Oh no doubt Gimp is the most powerful free software in its class. In fact it is more powerful than a lot of expensive software in its class. It is just a shame that that it is a no compromise user hostile interface. Borderline between an app and a programming language. And not particularly intuitive or straightforward in either aspect. Note doubt after using it for a two or three hundred hours over a reasonably short period of time, you get to the point where you say "this isn't so hard. I don't know what everyone is bitching about." But I suspect you need a few hundred hours, at least two hours a day, no more than one day skipped between session, to get to that point. And probably better off without even as much time as that to forget stuff - 3 or more hours on it a day, with no more than one day off a week.

Props to them for providing much of (or more than) Photoshop's functionality for free (though it still opens my NEF files as thumbnails...) but why hide it? Usability nightmare.

Polgara, how does that compare to Photoshop Express?

No idea, never used it. When I picked pixlr.com, I was just looking for something free, online, and with a very small learning curve for the Luddites I usually have to teach.

Also, please stop encouraging people to make their own cheap websites! It'll be Geocities all over again!

LOL! No worries, my method is always, "Use Wordpress. Use themes already created by other people." These are usually museum people with no experience and no budget.

For anyone who wants to build a website but has zero experience (hello!), I love love LOVE Weebly. I paid for the pro upgrade so I didn't have to use weebly in the IRL, but it works great at the normal level too. I used it to build ND's website and the 2012 Buffista F2F website.

I am dispirited about to do apps again. I thought I had found a replacement in toodleTasks, but dig this:

• no background syncing--you have to start up the app on each device
• reminders are SMS or email, not popups or status tray
• no widgets to display task lists

I got all in a tizzy because they seemed to have decent recurring task functionality. I'll look at the other apps that run on top of the toodledo framework to see if they do, but this is exhausting. Astrid was the first to do application I tried. I didn't feel like I was asking for the world, but how come it's so hard to match?

Fuck you, Yahoo. This is so clearly not in the interests of the users.

Oh, and even after I told the toodleTask people they spelt Blackberry wrong on the front page of their website, they told me I was looking at the wrong page--instead of just going and looking at the front page of their fucking website. That's just going to chafe.

What the fuck, Opera??? At least I verified I wasn't the crazy one:

"Although most users don't use bookmarks, some long-term users told us that they have many, many bookmarks in deep folder structures," wrote Lawson. "We love our long-term users, so we've worked with developer Stuart Langridge to develop a Bookmarks Manager Extension that brings some basic bookmarks functionality to Opera 15 for those that want it."

Excuse me while I put my previous browsing experience back. Jesus.

Whew. Back to Opera 12. I'm pretty agog at the idea of removing something like bookmarks, but if people don't use them...how do they get back to all the places they visit regularly? Opera's existing Speed Dial isn't an equivalent (it asked me if I really wanted to import 90 art bookmarks--no, I guess not) and neither is the new Stash.

Anyway. Do any of you Evernote users have a separate recipe management app? If so, what the features you need it for?

I haven't been back to check on Evernote extensions in a while. I should do that...

I don't use book marks except the ones I keep at work for some things that have complicated addresses. I just type in the URL! Buffistas Facebook tumblr twitter and livejournal. I used to keep fanfic bookmarked at delicious, but I stopped. Organizing bookmarks was very stressful, and since I remember things visually, every time I added one, I couldn't find my old ones

I do, but I haven't been using it recently and I'm not sure I still need it. I got it mainly for three features: recipe scaling, calculating nutritional info, and easy syncing with iOS devices. I have this fantasy that I will type all my oft used recipes that I only have in hard copy into some recipe mgmt program and have them all available to me on my phone, but that is a mere dream at this point, not least because I'm not sure my current software is really The One for that.

I just type in the URL!

If I could remember the 90 URLs in my art section alone, I'd be some sort of savant. But that folder, tech, cooking, productivity, shopping--they all get a lot of use. Many of the others are just so I don't show up in natter asking ill-formed questions. Especially useful when it's a page on a site I want to get back to, not just the site.

I have this fantasy that I will type all my oft used recipes that I only have in hard copy into some recipe mgmt program

Oh, I hear ya. But with the Evernote OCR, I've started taking pictures of the recipes in magazines and the packages, since they'll be searchable. It's kinda fucking cool.

I found a to do manager that sits over Google tasks and does recurring tasks, although not well enough for me. Still, it looked promising enough that I was annoyed at the omission.

And, oh...for some reason I installed My Effectiveness Habits on my stay-at-home tablet. I decided to have a look, and trying using it for something. I decided the "something" would be art, and whether or not I come back to it and use it as a guide, it did make me think stuff out, and plan a little--I suppose the most effective tool would then re-present them to you in some new context that would help with the quantum leaps. But just putting together the mission, influence, roles, and putting things in quadrants and then in relationship to each other was interesting.

And everything's cooler in an app than writing it on paper. It's true! I did an online survey.