And another thing

One last quick thought before I go to bed. Today when I was making a graphic for an upcoming presentation at work, I once again reiterated that The Gimp was downright impossible sometimes. Sean pointed out that The Gimp is an image manipulator, not an image creator. He told me to try out this thing called Inkscape. It's a vector drawing program (think Flash or Adobe Illustrator), so its images scale beautifully and it's got a pretty nice interface once you stop trying to use it like it's The Gimp. My favorite thing so far is the clone feature. If you need to have two things that are identical but in different locations, then you can draw it once and create a clone, which at first seems like a simple copy and paste but then you realize that if you decide you don't like them you can make the change on one and it will propogate to all the clones. Really cool.

It also has all those nifty things like aligning shapes with each other and whatnot that The Gimp can't do. I guess it has something to do with the fact that each thing you draw in Inkscape is an object, not just an action that changes some pixels, so the program knows where the center is and can change the color property even if things are partially obscuring it, and other such things as well.

Anyway, it's very cool. I highly suggest giving it a shot for anything from complex graphics to quick doodles.