Translation in progress… Coming soon!

Translation coming soon!

Today I bring you a program created by MIT which will teach you to program with the best way: programming.

I’m talking about Scratch. It’s an object oriented “programming language” with the peculiarity that you don’t write the commands but you drag them like puzzle pieces.

Script created by myself used to move and animate the default cat.

Scratch brings us a lot of commands and infinite possibilities: we can make an animation, a race game, an RPG, a drawing program and even an hypotenuses mesurator.

Also we have a good and active Scratch community, full of member-done applications made with the program and ready to download and play or see how’re they done to learn, and also to play online! (not all browsers support this feature, though)

Playing a game created with Scratch in my browser

Definitively, if you want to learn object-oriented programation (or programation in general too) and you haven’t had the opportunity yet, with Scratch it’ll be very easy! The program works in Mac, Linux and Windows too.

Download it!

This is a very tried topic, but not yet closed nor resolved. It applies to any aspect of life, although I will focus in software development.

One factor in an application usability is that the user can decide many things. A color palette pleasing to the eye, a screen resolution that fits your preferences, and so on.

But… To what extent we should give freedom to the user?

Some of you may think that every freedom is little, that the user must be able to configure everything to his liking, even the smallest detail to be comfortable with your application.

Others, however, may defend the position that if a program is well designed, following clear patterns with a friendly and well structured user interface, it isn’t necessary to allow the user to change everything.

This applies both to web applications (choose a style sheet), as desktop applications (minimize in the taskbar, notify me when a friend is connected), and even in videogames (select the contrast, brightness, resolution…).

My opinion as a programmer can contribute little to the topic. As a user, I always like to customize the programs I use. But according to psychological studies, freedom to excess is bad (I mean in software, don’t get this out of context haha). Faced with several similar applications, which differ in the degree of customization, user satisfaction plotted a Gaussian distribution, i.e. at the extremes (very customizable and less customizable) users were dissatisfied, while in the middle (moderately customizable) is where the user reaches the greatest degree of satisfaction.

This can be summarized in one sentence: “The excess overwhelms us.“ If the user has hundreds of small details to customize the program, he will get stuck. If the program is a black box, making it unable to simply maximize the window (it’s just an example) the user will also feel a rejection of this application.

Then… How can we know what is the middle ground? As advice, I would recommend doing the program as most customizable as you can. If when tested with real users you realize that you’re gone too far, probably all you have to do is to erase a few lines of code, so you can remove the unnecessary options.

To sum up, although it sounds weird, too much freedom is bad. It’s said by a psychological study to which I have to agree. We must give the user some freedom, just enough so that a large segment of users can get the program looks nice to them without much effort. But not spend more effort to the configuration options that to the program itself.

We all have heard many times “editing with Photoshop“, “this image is done with Photoshop“, and so.
Yeah, everybody knows that program called Photoshop, which serves for image designing and editing; but today I’m telling you about a similar tool, a free tool distributed under the General Public License (GPL), so it’s also open-source.

Its name is GIMP. GIMP are the initials of “GNU Image Manipulation Program“. Reading “GNU“, you could think this program is only for GNU/Linux, but  GIMP is for Windows, Macintosh and Linux.

You may think this things of the license doesn’t matter, but when you want to make business with graphics made by yourself, you will save the money of other program.

Let’s do a general analysis of the program.
We can download it from its website, which is here.

Today, 28th January 2010, the last version is GIMP 2.6.8. To download it, we will click Download and search the version for our operative system. If you are using Ubuntu 9.10 or earlier, GIMP is already installed as default image editor. However, in Ubuntu 10.4 (april 2010) I think it won’t be the default editor. In that future case, you can install it from the repositories.

Once installed and opened, we will find various windows in the screen, and surely we don’t know what are the most for.

If we don’t like this organization, we always can change it. Moving a window into other one, we can join them in an only window with various tabs, to have the program organized and be comfortable with it.

My organization looks like this:

We also can customize the tools in the toolbox, leaving there your favourites and getting the others out, saving screen space (of course, they will be usable through their keyboard shortcuts).

Something important is that GIMP, as many other image editing programs, works with layers. For those who don’t know what are they, is as if we had several images one above each other, and they all formed the final image.

GIMP basic tools would be the pencil, the paintbrush, the paint pot, the rubber and the selections.

The pencil is the most simple painting tool, which paints with the form we have selected in “Brush”, with the front color. In GIMP we have two special colors, front color and background color. We always can modify them to paint, make gradients…

The paintbrush is almost the same, but it allows opacity. This means that, if the selected brush has transparencies, it will paint with them, so it make softer lines.

¿The paint pot? Yeah, the filling tool. It fills certain zone of the image with a color of a pattern. A pattern is a image, usually textures or similar, which we can use in our images.

The rubber, obviously, is for erasing. Its result depends of the alpha channel of the layer. The alpha channel is like other channels (Red, Green and Blue), and it determines the layer’s opacity. If the alpha channel exists,the rubber would erase in the active layer, and we would see the layer below. If it hasn’t alpha channel (usually if its the first layer of the image), it would paint with the background color, white, for example.

The different selection tools are very useful. They are for choosing a region of the layer, so all the changes we will do will be only applied to that region. If I select a square and paint all black, nothing out of the square will be painted. There are many possibilities: Invert selection, grow, shorten, blur, add…

We have to know also the text tool, because we use it for writing anything in a new layer, which we can modify later.

If you’re audacious you can go beyond and try other tools, or the “Filters” menu, where we can find effects for applying to our image: blur, fractal renderizing, among many others.

I hope this small introduction to GIMP was useful to take your first steps in the graphic designing world, it would be nice if you liked it

Goodbye!