Many of the applications that Benjamin used on Meme, his Windows XP machine, were ports for the Linux realm: Gimp (raster image editor), Inkscape (vector image editor), and Nvu (WYSIWYG web editor). Luckily all of these are available on Mac OS X although not without some pain.
- Inkscape was the easiest as they had a downloadable DMG – easy as pie. Open source developers — this is the way to go!
- Gimp was more challenging. I initially thought about just installing it via port but didn’t like the idea. There are a couple of DMG-based ports (sounds like typical infighting from open-source developers) which sounded much easier. After I got one installed it wasn’t playing nice with the font size — the ‘F’ for the File menu on the toolbar was bigger than this 13″ MacBook Pro screen! After much googling around a bit I found the Gimp resource file which somehow had gotten a font size of 934! Changing this down to 10 made the Gimp work.
- The no-longer-developed Nvu wasn’t available on Mac. Instead a fork called KompoZer is, provided in a nice DMG for installing. It appears to work identically to Nvu and was an easy transition.
Inkscape and Gimp are pure X11 apps meaning that X11 has to be running in order to provide the infrastructure for these two apps to run. Coming from a Linux background this makes perfect sense. It took a bit of explaining for B to understand why the X11 app appeared running on his Dock when he started one of these apps — and why he shouldn’t just kill it until he was done with them!
One of his most important apps was certainly not a port from Linux: MS Office. Being the cheap person that I am I encouraged B to try OpenOffice and if that really just didn’t meet his need then we would evaluate Pages or bite the bullet and purchase MS Office for Mac. I was very pleasantly surprised to find that OpenOffice isn’t just running on top of X11 but is a full-fledged Aqua app! This dramatically helped B towards my goal of giving OOo a shot and so far I think it’s been an easy transition. I know he’s been using it extensively during the past few weeks he was out of town. I’m uncertain if I haven’t heard complaints because it has Just Worked or because he’s been too busy with other things to make his case for an alternative office suite.
Digital Ramblings 
Gimp. *shudder*. Every time I try to use that damned thing, it’s a perfect example of everything open source gets wrong: full of features, but the worst UI I’ve probably ever seen. I’ve broken down and used command line image processing tools before simply because it was so bad.
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Agreed. I use the Gimp only for cropping, resizing, small retouching, and one-off file conversions. All of that could be done with ImageMagick but I’d have to consult the man page for mogrify every time I needed to do something :)
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OO
While working for the oil and gas company, we used software that directly integrated with MS Office, so I had to have it, which left me with no reason to try OO. Now that I have left, I have a recently reformatted desktop that is running OO. Good so far, though I find I don’t use office apps much anymore (the most use it has gotten is for connecting Base to MySQL, though I usually end up going back to Navicat anyway.) I have used the spreadsheet app a bit, and it seems pretty good/comparable. Though I own a copy of MS Office XP, I think I’ll just keep OO for now. It does the job, and it has me learning something new, which is always good.
The more I read about your fun with OS X, the more I think about getting one. The fact that it would let me play with iPhone development isn’t helping either. Darn you!
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Another option for MS Office…
…is NeoOffice (http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php). It’s the “officially recommended” version for IBMers on Mac.
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Re: Another option for MS Office…
Interesting – thanks for the info! I hadn’t heard of NeoOffice. Looks like it is built off of Go-OO which is built off of OpenOffice. Not sure I’ll replace OOo with NeoOffice on Sebastian just yet — I don’t think B would be too happy with the app thrashing. Something to hold in my back pocket for sure.
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