Seashore

by Aaron Plane • 01/07/2006 at 11:20 AM

You probably have toyed with a program like Microsoft Paint in the past. You also may have used a commercial piece of software, like Adobe Photoshop and Fireworks. You also may have seen the relatively large price tag on these two solutions, and have avoided this by not buying them or pirating them (I hope you got coal this holiday). What if you wanted a powerful and free solution? You could always try The GIMP, but running on Mac OS X can be awkward. The GIMP is not a native Mac app, requiring you have the X11 libraries installed on your computer. It’s also a large file to download (for all you dial-up users), and loads relatively slow. Enter Seashore, the fast, lightweight, somewhat powerful image editor/creator that’s open source and free (as in beer, or an alternative, if you’re underage).

Seashore is a variant of The GIMP, but is completely native to Mac OS X. Once you run the application for the first time, you can clearly see the resemblance to The GIMP, although it does use a more Panther/Tiger interface. Most of the tools from The GIMP are also included in the package, with the ability to add more effects in the future. The popular tools, such as shading, colour adjustment, levels, gradients, text, etc. are included with the application. The anti-aliasinf for text and brush strokes is also a nice feature in the application. Although it does include some power tools from The GIMP, it’s not quite a Photoshop killer (yet). Seashore might remind you of more a beefed up Paint for Mac (with the source open), and is great for beginners to learn graphic editing because of it’s simplified interface.

Seashore is very stable, and didn’t crash when I opened multiple files at a time. It’s much quicker at starting up than any other image editor out there, including The GIMP. In fact, I also tested this. Seashore took a whole 1.94 seconds to start up on my Powerbook, while GIMP.app took 52.2 seconds. The binary file was only 3.7 MB big, as compared to GIMP.app’s 57.7 MB file. Seashore uses the same file format as The GIMP, xcf, and can save, open, and edit these files without hiccuping. It also supports Mac shortcuts better by using the Command key for keyboard shortcuts, instead of the Control key.

The source code is also available to anyone who wants it. It’s built in Xcode, and therefore it’s familiar to many Mac developers (if anyone wants to make it better).

With all this good talk about Seashore, I must warn you: it’s not a completely flaw-free product. There are some minor quirks, which hopefully will get ironed out in the upcoming versions. First of all, Seashore doesn’t have many of The GIMP’s advanced features, which make The GIMP a Photoshop competitor. Another quirk is the fact that, at least with my experiences, I could not edit text after I inputted it. The way around this is to make text it’s own layer, which brings me to another oddity. In Photoshop or Fireworks, when you create a new object or text, it makes a layer automatically. This is not the case in Seashore, but I believe it’s just an oddity and not a mistake. Another minor quirk is when you start up the program, it automatically asks you to create a new image, but doesn’t give you the option to open one.

All in all, Seashore is a good investment for those who want to get into graphic editing, but were afraid to shell out hundreds of dollars (or risk getting in trouble with the law). Seashore is fast, free, and pretty well-rounded already (surprising for the very early stages of an open source application at version 0.1.8 at time of writing). My best advice to you, before you prejudge Seashore, go and download a copy for yourself, and see what you think about it. As for me, I think it does the job (and does it right).