Monthly Archive for January, 2010

MyPaint reviewed

Published on January 31, 2010 in Development, Graphics and LGM. 0 Comments Tags: .

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 :)

Drawing volumetric objects in Inkscape

Published on January 26, 2010 in Graphics. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

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

Volumetric snowman :)

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!”

Calf is awesome

Published on January 17, 2010 in Development, Music and Sound. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

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.

Calf Organ DSSI

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 :)

GNOME Color Manager review

Published on January 11, 2010 in Development and Graphics. 0 Comments Tags: , .

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 :)

Inkscape Calligraphy

Published on January 11, 2010 in Graphics. 0 Comments Tags: .

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

Changes in Scribus 1.5.0/SVN

Published on January 8, 2010 in Development and Graphics. 5 Comments Tags: .

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 :)
Continue reading ‘Changes in Scribus 1.5.0/SVN’