Great progress has recently been made in porting GIMP to the Mac, Mat Caughron, MacGIMP editor, told MacCentral.
GIMP comes courtesy of the folks at MacGIMP, who have ported the open source GUI toolkit to Aqua. GIMP is an open-source program that has many Photoshop features. This includes filters, layers, and other bitmap editing tools. It’s been the primary graphics editor on Linux for the past three years, but hasn’t been available on the Mac until now, Caughron said.
“It now runs stably and VERY quickly in the X Windows environment under a variety of attractive windows managers,” he added. “Unix and Linux users will also be pleased to note that rootless X is now also quite stable.”
The folks at MacGIMP have the window manager (Oroborus), the GIMP, xv, and various other goodies all running very stably under rootless X, Caughron said. Instructions on how to install rootless X windows are available online. The only thing left to finish is the installer, which should be finished by the MacHack conference, Caughron said. MacHack 2001 will take place June 21-23, in Dearborn, MI.
“We’re on schedule to beat Adobe in shipping a stable feature-rich bitmap editor to Mac OS X,” he added.