By Howard Wen

There is a love-hate relationship for The GIMP. Whether it's deserved or not, the biggest criticism that this open-source, freeware image editor has gotten is over its user interface. The comparisons often lead to Adobe's Photoshop. Perhaps this is unfair -- after all, why should The GIMP developers feel obliged to make a Photoshop clone?

However, Photoshop is essentially the industry standard of sorts in the field of professional and amateur image editing, and, thus, its interface is the most familiar to many. Scott Moschella (a user of both Photoshop and The GIMP, and who works as an Segment Producer for the G4 network's Attack of the Show!) decided to give the latter a make-over with the former's user interface.

"I've always thought that GIMP was just as powerful as Photoshop. My way of proving it was to make GIMP work as close to Photoshop as I possibly could, given my limited programming experience. That was all I hoped to accomplish," says the 29-year-old Moschella, who resides in Santa Monica, California.

Despite not being a programmer, as he claims, he managed to turn The GIMP into something approaching a Photoshop clone: GIMPshop straddles the line between annoying both The GIMP development team and Adobe Systems, and satisfying the requests of many people who, like Moschella, wanted to use The GIMP more -- if only it was "easier" for them to use.

GIMPshop was originally released for OS X. The resulting enthusiasm for it was so strong that ports for Linux and Windows soon followed, which were contributed by others.

Moschella discussed with us the development of GIMPshop and the reaction by the open-source community towards it.

OSDir.com: Generally, the response to GIMPshop has been good. Are you surprised by this? What are your thoughts about the success of GIMPshop so far?

Scott Moschella: I was completely shocked at the response that GIMPshop received. Originally, I was concerned when I found that the lead developers on the GIMP project were upset with my hack. I stirred up trouble when I first posted on the official GIMP forums asking for help with my yet-to-be-realized hack. I got a reply asking me to "keep your changes for yourself" and what I was up to "is a horrible waste of time and resources." But when all the positive response came rolling in, that was more than enough to convince me that I had done something that other people truly appreciated.

The international response to GIMPshop was an even bigger surprise. I was unaware of GIMP's widespread use throughout the world. I was especially tickled when GIMPshop was featured in popular German and French computer magazines. I've seen GIMPshop appear on many foreign language sites, too.

Even though I compiled GIMPshop for OS X, others took the source code and in a matter of days GIMPshop was available for almost every operating system I had ever heard of -- Windows XP, Debian, Solaris/SPARC, etc.. When people were begging me via email to release a Windows version of GIMPshop, I knew I had something.

Scott Moschella reoriented the user interface of The GIMP to make it resemble more like that of Photoshop's. While the developers of The GIMP have not been enthusiastic about this unofficial fork, GIMPshop has garnered much praise from users of The GIMP wanting the familiarity of the look-and-feel of Photoshop. Here we see how the "Edit" menu of GIMPshop (left image, OS X version) compares to Photoshop's (right).

I also thought that the guys at Adobe would soon be looking for me. I haven't heard from them... yet.

OSDir.com: What are some of the major features of the Photoshop interface you haven't been able to replicate, and why is this?

Moschella: I didn't set out to make GIMP look like Photoshop. I had entertained the thought of re-doing GIMP's icons and cursors to match Photoshop, but didn't want to raise the ire of the good people at Adobe. I've already copied their menus and didn't want to give them another reason to send me a kindly worded cease-and-desist letter. I'm assuming someone at Adobe is aware of GIMPshop.

Given my limited coding knowledge, most of my favorite features of Photoshop -- things like Photoshop's layer styles and dockable palettes -- are far beyond my level of programming know-how. I'm not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination.

OSDir.com: What are the major technical issues that are still prevalent with GIMPshop you want people to be aware of first before they dive into using it?

Moschella: GIMPshop has some problems that are inherent in GIMP Version 2.2.4. Because GIMPshop is basically GIMP with some cosmetic changes, the underlying code is almost exactly the same. So the major technical problem for GIMPshop and GIMP 2.2.4 under OS X is with fonts and printing. However, there shouldn't be very many problems at all running GIMPshop under Linux or Windows.

The only other issue I want to warn users about is that if they aren't familiar with the Photoshop menu layout, GIMPshop will have no added benefit over using the original GIMP. For people out there who are looking to get a Photoshop-like experience without pirating or purchasing Photoshop, GIMPshop may be the way to go.

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