And again no non-destructive adjustment layers, the saga continues!
When I talk to designers about Gimp they say "Uh, I tried it once years ago. But back then it was so archaic that you could not even change the contrast settings after you did something else to the image".
Don't get me wrong. I use Gimp daily and love it. I am very grateful to the people who build it. But how this feature can be ignored after people have been begging for it for over a decade now is beyond me. As far as I can see, it is the number one reason why people do not consider Gimp as a Photoshop replacement.
> But how this feature can be ignored after people have been begging for it for over a decade now is beyond me.
Because begging for something which ordinarily is very expensive to be done for you for nothing is a meritless activity. An infinity of begging pays for not a single second of developer time.
It is likewise useless to suggest people would use it for free if only a few more million dollars worth of developer time was invested by other people. This isn't an offer of a favor. It's more like me saying that I would gladly come and stay in your guest room if you would only serve me coffee and donuts.
So which is it? If it's a just for fun project why take feature requests and donations? I make a feature request I get told "well you're not paying for it...", yet they provide no way for me to pay for it. Why not have a bounty system to fund that work if that are your terms?
Just feels what this project is shifts into whatever it needs to be to ensure it doesn't ever get any better or progress in any meaningful way.
Donations are driven presumably by people who are already sufficiently satisfied by current trajectory to want it to continue. Feature requests indicate that they desire to make it useful by understanding what things people want.
There is a difference between desiring to serve users needs and obligation to serve a particular need. No amount of need on your part constitutes an obligation on their part because simply you have paid them nothing and they offered you nothing other than the ability to use the current software as is or modify it. Nor indeed are they obliged to provide you a way to pay them for a particular feature although if you offered them a sufficiently large pile of money you might be able to reach a mutual understanding and certainly nothing prevents you from developing a fork or paying someone to do so right now.
A large problem with such an understanding forming is that the cost of such would be driven by the cost of expensive labor not your perception of the value to an individual end user. I have no idea what the actual cost of this is as I know nothing about their code but lets do a thought experiment.
Imagine if you will that making that happen in 2023 were to require 2 people who currently contribute to gimp part time to work on gimp full time for a year. This would in turn require replacing what they earn at their actual job including benefits. Suppose that for example required replacing $300,000 in wages. Unfortunately they may actually have long term employment that they like and not be enthused about working for one year and then going back on the job market. It might be much more feasible if it were possible to fund gimp development similarly for 5 years enabling not only your feature but others. This costs $1.5M dollars.
If someone responded to your feature request with sure thing will that be check charge or giant bag with a dollar sign I'm guessing you would laugh your ass off and move on.
At work I'm on Creative Cloud with the latest M1 Max MBP. At I home I've switched to Manjaro after 17 years of macOS use.
I just started looking into Krita for bitmap editing. It has adjustment layers (which I can't do without). Switching from Lightroom to darktable was quite dramatic, but I actually prefer darktable now. Took me two years of on and off fiddling to finally get to that point.
As long as it is missing, you have to duplicate layers and do some mental version control, which becomes really memory intensive after you have descended the tree a few steps. That's why you cannot really recommend Gimp to anyone, who wants to work professionally with it.
It is also a reason why Gimp cannot get better at Photoshop compatibility, so the issue even blocks the second biggest reason hindering further Gimp adoption.
This might be a case of familiarity blindness; people working on GIMP might have come to implicitly assume that destructive editing is a feature, but in reality destructive editing is something only done for resource constraints, not because it's actually good. That's why non-destructive editors essentially never grow destructive features, while most destructive editors tend to grow and expand their non-destructive features.
If you want to argue this from first principles, it's actually very easy: One of the first principles of UX is to respect the user's work. Destructive editing is pretty bad at that. qed.
Gimp is open source. Don't get me wrong, I love users and am very grateful for feedback. But how they can continue to make noise over a feature for over a decade without learning to code and implement it themselves or, you know, just hire developers to do it for them is beyond me. As far as I can see, this is not wanting a feature, but "wanting" a feature.
These are users who have a very competitive alternative and have no incentive to whip up the fix themselves. Usually the way it goes is an open source advocate asks why a user doesn’t use gimp, and the user has reasons xyz, then the advocate makes noise on the user’s behalf. It’s not like the real users are pining for these features, they just go somewhere else.
Why post this kind of thing on an announcement though...I mean it seems pretty harsh, if not rude.
If you can't get traction and it's really objectively that big of an issue, a separate post seems more appropriate.
