>Quick review of Seashore

>Seashore is a promising application, aiming to deliver a Mac OS X-version of the popular GIMP image manipulation program. I did a quick review of 0.1.9 and found the following:

• This build is dated April 2007, which seems to indicate development has stalled – which is too bad…
• The Open with… option in the Finder did not work for me when I selected Seashore.
• Full quantization support has not been ported yet, so there is no option to reduce the number of colors.
• There is a Select menu, but some of the selection actions are under the Edit menu (Select All, Alpha, Inverse, None). This seems counter-intuitive.
• Zoom in and zoom out are under the keyboard shortcuts Cmd-Up and Cmd-Down respectively. Typically these are under Cmd-Plus and Cmd-Minus.
• There is no autocrop feature.
• Overall, the application looks very nice. It feels like a decent Mac OS X-citizen.

My conclusion is that it’s a very promising application, that may be able to beat Photoshop Elements and Acorn one day. But not today.

 

>Adobe Photoshop CS2 installation

>I need an image edit program. On Linux I used GIMP, which is quite powerful and nice to work with. On Mac OS X, however, GIMP is not so easy to install and does not integrate with the Mac OS very well. I used DarwinPorts, which automates the fetching, compilation and installation and even the dependency handling.
The fact that GIMP is not integrated with the Mac made me look at alternatives. I could not find a lot of image editing programs for the Mac, which surprises me. It’s probably my lack of search abilities.
Anyway, the obvious alternative is Adobe Photoshop. The current version is CS2, 9.0. At almost 400 MB, the download is fairly big. One of the first things it asked me is whether it’s OK to look for updates. I said OK. I didn’t expect any, since I just downloaded it and I would expect all the download to contain all current updates. However, it still proposed installing about a dozen updates.
That’s OK as well. But then during the update installation process, I was asked for my password about 6 times. That’s just plain annoying.
Any tips on alternative image edit programs for the Apple, let me know.