The Dreamer - A Graphic Novel about the American Revolutionary War

I visited the S.P.A.C.E. graphic novel and comic book convention in Columbus, Ohio today. What a treat!

One of the most unique finds there was "The Dreamer" series of graphic novels, done by a young woman named Lora Innes. The artwork is exquisite and the story is very fun. Lora remarked that she has accumulated a very well-informed fan base which includes "Thomas Jefferson fan-girls, Alexander Hamilton fan-girls the fights between them!" Lora started out with a short graphic novel including some vague historical references, but the further she got into it, the more she found she had to improve her own knowledge of America's history. Soon, she (and her fans) were delving into the battles, lives and loves of many of the heroes and heroines of 1776 and the surrounding era.

I was truly impressed with Lora's work. You can view her The Dreamer series online here. If you like her work, donate here.

How To Get GIMP to Work on Mac OSX Leopard (And Get Focus Follows Mouse)

NOTE: This post is fairly old. One of my commenters below (Green) has given a solution that seems to be working for people more so than what I suggest here. I would say read my post briefly and then jump to his comment.

When we upgraded my wife's Mac Mini (PowerPC) to Apple's Leopard, we needed to reinstall X11 so she could run her favorite graphics program GIMP.

This turned out to be quite a hassle. Let me tell you how we should have done it.

1. Upgrade to Leopard using Apple's DVD.
   
2. Apple will immediately ask you to upgrade to 10.5.3 (or the latest version of Mac OSX), so do that through Software Update. Trigger it yourself if you have to.
   
3. DO NOT use the X11 in the Optional Installs folder on the Leopard DVD! This is old and GIMP will not work.
4. Instead, go here and get XQuartz (use the link that says X11-2.2.2.pkg), which is a newer version of X11 that works much better.
5. Now download the latest version of GIMP from here. As of this writing it is Gimp v2.4.
6. Ah, but now you've lost your additional brushes, haven't you? Well, you can re-download those, our favorites are here and here. (Remember, GIMP can now use Photoshop brushes seamlessly). You just copy them into the right directory of the GIMP application.
7. Now GIMP should work pretty well in X11. However...you will find that you need to click on each GIMP window twice because you need to bring focus to the window first before you can do anything.
8. Ha! This is a fun one. I could not actually find the right command to fix this, but eventually we figured it out. Open up the Mac OSX Terminal (in the Applications folder) and then type this command on the command line:

defaults write org.x.x11 FocusFollowsMouse -string YES

If you find that this was a mistake, you can go back to Terminal and type the same command with the word NO instead of YES. That should reverse it so that focus does not follow the mouse in X11.

I think that's it! I'll continue this post if we find any other problems, but for now, it looks like GIMP is working pretty well in Leopard. This is all running on an old Mac Mini with a PowerPC chip. You just have to make sure to download the right executable of GIMP for the PowerPC vs Intel.

Good luck. Please post a comment if this works (or doesn't work) for you.