Archive for April 5th, 2009

Playing with “stationeries” and bitching about Gimp on Mac

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

I took a break from work today (I’m porting some old code of mine to OS X, and it gets a bit dull at times) and decided to try to make a custom “stationery” for Mail.

I decided to try to make a “BiRC stationery”, in the hope that I might some day have a need for such.

A bit of googling helped me figure out how to create custom stationaries.

I just followed the steps in the first of the two links.  The second doesn’t really explain how to get a design like I wanted; it just explains how to save a template email.

Following the steps, creating the stationery is basically a matter of editing images.

No worries, thought I, I have done that before. How hard can it be?

Well, first of all, I didn’t know how to do it on OS X.  I don’t know if any of the iLife software that comes with the box can do it, but at least I couldn’t figure it out.

I have used Gimp on Linux, so I decided to download it and try it out on the Mac.

I googled for “native mac gimp” and found this one.

It was a bit of a disappointment, though.  It is not quite as “native” as one could hope for.  For one thing, it doesn’t use the Command key but the Control key for shortcuts, and I have just gotten used to using Command.  That was hard enough, and I am not going to have applications that uses Control running on my box to confuse me all the time.

I hope I can find another version that has more of a Mac feeling to it.

Or just give up on image manipulation… I’m not exactly a graphics designer after all.

Oh well, now I’ll head back to Xcode and porting my code.

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