I taught Photoshop at the college level prior to 2010, offered experienced PS students extra credit to try out and evaluate software like GIMP, and many of them thanked me for the experience and went on to use it in their professional life. Those who didn't want to take the PS route seemed more than happy to duplicate layers as backups and work destructively a lot of the time, too. We focused on pixel editing logic quite a bit so maybe that's why.
I agree that it feels a bit harsh. I feel a bit guilty.
But "silent mouths don't get fed". And I think I am speaking for a large number of users. And it's been over ten years now. So the voice of users might become a bit louder? I dunno. I read through all the features in the announcement and think "I don't need any of that. Who asked for all these things? Are they really user driven?".
You should feel guilty! You sounded extremely entitled there. How do you feel when someone asks you -- goads you really, into working for "exposure" instead of your usual rates? It's more than a little insulting!
If you want Free Software to be different, change it. If you don't know how now, like with anything else, you can learn how, or you can pay someone who has already spent the time to learn. The gimp project has a page where you can easily reach out to developers working on Gimp and fund them directly. If you think this feature is important, you should reach out and find out how you can help make it happen.
Now I don't work on gimp, but I do make Free Software, and I think most of us who program Free Software aren't working for "exposure". We aren't excited to be "used" by "users", and so of course we do not do anything "user driven". We do stuff because we want to, and when we don't want to, we may want-to for money. Like everybody else.
This is very true. It should really be more understood, that open source developer are basically sharing their hobby and what they create with others on their terms, not their users....
Imagine someone building furniture in their free time because they enjoy doing so, and then offers to give it away for free. You see this offer and now have two polite options:
1) decline, because you do not like it
2) accept because you do like it
I have never understood the people who take the third option:
3) complain that the furniture is not to their liking, and then demand that the person builds it to his/hers specification and then give it to them. Free of charge, because that was the original offer right?
The Open Source community does the opposite, that's the issue.
Every time there's a push for commercial apps on desktop Linux, you have a bunch of rabblerousers throwing dirt at said devs. "They should make it Open Source! Micro$oft paid them off"
You can see it in every Linux forum.
At some point Linux distributions should just admit defeat for this kind of software, recognize that the Gimp and co. are just hobbyist software, and accept the real world and endorse commercial software for these use cases.
Instead every time this kind of discussion happens, someone compares a kiddie toy truck (Gimp) to a 10 ton semi (Photoshop).
It's really a shame when true commercial quality Open Source software exists out there, such as Blender.
> At some point Linux distributions should just admit defeat for this kind of software, recognize that the Gimp and co. are just hobbyist software, and accept the real world and endorse commercial software for these use cases.
Aren't they already doing that? I think commercial software has been targeting Linux almost since it came on the scene, simply because it made eval easier. Ubuntu distributes lots of nonfree stuff. If you count the enterprise (and perhaps depending on how you count that), I think it's possible more commercial software runs on Linux than on any other operating system.
But I can certainly agree there just isn't very much good commercial Linux desktop software. Do you think it's possible perhaps too many Linux desktop users consider price to be the biggest reason they use Linux (or assume, reading comments like that online that most users anyway) and so there just isn't any money to be had?
If this is true you should really get those users to give you objective evidence that 1) they exist and 2) they feel this urgent about it then, at the very least
Edit: Probably not in the form of HN search results though? Lol come on, a bit of a quality issue there if we're going for objectivity.
GIMP devs have been hammered by highly subjective UX & feature critics for decades now. They are humans and know they'd be doing work on behalf of people who seem complainy, persistent, and lacking perspective compared to their own priority view. So, software Karens? :-) Where's the carrot? How is this issue supposed to turn out well for anyone involved?
If it's really objective and a big deal and not just subjective annoyance compounded by years of boundaries set in your path, show the proof and be convincing about it. And this may seem a stretch but I think it can be done gently if you will it.
I am a total music nut. So I would certainly try it if it had a web interface. For me, the barrier to install a native app on my phone is pretty high.
Looking at the permissions this app wants makes me feel even less comfortable. Access to my camera, my mic, my contacts, my identity, the data on my sd...
One of my favorite ways to discover music is Gnoosic (https://www.gnoosic.com) where I don't have to install anything and get results right away. I found some of my all time favorite bands this way.
Any other tips by the HN crowd on how to expand ones musical horizon?
The first thing it suggested was an artist I’ve never heard of, who I’m now completely in love with. Craziest part is the artist isn’t actually that similar to the 3 suggestions I gave it, different genre and everything.
Spotify and Apple Music (my two main sources of music) both constant suggest stuff to me I have absolutely zero interest in, almost to the point where it seems like a parody, yet this site just nailed it first go (and subsequent suggestions were really good too).
Hey there I created Audius about 3 years ago for the same reason these guys created their app: algorighmic music recommendations get boring after a while.
