Saturday, January 13, 2007

Mac OS X Annoyance #001: No built-in image manipulation software

It never really hit me before, but it is almost inexplicable that OS X (up till 10.4 Tiger that is, hopefully Apple has something in 10.5 Leopard) has no included image manipulation software. What about iPhoto? iPhoto is not included in OS X, yes you get it free with new Macs, but you only get it going forward with iLlife upgrades. Besides, you can't arbitrarily draw lines, boxes, and add text to images with iPhoto. It is designed to correct digital photo problems like red eye, color levels, cropping, but it doesn't overlap with something like Photoshop.

I am not saying Apple needs to add Photoshop, or even Photoshop elements to OS X, but something more along the lines of Paint for Windows. I think Paint sucks in a lot of ways, but it can get you the basics. Come on Apple, make it happen!

UPDATE
I actually got so annoyed with the various image editing apps on OS X, none freeware and they watermarked the image I was editing (which is actually the new header on the blog), that I fired up Parallels and installed Paint.NET to bang out the change to my header image.