I am a college student. Hence, I am poor. I can't afford to pay the license fee, even the student one, for a copy of Adobe Photoshop, even though I love the program and use it constantly. I have turned to the GIMP as an alternative, as it really is a very decent image-manipulation program (the logo for my site was made in GIMP). However, on OS X, the only way to run it is via the X-windows overlay. I don't like that, since it makes it difficult to switch windows, and it just seems generally messy. GIMP is resource-intensive anyway, and having to run that as well as X on my poor little first-generation ibook is just not a very pleasant prospect. So I decided I'd try to port the GIMP natively to OS X. This also gives me an opportunity to learn Cocoa and Objective C.
The project is still embryonic at best; I haven't progressed much past the GUI. Unfortunately, the code is somewhat sloppy, with a decent amount of the processing for the image manipulation being in the code for the buttons themselves (for example), so it's taking me some time to extract the useful stuff. Plus I'm teaching myself as I go along, so it's slow. Development will probably progress more rapidly once I own my own Objective C and Cocoa books and am not constantly having to borrow them.
There is another project I have heard of to port GIMP to OS X natively, but it hasn't been updated in quite some time last I checked, and still uses GTK+ somehow. Rather than get bogged down in whatever has been slowing that project, I decided to forge ahead myself.
There will be screenshots, at least, up shortly. I might have a working version put together by next year sometime. I'm still not entirely sure how I will keep my code up to date with the main GIMP branch, but we will see.