Some results from Adobe

I'd heard awhile back that Adobe was starting to move some of its stuff to open source. All it seemed was talk, but this morning I came across a software release from Adobe - mind you it's MIT Licensing:

http://opensource.adobe.com/

The state of Linux art tools

I've never had any formal art training. I did take art in grade 9, but it was a tramatic experience at best. My art teacher for the class was semi-senile, and should have been retired long ago. She may have been a terrific artist, but when a teacher loses a student's work and then orders them to produce another by weeks end, they should be held accountable. I never took an art class after that experience.

I did hang on to my interest in art. Back when the web was still fairly static I worked with Corel's Photo-Paint product, it was a great package, with a very loyal fan following, though nothing the size of Adobe PhotoShop enthusiasts. Photo-Paint helped me through a few design jobs, both for the web and print. But when I moved to Linux, I found that The Gimp was quite different. I'd read the hype that it was powerful, and could do a lot of things Adobe PhotoShop could, not everything, but a lot.



It's only been recently that I latched on to the vector-based Inkscape, a program that lets you create some pretty amazing things, without a lot of skill or graphics experience. I found the Inkscape tutorials good enough that I managed to create the above ANIME image having never created anything like it before.

Get rid of dot files in gftp

If you do any publishing, chances are you use ftp to upload files to a ftp site. GFTP is an easy to use graphical ftp client for Gnome which is included in most Linux distributions. I've used gftp to upload a lot of projects, but one of the things that has always annoyed me is that by default, gftp enables showing of "dot files." Getting rid of dot files, aka hidden files, is a simple process:

cd ~/.gftp
vi gftprc

Look for the term hidden in gftprc and change it from 1 to 0.

Happy ftping!