open. Panning is just a case of holding space and dragging the document. The zoom thing is odd. cmd-space-click (zoom in) doesn't resize the window, nor does the zoom tool, whereas cmd-+ does ... Oh, that's right, I think I set it to work that way. Keyboard zoom resizes the window so I can get a closer look without having to keep manually zooming the window, but cmd-space-click does not, meaning that I can zoom that way without having to lose my window size when I've got several windows side by side.

    @dhromed said:

    7 gave us layer sets and the browser.

    GraphicConverter has a browser, IcoFX has a browser, iTunes has a browser, Winamp has a browser, all sorts of apps have browsers, and yet I refuse to use any of them. I won't use iTunes primarily because I refuse to be bludgeoned into using someone else's lousy file browser.

    7 puts back the brushes palette that Adobe stole from 6, and brushes can FINALLY be re-ordered, even if you have to open the Preset Manager to do it. It really frustrates me that all my custom brush sizes are all completely out of order -- according to when I created each new size -- and no way to do anything about it. Honestly, if all the world were to use XML, it would still be light years ahead of where we are today. Imagine if a Photoshop brushes file were XML? It would take one swipe with a text editor to re-order them all. But noooo, it's some manky binary file. There might be alternatives to XML, but XML is a standard and everyone else's home-brewed alternatives would be completely different to each other and you'd be forever figuring out the quirks of each. Plus, XML can be edited in a GUI editor if it gets too complicated :) XML also means you can use a stock generator and parser with hard and fast rules about encoding, so no stupid bugs arising from every man and his dog's broken format and broken parser. Or intractible binary format ...

    What would I change about Photoshop? The one flaw that truly incenses me is that when I undo, I'm always taken back to the layer on which the previous action took place. If I select a layer, try something and then undo it to try again, I'm thrown back to whatever layer I was on before. The joke wears off fast -- I want to remain on whatever layer I'm trying to experiment with. You want to strangle someone if what you're trying to do isn't working, as Photshop is actively making it even more tedious than it ever had to be. I wish there was a simple "stop changing my layer focus" checkbox. Maybe a hidden setting in the XML-based prefs it does't have, rather like about:config.

    PS 6 also has a flaw where in visible mask editing mode (opt-click a layer mask), moving or dragging the selection tends to throw you back to the image layer, move that and colour it red (!). I can't find a consistent way to stop it -- it seems to be a horrible bug as 5 never did that. I need to see if 7 fixes this one.

    Otherwise, there's nothing too horrid I suppose. You can't disable chroma subsampling in JPEG generation, which is actually pretty heinous, but IrfanView and GraphicConverter are there to make you JPEGs that don't look like they have the plague.



  • Pretend I could edit my post.

    [Edit] Wow, PS 7 fixes this! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee [/edit]

    [Edit] And this one! [/edit]



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Pretend I could edit my post.

    [Edit] Wow, PS 7 fixes this! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee [/edit]

    [Edit] And this one! [/edit]

    Sir, cocaine is not a substitute for sugar.

    Fullscreen isn't a great use to me, as then I really can't view any other open documents or views, and I very often have multiple views open.

    That's true, and I keep wondering why panning beyond the image edge is restricted to fullscreen view. AI's capable of doing this and I usually maximize the document window.

    Someone finally explained that you just don't maximise the app itself (the MDI parent), and then move the palettes outside of that window.
     

    Ouch; I seriously hate seeing all my other stuff through my Photoshop work. Grey backdrop voor de win. But The parent window doesn't interfere with palette placement in whatever state, so what would un-maximising it accomplish?

    And given you're a McUser, I suppose you haven't had the strange bug in CS+ where showing the Info paletter would make the rest of Photoshop crawl (jerky panning, delayed menus, even jerky cursor motion)? Thankfully, there's F8.

    I'm just sad that CS3 won't let you put the tool options half off the screen: options are betterly clickable when they're infinitely large.

    I've never worried much about the brush options, because I rarely use it. :) 



  • @dhromed said:

    Sir, cocaine is not a substitute for sugar.

    It's just so wonderful to have Undo leave me on the current layer. That's been driving me batty for the, oh, only seven years I've had Photoshop 5. I find it odd that, since I used to use 7 at work, I never noticed that it cured this flaw.

    @dhromed said:

    Ouch; I seriously hate seeing all my other stuff through my Photoshop work. Grey backdrop voor de win.

    This is a long-standing Mac/PC difference: PCs have maximise, and you have the love-maximise and hate-maximise camps. Around my Photoshop work I can see a desktop picture covered in far too many icons, and all other running programs. But on a Mac you learn to live with this. If you're really unhappy, you can set the desktop to plain grey, hide all the icons and hide all other apps. I often do hide other apps to remove some of the clutter, but I leave all the icons up.

    @dhromed said:

    But The parent window doesn't interfere with palette placement in whatever state, so what would un-maximising it accomplish?

    With a maximised parent window, the palettes are inside the parent window's client area. Thus, there's the high chance that document windows will be partially obscured by them, particularly if, like me, you maximise the document window. So, if you unmaximise the parent window and push the palettes outside of it, they no longer hide your work. Mac Photoshop intelligently size and positions document windows to never be hidden by any palettes, which has given me interesting ideas for window management in general.

    @dhromed said:

    And given you're a McUser, I suppose you haven't had the strange bug in CS+ ...

    You're welcome to figure out a way to get my old StarMax Mac clone running OS 9.1 to run Photoshop CS. The iMac will run it, but it only has a 1074x768 screen and that becomes a pain after a while.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @dhromed said:

    And given you're a McUser, I suppose you haven't had the strange bug in CS+ ...

    You're welcome to figure out a way to get my old StarMax Mac clone running OS 9.1 to run Photoshop CS. The iMac will run it, but it only has a 1074x768 screen and that becomes a pain after a while.

    Thank you for the invitation! I think I'll decline! :)


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