Brandon Thomas, developer of ArtCraft, a suite of open-source creative tools meant to replicate Adobe applications for free, has now announced apps to replace Microsoft Office tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, respectively, named GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft, that are created with Claude. Thomas has shared his new clones to ArtCraft GitHub, making them free for all to download.
Yeah, why would you waste time with these instead of Gimp, OpenOffice, etc? Except for the clicks.
i assume this person is making a statement more than anything. but gimp is not an adobe alternative. affinity is but not gimp. but since this is an open source commjnity i should point out affinity is not open source
You’ve obviously never used Photoshop or GIMP because if you have then you would immediately understand why. GIMP is a completely different experience, and its UX is far inferior to Photoshop. On top of that, anybody who is used to the workflow in Photoshop will have a very steep learning curve using GIMP.
Believe it or not, but most people just want a tool that works for what they’re trying to do. These apps have some bugs and rough edges still, but they’re very much usable and make it trivial to switch for anybody who’s used to Photoshop.
The venn diagram of what GIMP does and what Photoshop does isn’t the singular circle people assume. I, too, loathed my time with GIMP wondering how it ever got so popular in the OSS community, but then you realize it’s kind of all they have so of course they’ll support it no matter what.
I haven’t used it in years and based on that experience, I’m not rushing to try it again anytime soon. The UI felt like a UX designer’s prank on the world.
I’ve been using the recent versions of GIMP and it’s surprisingly usable. Of course tools are a bit different and in different places compared to Photoshop, but that goes for any software.
Yeah, you should definitely try using it again - especially since the big 3.0 release.
Menus and tool names/functions still do not map perfectly onto Photoshop’s (it is its own thing after all, so why should it?), but it is a serious and sophisticated piece of software. Easily adequate for my professional reproduction work.
I switched to it from Photoshop two or three years ago and had to spend a few hours watching tutorials and reading the manual to make the transition. But now there is hardly anything I can’t do in GIMP at least as fast, easily and reliably as I could in Photoshop.
Yeah, these are very different tools. And yeah UX in GIMP is something else.
Yeah, there are already good alternatives for the office package. I don’t see why anyone would use a slop version instead of them.
I can’t say anything about Photoshop and autodesk since I don’t use them.
Is OpenOffice still maintained?
The descendant of it called LibreOffice has been the well-maintained thing to use for the last 15 years.
about OpenOffice:
Sadly something called OpenOffice is also sort-of still maintained but should not be used under any circumstances. It has basically been a zombie project since Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in 2010 and (as the Apache OpenOffice wikipedia article explains) is not safe to use:
There is a somewhat complicated history about why the fork from the old
OpenOffice.orgto LibreOffice was necessary and how/why something else called “Apache OpenOffice” came to exist after the fork; the tldr is that Larry Ellison is a real-life comic book villain so his companies strive to do the worst thing possible at every turn.Yeah, I know about LibreOffice as I use it myself. That’s why I was wondering why OpenOffice was brought up.
I agree, then I remember those infuriating pricks asking “Can I draw a circle in GIMP yet?” in every thread about updates. The slop is for those people.