AlexHopmann.com

I frequently need to do small-scale image editing tasks but am not a pro-graphic person, so I’ve always been reluctant to pay the big bucks for the industry-standad Adobe products like Photoshop. Up til now I’ve used Digital Image Studio which was made by my friend Chris (and his team) for simple photo editing, but it doesn’t really cut it for icons or other more detailed graphics that involve drawing / doing anything more than color adjustment/cropping/resizing.

I’ve recently been using the Gimp a bit. Overall it seems to have a lot of functionality, but it also continues to demonstrate the classic complaint against open source software- they rarely invest enough in usability since the people who are doing the work are scratching their own itches and are pretty much by definition already experts at the software by the time they start contributing to it. I don’t mean to slam the Gimp - its nice that its out there.

Today I heard about Paint.Net which is a new free app built in .Net that is like the built-in Windows Paint app (which I have used an embarrising amount) but on steroids. I haven’t had a chance to play with it much so far but I’d highly recommend checking it out- it seems really cool.

I tried installing Adobe Reader again, downloading a fresh installer from Adobe. At first it didn’t work, giving an error that my temp file was invalid or full. I eventually figured out how to get it to work- you download and run the installer which unpacks your stuff into a temp folder like c:\users\[username]\AppData\LocalLow\Netopsystems\temp\Adobe Reader 8.0\ . At some point Windows security stuff prompts you to run another app. Don’t answer, instead open the folder above in Explorer and execute the “AcroRead” MSI Windows Installer and everything should go smoothly.

Its still pretty amazing that its been a month since Vista shipped and Adobe hasn’t fixed this.