OSDir.com: Having now played around with the code for The GIMP, what do you think of it overall?

Moschella: I think the GIMP's codebase is pretty easy to navigate, and almost all of the code is commented so that novices can understand what's going on. The complex code that actually performs image manipulations can be daunting -- I stayed away from anything I didn't understand. But hacking menus and text strings is something that almost anyone can do with a little time and patience.

I now know that the easiest way to hack GIMP is to create your own language file. You can create your own "translation" to rename almost every command and tool inside GIMP.

GIMP's menus are almost entirely editable through an XML file, although items like plug-ins are hard-coded to show up in certain menus. These caused some big problems. Thank goodness for "Command + F" [the Macintosh keyboard shortcut command] and BBEdit!

OSDir.com: What would you advise someone who is interested in tinkering around with The GIMP codebase?

Moschella: If someone out there wants to try their hand at hacking the GIMP, I'd suggest they get a program like BBEdit and then "find and replace." It sounds ridiculous, but, for most of the changes I made, each change started with a search for a text string.

Then, it was just a matter of compiling my hacked GIMP on OS X. For someone who hardly knows their way around a terminal window, this is no small feat. To compile GIMPshop, I used some Fink trickery. After editing the GIMP source and turning it into GIMPshop, I BZipped and tarred it, and renamed it to match the zipped GIMP source in Fink's source folder. I replaced the official GIMP source with my impostor and ran fink install gimp2.

OSDir.com: What do you have in store for the next version of GIMPshop?

Moschella: For the next version of GIMP, I'd just like to hack it properly this time. Because of my lack of coding experience, I performed the equivalent of a lobotomy on GIMP's source code. Thanks to some helpful suggestions I received, I can probably save myself a lot of work when I update GIMPshop to become current with the latest GIMP release.

I'd love to have a Cocoa version (OS X native) of GIMP. I'm not a big fan of X11 under Apple's OS X. I'm not exactly sure what that would take, but I'm looking into it. The guys behind Seashore look like they're onto something.

I'd really like to implement scales and transforms in OS X that use the layer's center as the origin for the transform. This is something that every Photoshop user has to struggle with in GIMP.

OSDir.com: Could you use contributions or help from others with GIMPshop?

Moschella: I could definitely use some help with GIMPshop! My biggest problem right now is that I'm unable to compile the latest version of GIMP (2.3) under OS X Tiger. My Fink hack won't bail me out this time because the GIMP package for Fink was reverted to 2.0.6 due to incompatibility problems (font and printing issues seem to be the cause).

I'm very grateful for the help I have already received. I've gotten helpful suggestions from my site's visitors, along with a big helping hand from Aaron Voisine, who builds the free Gimp.app for OS X.

I'm probably going to switch to a Linux box so that I can update GIMPshop. I'm still going to use my Mac as my primary computer, but the problems I'm running into aren't worth the effort of figuring out. If I can compile GIMPshop under Linux, others will take the code and compile it for their systems. I just hope that OS X users aren't left out.

OSDir.com: Even though The GIMP development team has its own particular way for developing their program's UI, do you have any general suggestions for them in this regard, beyond cloning the Photoshop UI?

Moschella: I think the GIMP development team is doing a great job. I've seen some talk of implementing functionality similar to Photoshop's layer styles. This would be a great addition. I don't think that cloning the Photoshop UI is a good thing for the GIMP project, but it would be a nice option -- I'd call it "GIMPshop Mode."

There have been complaints about the current state of GIMP's menu structure, but I think any menu layout other than a Photoshop-style layout would be foreign to me. I've heard that Photoshop's menus have also received complaints, but because I've got them memorized, Photoshop's "awkward" layout is not an issue for me.

Even if the whole GIMP team and open source community are finally satisfied that every GIMP menu item and tool is in a sensible place, I'm still going to complain that I can't find the "Q" key (on a DVORAK keyboard layout) or that I have no idea how long a meter is.

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Howard Wen is a freelance writer who has contributed frequently to O'Reilly Network and written for Salon.com, Playboy.com, and Wired, among others.