Just a kind thank you note to the gThumb authors for completely breaking my workflow by re-inventing the paradigm used to save imported pictures. Until now, all my pictures landed in a predictable location, using a predictable filename pattern that was easily searchable. Not anymore. Now, files land into my home directory, according to some recursive folder pattern that further complicates searching for files and requires a few more clicks to accomplish. Dammit! Couldn't you at least make this configurable, so that those of us who prefer to retain the old paradigm can?!
Note: re-inventing an application's paradigms is always a very bad idea. If you're a software developer who is reading this, please keep it in mind and go scratch your itch to change the world somewhere else. Thank you.
Post Scriptum
Many thanks to Damon Lynch for pointing me to his own professional picture importer called Rapid. This is an extremely configurable importing tool and, lo and behold, Damon even offers builds for Ubuntu via his PPA!
Still, the consequence of this mess is that migrating to Rapid means that I'll be loosing gThumb's simple but extremely efficient editing tools. To me, one strength of gTthumb was this unique combination of picture importing with basic editing tools. Now, I'm forced to split these interconnected tasks, simply because someone chose to completely rethink gThumb's paradigms. I'm of course aware of Gimp's existence, but repeated attempts at mastering it made me conclude that it's entirely the wrong software for my needs and essentially overkill. By contrast, gThumb offers just enough tools to enable someone to crop images to useful sizes and to adjust color balances in easy steps; it does the job without hassle, which is not the case with Gimp.
Thinking out loud, it is precisely on days like these that the urge to create my own Linux distribution keeps on coming to mind. Retaining consistent paradigms in the desktop environment and applications that I use, not to mention maintaining the number of duplicate libraries to a bare minimal, has been a constant struggle and, noticing how some developers' urge to re-invent the wheel every other day, using whatever new programming language of the day, persistently takes precedence over keeping system resource consumption to a bare minimum and over preserving user sanity, I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that Free Software has veered way too far into the bazaar and urgently needs a copious amount of cathedral to make it usable for mere mortals again.
Some dpkg-based distribution where the only scripting language allowed is Bourne shell and the only programming languages C or C++ comes to mind. Of course, this would also require porting popular application from e.g. Java, Python, etc. which would be a colossal amount of work. Still, I think that the time has come for this to happen. As an added bonus, this would make applications usable again on embedded devices with spartan CPU, RAM and storage resources, so this project could generate huge benefits to the embedded Linux industry. Based on my experience at my previous jobs, I have a rather clear picture (pun intended) of what needs to be done and of who I would hire to make it happen. What I'm missing are investors. Who's with me?
