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Playing with “stationeries” and bitching about Gimp on Mac

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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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Fun, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Playing with “stationeries” and bitching about Gimp on Mac”

  1. mw Says:
    April 5th, 2009 at 8:21 pm

    PixelMator is a near-verbatim (though non-free) port of Gimp for OS X. In recent versions, they have started making the keyboard shortcuts less Gimp-like, though.

  2. Gimp Tutorials Says:
    September 19th, 2009 at 8:50 pm

    Nice gimp tips. thanks..

  3. Ras Says:
    September 20th, 2009 at 5:07 am

    Theres always seashore (http://seashore.sourceforge.net/) which is a stripped-down-native-mac-gimp kind of program, but in my oppinion its a wee bit too stripped down. As former Linux user i still have the port version of gimp installed. Theres just some things you have to be able to do with images (such as rotating some other degree than 90°).

    Maybe im only lingering with gimp because i refuse to pay for software which may be kind of an odd thing to do on a mac.

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