Martin Geisler Online

The answer to the above question is mostly yes and a little bit no. Let me explain.

I like Photo-Paint 9 very much. Although I’ve learned to use The Gimp, I’ve never felt truly comfortably when using it. That would probably have been different if I’ve had been using Adobe Photoshop, which have been used heavily in the development of GymNet and StudenterNet (both Danish sites). I must say that I’m impressed with the number of cool effect there are in Photoshop — it’s amazing what you can make with these filters and effects.

But lets get back to Photo-Paint 9. When I first started it under Linux I instantly felt at home. Everything was just right. This is due to the fact that Corel have managed to keep the Windows-look when they ported Photo-Paint 9 to Linux. It’s kind of a funny experience — you have a program where everything except the windowborder looks like it does under Windows.

The program also works in exactly the same way — the tools are the same, the menus are the same, the whole thing about layers, masks and so on are the same. I think Corel has done a really good job of making sure that the user can get straight to work — you don’t have to start learning who to use the program, you just use it.

With all these nice words about Photo-Paint 9 — what’s the catch? Simple: system resources. When Corel ported Photo-Paint 9 they kind of cheated. Instead of rewriting all the code for Linux, they use Wine as an emulator. This means that they can ship their code more quickly, but it also means that I use about 50% of CPU when I move the mouse in Photo-Paint 9! That’s probably partly because Photo-Paint 9 have these fine cursors that resembles the current tool — but there is no way you can justify using 225MHz to move the mouse!

So, to sum it all up: The good news is that Photo-Paint 9 now runs under Linux and that it is a wonderful, full-featured program. The bad news is that it need a lot of power. I had a chance of trying it on a 700MHz Pentium III, and that was much better. But still, it’s good to be home :-)

I’m just in the middle of the download of Corel Photo-Paint 9. I’m glad to see, that Corel finally releases something useful for Linux, instead of trying to emulate Windows under Linux. I’ve seen and tried their Linux OS, but I didn’t like it. It tried to hard to turn the Linux-filesystem into a filesystem that Windows-users would find familiar. Although they made a great attempt the illusion wasn’t perfect.

The download has finished — I’ll be back with more information later.

The domain for GymNet has now been set up!

I’ve been working on the menu the last couple of days — I really like how the images pop up when you point at the links. It’s done with simple JavaScript, but the effect is pretty cool. The JavaScript is generated dynamically by PHP. When you mix server-side PHP scripting with client-side JavaScript you get a very powerful mixture.

My GIMPS-section has been out-of-order for quite a while, but has now been fixed.

You’ll get a forecast for the next two years — when your team advance the ranking is written in blue, and when your team falls back the ranking is written in red.

I hope you can use it — please don’t hesitate to send me feedback! I would love to hear you comments, and ideas for improvements.

I’m currently working on a new Danish website called Gymnet. So far I’ve had the pleasure of implementing the design according to the graphics-people’s wishes. That’s hopefully something that only needs to be done once :-)

Later we’ll make all sorts of fancy features in PHP. But it’s still under construction (we began this Monday), so don’t expect too much here in the beginning.