I extended Audius with the Matrix chat network to chat and share music, all with YouTube/Vimeo/mp3 Urls (so it's completely free and no registration is needed, all data is stored in the borwser)
Audius is also a progressive web app so you can use it like an app if you want to.
It's also open source, and has a single HTML file that you can host on any server.
I made a micro social media site during the first UK lockdown which allows people to share their favourite track each week.
I thought it could be a cool way to get music recommendations from people you know. The main concept is that by limiting shares to once a week, no one person could dominate the feed.
That looks very appealing - I'm an Apple Music subscriber, so having the option to play in Apple Music alongside Spotify would be handy - is the project Open Source?
I like to use Spinitron — https://spinitron.com to find radio stations or shows that I like.
The home page is a feed sourced from a large number of community/college/non-commercial radio stations in the US, showing what tracks are being played at any given moment. One can watch tracks spill down the feed and, if you see something you like, click the link through to the station’s page on Spinitron. This lists the stations recent playlist, archived playlists, and schedule, with links to the station itself as well as links to the major music services for each track. It’s a little buggy but I’ve found it great for discovering not only new music but new curators of music (ok DJs) which is even better. And because it seems restricted to non-commercial stations (though no NPR affiliates) there are no ads to speak of.
There's this (very very old) website which makes discovery very nice, but specifically for progressive rock[0]. Maybe you can find something like that for other genres too.
https://everynoise.com/ was a thing for me.
I opened a lot through it. And it was fun to browse through different countries as well as through different genres.
I unlocked my phone and two
accidental clicks led me to
agree to a dialog that my brain
immediately registered as suspicious
What type of dialog can pop up on your Android screen after unlocking and install "malware"? What is "malware" here? It looks like they mean an app from the play store?
The next day, I picked up my phone and
when I launched Chrome, I immediately
noticed it was displaying a spammy URL.
What I believe the author is saying is that he received a push notification to chrome from the malicious app.
Coincidentally, I just spent my Saturday evening pouring over malicious JavaScript hosted on Cloudfront that does extensive browser fingerprinting and if a match is made to an Android device a fake Captcha pops up in Chrome which actually enables push notifications and from there a full screen pop-up appears that vibrates the devices and claims the phone is infected with (N) viruses and the “repair now” button pulls up the Play Store app to install DFNDR antivirus/cleaner.
If you look at the reviews of that app you’ll see all the angry reviews of users having their browsers hijacked.
The app itself is just an advertising server wrapped around Avast’s detection engine and is funded by the Chinese Qihoo.
It harvests users social media data and charges the users almost $10 a month after a 3 day trial period.
Novice users are unable to delete the app if “advanced protection” is enabled because it becomes a device administrator and uses deceptive language to confuse the user trying to remove the app.
If the app gets installed it will not let you clear the storage of the app from within settings even if you had never opened the app and before you agree to any terms and conditions.
The fake virus warnings that lead to DFNDR have been going on every single day since 2013.
I’m putting together a webpage that will include the JavaScript and other details as we speak.
The Google Play Store is a dumpster fire full of scam apps and Scummy developers.
Not GP, but my interpretation: app sent a general push notification which, when tapped, opened a malicious URL in Chrome as the next step of this "funnel".
Something similar happened to me a few years back after I accidentally tapped an ad in Chrome (an ad delivered by Google no less). While I didn't get infected the site did start displaying system like prompts (my phone was also vibrating at this point and playing the same sound I get when there's a natural disaster) saying my device was infected and that I should tap OK to download an apk.
I did several things after this:
- Reported the ad to Google (no followup from their side - naturally).
You can disable system apps so they don't show up even without root. If you have root you can also uninstall them. Just open a terminal, su and use pm uninstall to uninstall for your user or all users (you can reinstall the same way if you end up needing it later). No reason to use the provided Chrome when you can just use Bromite though.
> What type of dialog can pop up on your Android screen after unlocking and install "malware"? What is "malware" here? It looks like they mean an app from the play store?
That would be the case if you enable sideloading, but that isn't mentioned in the article. Is it possible to install an app via popup without going through the store? This needs some clarification.
If that would be the case what is the point of the article? Of course Google Play Protect shouldn't interfere with an side-loaded app. One major reason for side-loading (after giving explicit consent and ignoring all the warnings associated) is to allow applications Google wouldn't approve.
Google Play Protect also warned on unknown sideloaded apps (and requested an upload for a scan) when I tried it ~half a year ago. Documentation[0] implies this is still the case
> It checks your device for potentially harmful apps from other sources. These harmful apps are sometimes called malware.
