The Gimp 2

Now if you know me, you know I'm a sucker for a good deal.  I'm talking about low price high quality.  You just can't go wrong with big project FOSS when you want a good deal.  Free to me as in "free nuts" and free to use as in "free speech", and programmed by people who not only know what they are doing, but in many cases have created the standards.  Since my first bit of free candy I've loved free things, and the FSF has treated us all VERY good in the past 2 decades.  The GIMP stands for "The GNU Image Manipulation Program" (it used to be project, but these sorts of things change), and as we all know GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix". Anyway it's time to get this going properly before I start spouting off more about my love for FOSS or,which would be much worse, expounding on the great (if short) history of GNU, and GIMP.

GIMP is an image manipulator, or rather an image editor.  Not just any old image editor, it's a full featured image editor, whose rivals would be from big companies like Adobe and Corel.  I'm not going to compare this to other image editors, you can find lots of those types of reviews all over the place.  I'm also not going to be able to go thru all it's features like I do when I review smaller apps. What I will try to do is explain what sort of things it's good for.  Photo editing and drawing are right there at the top of the list, but I also use it for my pixel art, and digital scrapbooking.  There's filters you can use to do all sorts of things from noise and blur to rendering clouds and applying new art styles.  Layers, history, and colour management are all there too.  I've said this before to other graphic designers (Adobe lovers the lot of them): "There is not a single thing you can with Photoshop that you can't do with GIMP."  to which most of them ask "What about actions?"

Anyway The GIMP 2 passed mustard.

http://www.gimp.org/

Steam (iPhone)

So like everyone else who plays steam games on pc and owns an iPhone I signed the petition to get friend chatting on the iPhone.  Fortunately for all of us Valve decided to give way more than just chat.  You can browse groups, see friend activity, browse the Steam Catalog (a.k.a. Store), your wislist, fill up your cart, checkout and have the game ready for you at home, and use the steam store search.  Oh, yeah and there's steam news, store account info, app settings and a way to log out (either for security or cause you share your iOS device).

I'd like to go through each and every section but I'm not prepared to type 12 paragraphs.  My most used features are Friends, Catalog, Cart, and Search.  Friends works much like your friend list on the desktop Steam (Mac or PC), it lets you see who's online, playing what, and chat with them.  Catalog is essentially store.steampowered.com built for the iPhone.  Cart is your shopping cart, you need to go in here to pay for your purchase that you got from either Search or Catalog.  You can use all the same checkout methods as when you are on your computer, and when you do finally get back to it you can download the game there.

Now I do have to say that it isn't seamless with the desktop app.  Chats do not propagate across, and sometimes when you exit the app, chats will pop up as notifications, and sometimes they just don't.  I'd like to say it's stable, but my copy has crashed just before checkout, and then I had to start over searching for my game again.  Not a big problem, but occasionally annoying.

Passed mustard.