Monthly Archive for September, 2007

Flickrscape and more

Published on September 24, 2007 in Graphics. 7 Comments

The summer was pretty busy and the autumn is not different, so last couple of months there were not as many news at inkscape.org as there should have been.

Anyway, here is what you can already start drooling over :) Inkscape 0.46 will be coming with features like PDF/AI import, Bucket Fill tool, Tweak tool (adjust paths with a brush), boosted wireframe mode using Cairo, ~20 bitmap effects (ImageMagick), nearly all or all SVG filters and GUI for them, live path effects, dockable dialogs and many more.

Last weekend I wanted to post an Inkscape/SVN screenshot on Flickr and looked for relevant groups. Only “GIMP and Inkscape” was available. So I went ahead and created a new special group called “Inkscape”. With all the user mailing lists and excellent inkscapeforum.com I don’t quite expect this place to grow into a vivid community, but at least we have a dedicated Flickr group to watch for new designs created in the most versatile open source vector graphics editor ever ;) And there are great works indeed!

Ugh, and on the screenshot. As mentioned above, Inkscape 0.46 will be shipped with probably all SVG Filters as of SVG 1.1. Funny thing is that SVG filters are not really well documented. Well, we do have a specification from W3C, but it’s quite technical.

You could expect from Adobe to provide some good designer-oriented documentation, but if you look into user manual for Illustrator CS3 (freely available from adobe.com) or some printed books (I read 4-5 of them) you won’t see much of it. This is most probably because SVG filters do not work in CMYK mode, which makes them useless for prepress people (exporting a drawing like this one to PDF should be a challenge even for experienced software engineers).

So one thing we will definitely be adding into our user guide is actually telling people how to use all the eye-candy like feDiffuseLighting. And that means a lot of playing, sleepless nights and everything else that comes along the way :) The little silly screenie below is a 3D box (another Google Summer of Code project) with its copy above in Screen blend mode (SVG filter), blurred (SVG filter) and convolved (Convolution Matrix — another SVG filter).

svg-filter-test-3dbox-1.svg

Now we only need GIMP 2.4 out (2.4 RC3 available since today) so that GEGL would finally start making its way to development tree to bring us features we wanted for so long (not before 2.6 most probably). The 2.4 branch alone has seen a lot of improvements, of which proper color management and redesigned rectangular selection/crop tools are major for at least digital photography.

Open source wireless triggers

Published on September 21, 2007 in Development and Photography. 2 Comments

Some guys are planning to design a low cost open source wireless trigger for flash photography.

Sounds like open source hardware is gaining momentum ;-)

Ranting on GtkFileChooser

Published on September 13, 2007 in Development. 2 Comments

Latest well-known opinion from Miguel made a lot of people unhappy. When people are unhappy with someone from GNOME camp, they start ranting, recalling all of the bad things about GNOME, HIG, usability etc. they ever ran into or just heard of. You know it, I know it too.

While replying to one of few adequate complains about GtkFileChooser today (don’t even try to imagine, what winding roads lead people here from OOXML), I did a short investigation which, I think, is good enough to share with you.

To cut the long story short: a common perception is that missing funcitonality in Gtk+ and GNOME is result of GNOME HIG that proposes a desktop for lame people. Now, let’s check facts and see what is the reason of most common issues with GtkFileChooser.

  1. You can’t see files as multiple columns list. Very true and guess what — noone ever complained. There is no single entry on exactly that in bugzilla, neither OPEN, nor closed as WONTFIX, nor UNCO. Feel free to prove me wrong.
  2. Impossible to use a custom filter/wildcards. Right, and now please read the last paragraph at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=138642#c5. Noone objects, proposals and patches are welcome.
  3. Impossible to navigate as in browser using Alt+Arrow keys. This is not quite true, because Alt+ArrowUp actually does lead you to an upper folder. But try to find any mention of them in b.g.o. and most likely you will miserably fail like I did: noone bothered to report.
  4. Impossible to preview files. One of my favourites and only partly a true one :) This and this bug reports more or less cover the issue. You can see Sven clearly not objecting this feature (and may I remind you that GIMP is top “user” of Gtk+), but you don’t see proposals or patches. Either everyone is happy with preview available in applications like GIMP or Inkscape or, again, noone bothered to come up with a solution.
  5. Sorting by data is not enough. I completely agree. What about GNOME developers? Do they really think it will bloat GUI as many people say? Wrong, wrong, wrong: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141155. In fact they want this feature, but again — noone bothers to send patches.
  6. Not much place for actual list of files in the dialog. The guy measured empty space in the dialog and it’s 135px between bottom border of the list and bottom of the dialog and 88px on top. Ever reported to bugzilla? Looks like not.
  7. No drop-downs for file types. See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=135901, Federico asked for API extension proposal (comment #5), noone did it.
  8. Not possible to delete or rename files. See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=325150, an initial patch exists, but its not finished and therefore not applied. Note that comment #1 is an official green light for the feature again.

As you see, issues are either not reported, which means they don’t seem to be THAT bad, or are addressed by Gtk+ developers, but not solved due to lack of contributors.

The same guy asked me today: “Will you GNOME people ever fix the gtk-alternative-button-order issue?”. There we go — he was asking me same question several months ago and NEVER bothered to report to bgo. Only today, when I pressed him to actually do it, he reported. And he is an open source developer and advocate!

You see, open source projects simply do not work that way. You can’t have bugs fixed, if noone reports about them. You can’t have new features, if noone writes patches.

This is not GNOME/Gtk+ ideology or any other scary fairy-tale for kids that stops GtkFileChooser from becoming more versatile. This is lack of actual contributors. And if you care to look closer, you will find that the same applies to many more parts of Gtk+/GNOME and standalone applications.