I have been using Paint Shop Pro trials, but aren’t there any freeware alternatives? Most of the time you can find freewares that are ‘almost’ what you need - does anybody know if this is the case with pixel pushing?
/Micke
If someone suggests the GIMP bear in mind that version 2 (newly released) looks like it might actually be usable. Trying to do anything with any prior version is like being eaten alive by anorexic piranha - very painful, frustrating, highly ironic, and slow.
Sod free. Pay for it if you need it. I heartily recommend Cosmigo’s Pro Motion which looks uncannily like Deluxe Paint.
Cas 
[quote]Trying to do anything with any prior version is like being eaten alive by anorexic piranha - very painful, frustrating, highly ironic, and slow.
[/quote]
That is an interesting visual, but I really wouldn’t agree with it! 
No offence meant, but sometimes you do rather come across as an angry old man standing on a street corner shouting obscenities at random passers-by. I don’t know anyone else as quick to criticise software as you! ;D
If you want the best 2D graphics package you can find for zero cost, the Gimp is for you. Nothing else in the freeware arena comes close to what it provides. I’ll agree that version 2.x is a lot nicer than 1.x, but if you can’t use 2.x for some reason, I’m sure 1.x will do you fine.
Yes, it was an intentional stab at humour by taking something to an extreme.
…but that’s partly because I don’t accept things like the utterly crap behaviour of 1.x GIMP as acceptable when PSP has been better in every respect for close to 8 years - and very nearly free!
Partly I just wanted to make sure that someone doesn’t accidentally end up with 1.x and then be so horrified that they don’t even try 2.x (which is easy to see happening, giving that distros haven’t caught up with 2.x yet)
The big thing I hate about 1.x GIMP is all the really really stupid “features” of the UI which fly in the face of all the hard work and research done over the years into good UI design and produce something that is a truly unpleasant user experience. It’s not so much that it’s hard to use - it’s that it goes out of it’s way to be hard to use (and defecates all over the conventions and standard practices of UI design). Apple are still praised for their foresight in encouraging/enforcing that all apps must adhere to common UI standards, and for producing extensive documentation and guidelines (which MS copied in a small way) - yet the GIMP just goes “nah, sod that! Let’s do something really different and make sure that our software requires you to learn every paradigm you knew anew”.
It’s also partly bitterness that until now there has been no usable free paint package on linux because all the opensource free graphics apps that had promise were strangled by the GIMP grabbing all the attention and users. It had more features, and the other projects were all small and fragmented, so they died out.
NB: I’ve been using the GIMP exclusively for about 3 years now, so I speak from bitter experience, and fondly miss my PSP 4 (!), let alone the later versions, which had so very very many things that just don’t work properly in the GIMP (like, oh, NOT forcing spacing to 20.0 on every tool - a behaviour whose only justification is (IIRC) that the GIMP code is so bad that it needs to skip 19/20 paint calls otherwise it’s too slow to use. Even on my Ghz PC. That’s crap.)
Given how miserable software makes most of us, most of the time, you can’t blame him.
The only useful computer ever invented was the cash machine*.
Cas
- that’s an ATM, for all you Yankee types
[quote]Given how miserable software makes most of us, most of the time, you can’t blame him.
[/quote]
LOL, yeah - I hate computers. The more you use and know about current software, the more frustrated and depressed you get ;). The ignorance of the techno-illiterate who naively believe that their windows machine always works truly is bliss :P…
Although maybe I’m a bit worse latetly because I’ve been particularly badly burned by bad software in the last few months (mainly linux, but also nasty bugs in each of mozilla, OpenOffice, Sun’s JVM, and windows-xp :(. FYI the JVM problems that have bit me were two nasty bugs in NIO and at least 2 bugs with no workaround in the JVM launch process that prevent it from running at all in a chroot environment [thankfully, one was fixed in 1.4.2_04, and the other means you can’t use some features of javac (javac refuses to run if you try). Sigh. The last I heard from the sun engineer on that bug was the claim that this a typo on my behalf (despite me giving the exact copy/paste) and he never replied when I asked if he had himself proved that it worked - which I guess means the answer was “no”)
[quote]Given how miserable software makes most of us, most of the time, you can’t blame him.
The only useful computer ever invented was the cash machine*.
Cas
- that’s an ATM, for all you Yankee types
[/quote]
** that’s the Geldautomat for all you Deutschlanders
*** that’s the Bankomat for all you Italianos
;D
Well let’s make a feature-rich, multi-platform Java graphics app!
While looking for some pixel art programs, I came across this which might be worth a look: http://jdraw.sourceforge.net/jdraw.jnlp
Theres also a whole load of others linked at http://web1.t43.greatnet.de/viewtopic.php?t=2775 (and a free clone of Delux Paint as well http://www.eclipse-game.com/?dat=7 )
That jdraw is sweet! Nothing like a good gradient fill to make up for a lack of artistic ability…