Monthly Archive for December, 2005

Party shots

Published on December 24, 2005 in Photography. 0 Comments

We had a New Year/Christmas company’s party last night. It was organized a-la USA in 20-30th years of 20th century — you know, Don Carleone, Chicago — all that gangster stuff :)

The lighting in that club was pretty nice, so shooting was a pleasure. And, TBH, I like F-Spot more and more. Just import all shots, review them, create a version of ones you like right there in main window and edit them without touching originals. Really nice.

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Larger versions and other shots are at my Flickr account.

Now going to a gig where my friends play. Should be fun.

Gestalter revisited

Published on December 15, 2005 in Graphics. 1 Comment

I was looking at the list of illustration related projects at gnomefiles.org I saw Gestalter among them. Last time I tried to run this vector graphics tool was about a year and a half ago and it wasn’t a successful experience — the application crashed whenever I tried to draw anything.

Anyway, I wrote a letter to its developer, Philipp Klaus, to find out, whether Create’s Shared resources spec could be valid for his project. Philipp answered that everything that applies to Inkscape also applies to Gestalter plus vector patterns that are missing in Inkscape (not true, an object can be filled with clone tiles) and most likely will be available as separate SVG files in the future.

If you ask me, what features Gestalter has over other available opensource vector graphics editors, I will mention just one — masking. Even more, Philipp is working at gtkmm2 port (released versions are based on gtkmm1).

As Gestalter’s native file format is a subset of SVG (but renderers are different), I wonder how much effort it would cost to reuse masking code in Inkscape (yes, I’m a biased Inkscape freak :) )

Unfortunately I don’t know about any user community around Gestalter, but the application itself would be a nice addition to our project.

Object snapping in Inkscape

Published on December 13, 2005 in Graphics. 9 Comments

This is übercool, object snapping in Inkscape is now implemented by Carl Hetherington.

snapping

This code needs some improvements (e.g. 0,40px isn’t a good default for grab distance), you can do some things easier and better. E.g. you can align objects diagonally by just drawing a diagonal line and snapping them to it automatically like in the screenshot above. This pretty much eliminates need of arbitrary (non-horizontal and non-vertical) guides.

And maybe now it’s time for snapping options toolbar

First release of Shared resources tarball

Published on December 9, 2005 in Graphics and Specs. 0 Comments

Finally the first release of Shared resources is announced. It took quite more time to reach this milestone than I expected.

Grab the tarball, use it, spread it, add support for the spec in your application if you are keen of standards (I dare to hope you are :) ). Currently Krita and Scribus developers have expressed interest to immediately add support. Other guys are a bit silent, but still patient ;)

In other news: OpenIcc gets more and more weight. Just a week ago Adobe released their ICC profiles package as RPM following OpenIcc developers agreement on paths to search for profiles. And now F-Spot and Digikam developers seem to be going to support this initiative. C’mon, X.org guys, it’s your time! :)

Translatable .inx

Published on December 8, 2005 in i18n. 0 Comments

Wow, Ted has introduced i18n to Inkscape’s plugins. Looks like I’m gonna have a lot of fun now, remembering the last time I touched po-gimp-plug-ins/ru.po and po-script-fu/ru.po :)

Deeping toes into C++ programming

Published on December 8, 2005 in Development. 0 Comments

I think that one of most serious reasons to actually do something is a feeling that something is not good, if not disturbing.

There used to be some glitches in Audacity‘s UI that went on my nerves for last two or three years. And here I am – the one who broke his promise to himself to never ever write code :)

Changes so far:

- All six “Export As… [type of file here]” and “Export Selection As… [type of file here]” went into “Export as…” and “Export Selection As…” submenus.
- All four “Import [type of data here]” has moved into “Import…” submenu from “Project” top menu item to “File”
- “Edit ID3-Tags” has moved from “Project” top menu item to “File”
- “Project” top menu is renamed to “Tracks”

Thus, all project related entries are in “File” menu now. Next step is to move entries from trackpanel menu to “Tracks” menu. I’ve already grouped all “New [type of track here]” entries to “Add New Track…” submenu to save some space.

Audacity’s menu looks much cleaner now. More to follow ;)