Magic glue between developers

What happened to Integrated Media Management for GNOME GSoC project? Was there any real code in the end? Is it going to be used? Where? When?

To those who were wondering what ever happened to OpenRaster. MyPaint 0.7.0 is out and among other things it now saves to OpenRaster by default. ORA files produced by MyPaint are reported to be correctly opened by Krita and GEGL.

It’s been almost week since I’m back from LGM’09. Jet lag finally got me on my way back (8 hours between timezones), for the first time in my life. Am I growing older then?

I’m currently busy writing reports and sorting photos, but for now just few things:

• lightning talks are great and should be used further, but in some cases we still need long talks
• all talks in one room is good — everything is recorded
• more time for BoFs is good, we need even more of that
• BoFs should probably be recorded as well, at least audio
• we need all the attention of local designers and content producers we can get — publish articles in local thematic magazines perhaps?
• if we get this attention, we should better organize selling of books on using GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus and Blender (Blender movie DVDs too?) for little to no income, but publicity
• we probably need some handouts for free software — something in the lines of LGM’07 newspaper, but smaller
• we need a better academic track by all means

For the latter I think we should track scientific papers that relate to libre graphics tools.

Ay, and a small photo teaser for our LGM Flickr group

I want to once again thank all of our sponsors, especially our dear community. You are amazing!

In the world of recession we somehow managed to cross 5K USD borderline last week in our Pledgie campaign. This is where I’d love to give credits to both our community and blendernation.com which published news on LGM. In the mean time we published draft schedule of talks.

You can still register to attend the conference.

This is another posting in the Libre Graphics Meeting series, and another on LensFun, of which I’ve already written before.

LensFun as idea — a library to provide means to fix distortions and aberrations that lenses apply to captured photos — and a set of requirements was born two years ago at Libre Graphics Meeting in Montreal. As a real code it was born a bit later — you can read interview with Andrew Zabolotny by Joel Cornuz for details.

At this point we have a sophisticated implementation of LensFun in UFRaw, a quite simplistic yet working implementation in digiKam and somewhat forgotten test implementation in Rawstudio which hasn’t made its way to users yet — last thing I heard is Anders K. will probably do it soon now that Rawstudio has plug-in architecture. (And if he doesn’t, I will feel justified to renew my torturing skills that I got during my KGB secret agent course years ago :))

Currently LensFun suffers from lack of a very much up to date lens/camera database. New lenses pop up every few months, but most of its data is coming from the last available open ptlens database (before it went proprietary). So I have an idea. If you happen to have lenses unsupported by LensFun and you are planning to come to LGM, bring them, and we’ll do a calibration session. The walls of École Polytechnique — our old/new venue — have pretty straight lines to rely on, and at least one pano head with leveller will be available

By the way, you can start registering for the conference now! And if you would love to do a talk on free graphics software, do get in touch — the program is still in the works

This week list of organizations accepted to Google Summer of Code 2009 was announced. Students have time from March 23 to April 3 to have a look at lists of ideas, talk to their would-be mentors and apply.

Here is a rough list of graphics related projects:

• Aqsis (ideas list)
• Blender Foundation (ideas list)
• BRL-CAD (ideas list)
• Creative Commons (ideas list)
• Crystal Space (ideas list)
• GIMP (ideas list)
• GNOME (ideas list)
• Hugin/Panotools (ideas list)
• Inkscape (ideas list)
• KDE (ideas list)
• OGRE (ideas list)
• OpenICC (ideas list)
• OpenImageIO (ideas list)
• OpenStreetMap (ideas list)
• OSGeo (ideas list)
• Scribus (ideas list)
• X.Org (ideas list)

Of them I happen to be backup admin for hugin/panotools (somewhat traditionally :)) and OpenICC. And right now I’d love to plug OpenICC.

Last year there was a successful project to create KDE Control Center for color management. What we need to do now is make one of KDE application aware of these settings and start making use of Oyranos. DigiKam sounds like a perfect choice here. Continuation of “Color management near X” project is quite important too — we need to become friends with Compiz at least.

So far I’ve heard several excellent ideas for GSoC projects for GIMP/GEGL, but there is somewhat lacking activity on Inkscape and Scribus fronts. I’d be happy to see more proposals for hugin/panotools as well.

And one more little thing. I listed GNOME and KDE projects above because through these projects you can work on applications like F-Spot (three projects last year) and Krita (one project last year).

For years GSoC has proven to be a great way to introduce new people to free software world (and keep the new blood pouring in :D), but also to be a great challenge for restless minds and playground to shape team work skills. You really can learn a lot from this experience and, coincidentally, make a valuable contribution

Continuing the series of postings about Libre Graphics Meeting. This one is all about Raw software.
At LGM3 We had almost everybody related to Raw software:

• Dave Coffin, creator of DCRaw
• Udi Fuchs, creator of UFraw
• 3×Anders, creators of Rawstudio
• Gilles Caulier, creator of digiKam

We were missing only Hubert Figuiere of libopenraw/exempi/niepce and Alex Tutubalin/Ilia Borgh of LibRaw. But the spirit of Tutubalin flew across the top of the waters of Oder for four days, so naturally Gilles couldn’t resist embracing the heavenly emanation and just few weeks later introduced LibRaw based libkdcraw Jokes aside, this library is now used across KDE4 graphics applications: digiKam, kphotalbum, DarkRoom and Krita. This is because Gilles heard about it at LGM in Wrocław.

You might as well ask, what is LibRaw and why it is better than the original DCRaw from which it is recreated. Alex’s “Goals and objectives” article pretty much covers covers this question, but you probably would like to hear from developers who use LibRaw. So I asked Gilles to write a short explanation.
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OK, so since jimmac has already plugged Stephane’s XCF gdk loader, I think I could plug PSD gdk loader by Jan Dudek

Anobody to write an OpenRaster loader?

As promised before I start a series of postings about Libre Graphics Meeting and how it affects development of open source software.

Fontmatrix, as Peter Linnell says, is THE application for Scribus users: it is a new yet versatile font management application. This was the first application in C++ that Pierre Marchand, its principal developer, ever wrote, and it’s amazing how far it’s gone so far.
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We ask our community to support Libre Graphics Meeting conference again. Last year we managed to collect 12K in few weeks and we put it to a really good use. I’ll be talking about LGM2008 in further blog postings about past, present and future of LGM.