Magic glue between developers

On January 23 Alastair M. Robinson silently released first public version of CMYKTool. That would go quite unnoticed if it wasn’t for someone liking to read all sorts of RSS feeds So the very next day linuxgraphics.ru community was already discussing the new tool, discovering bugs and requesting features. The thread was so hot, that Alastair started reading it via BabelFish online translation tool, and now just a week and a half later v0.1.1 is out with feature enhancements and bug fixes for bugs reported by the community.

So, what is CMYKTool exacly? The application is basically a rewrite of Alastair’s old separate plug-in for GIMP (later continued as separate+ by Yoshinori Yamakawa) into a standalone interactive tool. You can freely convert between RGB<->CMYK using ICC profiles and save to TIFF and JPEG, you can use devicelink profiles, you can compare renders (I think this is where libgdl would come in handy to provide arbitrary docking). And you also can see per-channel % and overall ink coverage values for a point under mouse cursor.

In the future CMYKTool is likely to gain spot color based duotones and more devicelink related functionality like generation of such profiles by means of Argyll.

Thank you, Alastair, and thank you, community

MyPaint developers released a much anticipated v0.8.0 on Friday, and one of them, Ilya Portnov, wrote a good introduction to MyPaint and a review of changes in this version. Read on!

I can’t stop myself from quoting one of the users who commented on the Russian version of the review: “Yeah, great application! I’m painting again!!! PS: my girlfriend just can’t stop using MyPaint, that’s how much she likes it! I’m getting jealous ”

The raising popularity of MyPaint clearly has a lot to do with David Revoy’s famous time-lapse video. This is how a lot of people discovered the application. Here is one of the new MyPaint artists: http://tissia.livejournal.com/ (warning: cyrillic letters )

Hopefully at least some of the developers will make it to Libre Graphics Meeting in May. We’ve been having more or less same projects every year at the conference, it’s time to see more people

Yuri Apostol wrote a great tutorial on drawing volumetric objects* in Inkscape:

The tutorial covers things like smart use of gradients, blur, clipping paths and simulating the missing conical gradient fill.

* the text says “…and my little scarf!”

I’ve been using Calf pack of DSSI/LV2 audio plug-ins and instruments for a while now (vintage delay is my fav), so since I’m used to bleeding edge software I decided to clone its git repo and see what they’ve been cooking for the next release.

After so many years of geeky interfaces native effects on Linux don’t look like complete crap anymore

The upcoming version will also feature several equalizers (already in git), and the very next thing I’m going to do is build it with –enable-experimental to enable “50 small LV2 plug-ins made specifically with modular hosts in mind”. Jeez, you free software developers just don’t seem to be able to stop making us excited recently

As some of you probably know, since recently GNOME users are happy to have a simple color management tool called GNOME Color Manager or GCM, for short. But since this knowledge isn’t equally distributed across mankind , I went ahead and wrote a review. Richard Hughes who is principal GCM’s developer kindly read it before I pushed the Publish button, so it’s really a bit more accurate that it originally was

I thought I’d share this finding with you The video below is created by Florin Florea who does amazing things with Inkscape.

Scribus developers wrote in the mailing list about a bunch of new importers available in 1.5.0/SVN and asked most brave hearts running the bleeding edge to test them. Unfortunately they didn’t mention a whole lot of other interesting things and they do not tend to blog a lot about changes, so let’s fix that

As of revision 14500 changes include, but are not limited to:

• Importing XTG (QuarkXPress Tags documents)
• Importing IDML (Adobe InDesign documents, XML-based)
• Importing CGM (bitmap/vector ISO file format)
• Importing XAR (Xara Xtreme documents)
• Importing Macintosh PICT (which Adobe recently reported to have ditched from upcoming Photoshop CS5, IIRC)
• Importing CVG (Calamus)
• Rendering of 3D models with user defined lighting, point of view and so on via OSG (PDF 1.7 supports 3D models);
• A new dialog in Edit menu to manage gradients;
• Properties palette is partly rewritten to feature a) much saner UI to gradient and pattern fills and b) new Transparency tab where new gradient masks functionality is located (mostly motivated by XAR importing);
• Merged a GSoC project from 2008 that adds a simplified pictures browser in the lines of Adobe Bridge;
• Beginnings of Inkscape-like status bar (only displays how many objects are selected now and doesn’t respect multiple forms yet).

Apart from that Preferences dialog is being rewritten (again) and there seems to be some activity re. color management.

Now the question you might be asking is when this is going to be released as a final version. I’m afraid it’s “right after it’s ready” as usual. Besides, if you read the 1.3.5 review, you know that v1.5.0 will be officially unstable (which of course won’t stop you from using it, as we’ve grown to know )

Nevertheless it’s great to see progress in development, even though changes like 3D objects rendering wouldn’t stand a round against a much desired feature like easier footnotes insertion

Okay, as expected, some more goodness:

• digiKam 1.0.0, lots of new features;
• KIPI plug-ins 1.0.0, only cosmetic changes, though;
• linuxwacom 0.8.5-8, with OLED support in Intuos4 and all new Bamboo tablets, including (at least partial) multitouch support.

And presumably there will be another very important release before new year, more on that soon

In case you missed, there’s a bunch of goodness released recently, for instance:

• Hugin 2009.4 with basic lens calibration and control points cleanup
• Enblend/Enfuse 4.0 with OpenMP support (multicore processing), new docs, multilayer TIFF support and more
• FFADO 2.0.0 that supports lots of Firewire audio interfaces, including some of the evil hostile MOTU

I do have a suspicion that we are going to see some more interesting stuff next week despite of the coming holiday season. Um, and I already owe you two reviews

For some reason I never attended previous “CG event” conferences in Moscow and now I’m back from one. I was actually expecting a lot of marketing stuff, but it turned out really, really interesting with lots of insights into game/movie VFX production, tools, workflows, project management and so on. And there are ideas we could borrow for LGM too