> If you choose to install apps from unknown sources outside of the Google Play Store, turning on the “Improve harmful app detection” setting will allow Google Play Protect to send unknown apps to Google to protect you from harmful apps.
Yes this is basic (and incredibly common) behavior. The alternative is often much worse (an embedded WebView in each app to do things like open TOS pages).
Since everyone has the FB/Insta/WhatsApp apps installed, how can Apple prevent users from being tracked?
I would think when a user visits a web page, that page can deliver an insane amount of fingerprinting data along with the IP to FB. So it is easy for FB to correlate it with the users accounts which are phoning home on the same IP.
Other apps can send even more data to FB then a website. Seems hard to imagine FB can not figure out it is coming from the same phone.
Easy to imagine a world where not everyone has those apps installed - my home is a great example. Also, it’s easy to imagine a huge building full of people who all connect to the internet using one (or maybe a small handful) of nat’d IPs. Maybe we could call that an ‘office’...
I look at it this way - if this cross-app tracking BS wasn’t so important to FB, they wouldn’t have their panties so wadded up about it.
ARK publishes their "balance sheets" daily. I noticed that they update them usually around 6:30PM central. So you're basically just comparing with previous day's data to find deltas.
With a plane, I leave at 10:00 in the morning, arrive at say 14:00 in the other city and check into a hotel at 15:00.
With a train, I leave at 22:00 in the evening before, arrive at say 10:00 in the other city and check into a hotel at 15:00.
Same amount of hotel stays. A few more hours in the other city. But since I have to carry around my luggage and don't have a shower and toilet, I am not sure if those hours are a plus or a minus.
Leave at 10 pm, arrive at 8 am in Austria, connecting train to a village in the middle of the Alps, get some last minute supplies, start hiking at 10 am, arrive at the mountain hut at 5 pm. Not really feasible with air travel without spending a night in the valley where you don't actually want to be as 2 or 3 pm is too late to start the hike. Admittedly that is a very specific example.
For city travel, I've had good experiences with hotels that let me check in early (before noon). I've never had a hotel that wouldn't let me stash my luggage before check-in.
Obviously depends on the user. When I was younger I tried the night train thing on a trip that hopped a few European cities. So, stay in Munich for 2 nights, then on the 3rd night, get on the train to Vienna. Stay in Vienna for 2 nights and get on another train ...
Basically spending 2 out of 3 nights in hotels due to the night train (compared to if we'd done the same itinerary but with daytime trains).
You're missing a night somewhere. Day 1 10:00 - Day 1 14:00 means you need a hotel room Day 1. Day 1 22:00 - Day 2 10:00 (more like 6:00 IME tho) means no hotel room for Day 1.
Train stations in Germany at least generally have luggage lockers, so you can just leave your stuff there. It's not hassle free, of course, but pretty convenient. Not sure if that's common in other countries.
Back in the old days when I traveled for work, I had to be in the other office at 9am, which meant I would travel the previous afternoon and grab an extra night at the hotel.
Even with your example, you're getting an extra day in your destination without an extra hotel stay.
The point would be to skip that hotel stay alltogether by arriving the next day. If you have things to do during the afternoon the day before resulting in an extra night then it will not save anything.
you can
a)leave your luggage at the hotel early
b) use a locker at the train station to store your luggage
c) avoid bringing a lot of luggage for this trip
Flying is a lot of hassle though. You need to go to the airport which is far away from the center. In most cities half an hour to an hour. And you have to arrive at least an hour before your flight takes of. And you cannot buy a ticket spontaneously.
I love trains. They often go every hour. You can spontaneously take them. Right from the center. And you arrive right in the center. And you can freely chose your seat. So you can pick a pleasant neighbor. Or just change seat if your neighbor annoys you.
Especially night trains - if you are able to sleep in that somewhat noisy and shaky environment. You travel overnight, where you can't do anything anyways and come up in the other place in the morning and have the full day available. When flying you typically need a hotel night more and have to get to city center first.
Personally, I can't start a day without a proper bathroom to shower and groom myself. An overnight train doesn't even come close to a hotel replacement in my book.
In general however it is a compromise. At least "true" sleeper cars often have a (shared, small) shower, but yes, no comparison to equally expensive hotel rooms.
That's a super-expensive luxury cruise train that only does irregular (and mostly circular) tours - it's the equivalent of the Venice Simplon Orient Express. There's one scheduled sleeper train left in Japan, the Sunrise Izumo/Sunrise Seto.
We almost rode Sunrize Izumo last year in Japan! We even booked accommodation accordingly, leaving out the one night we ecpected to spend on bord of Sunrise Izumo going from Izumo to Tokyo.
Unfortunately even though we tried to book the train as the first thing after arrival, right on the Narita train station ticket office, it was already fully booked. :P
At least we managed to book the marvelous SL Hitoyoshi steam train from Hitoyoshi to Kumamoto over Hisatsu line. We were actually double lucky on that one, as SL Hitoyoshi is actually out of service right now as floods in July 2020 washed away key bridges on the Kuma river, cutting the rail connection between Hitoyoshi and Kumamoto, until the bridges are repaired...
Still we did go to the very inaka Izuma anyway and spend a very nice old school and almost mythical four days there.
And what we did about that missing accommodation? We booked a night in a ryokan in the splendid Kinosaki onsen town instead and it was indescribably good decision! :)
It took as like 6 hours by multiple small local diesel trains to get from Izumo to Kinosaki, possibly the only tourists to arrive from that direction in quite a while! :)
And on the very elegant Kinosaki station we even discovered a special gate reserved only for guests arriving by one of those luxury cruse trains - namely Twilight Express Mizukaze: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Express_Mizukaze
Likely inspired by the special gate only ueed by the Emperor on Tokyo station. :)
Ideally you could have a lounge area at the start and end stations where passengers can shower and generally freshen themselves up. Kings Cross in London already has shower facilities, which are wonderful for long days as a tourist.
The Italian ones are nice, as are the UK ones (if a bit cramped). The Nightjets mentioned in the article (mostly taken over from DB's CityNightLine a few years ago) are variable; the Poland-Ukraine one is pleasant enough but poorly timed. I had a pretty bad time on a Hungarian Railways one. The Russian Railways ones from Paris and Nice to Moscow have a reputation for luxurious looks but bad (or at least not westerner-friendly) food.
Austrian ÖBB, which runs in multiple countries like most lines going through Germany, is working on modernizing their trains, but they also have quite old cars. Not sure if there is a good site showing car types and train lines.
https://www.nightjet.com/en/komfortkategorien/nightjetzukunf...
That is, "Most Nightjet trains use Comfortline sleeping-cars built by Siemens in 2003-2005 for German Railways' City Night Line sleeper trains." and "Below: Comfortline sleeper layout. All compartments can be sold as a single, double or triple."
I picked 14 April 2021, leaving Wien Hvf (U) at 20:13 arriving Berlin at 08:55. "Sparschiene Nachtverkehr Nightjet + Anschlussticket Nightjet." "Sleeper Bed", "Compartment with 1 bed (Single)".
€ 216,00.
Bear in mind the comment at https://www.nightjet.com/en/ : "Due to the travel restrictions caused by the corona pandemic, we are reducing the Nightjet traffic to probably 8 February 2021 ... As a precautionary measure, no bookings are currently possible for the affected trains from January 10th to March 24th, 2021", confirming johannes1234321's comment "During Cornona this probably is different".
Well I sort of prefer night trains also, in theory at least, but I have to say where I am in a suburb of Copenhagen, it takes me 20 minutes to get to the center station where I could conceivably board a night train.
And I couldn't really spontaneously take a train to the center station where I would then catch a night train because of course I have to make sure I get there in time for the train going to where I want to go.
The upcoming night trains will depart from Høje Taastrup since they arrive from Sweden, and don't want to go to the Central Station just to turn around (takes another hour or so to do).
Why would you even want to search all the sites that are trying to sell you something when you're simply looking for some information? Putting it in pre-internet terms, it'd be like walking down the high street looking at shop windows to try to answer a question rather than going into a library to look it up in a book. Wikipedia isn't trying to sell you something - with the high street vs library analogy its more like a book than a shop.
> Why would you even want to search all the sites that are trying to sell you something when you're simply looking for some information?
Answering the question online is a means to an end. The 'answer' is the top of a marketing funnel that's designed to make you familiar with the answerer's product/service and sign up, or post a link to their article on your Twitter.
Look at it the other way around. If you were a cat owner, how much of your free time would you spend answering questions about their dietary restrictions?
When I talk to designers about Gimp they say "Uh, I tried it once years ago. But back then it was so archaic that you could not even change the contrast settings after you did something else to the image".
Little do they know. It is still that archaic.
12 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2091318
11 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2890549
10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4814360
9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5912145
8 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8969088
7 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9932717
6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12092173
5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15101108
4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17926027
3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20422647
2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25012155
1 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29005637
Today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31419514
Don't get me wrong. I use Gimp daily and love it. I am very grateful to the people who build it. But how this feature can be ignored after people have been begging for it for over a decade now is beyond me. As far as I can see, it is the number one reason why people do not consider Gimp as a Photoshop replacement.