On 26th of July I’ll be giving a talk at a FOSS developers conference in Obninsk about standards in open source software for authoring and processing graphics. The plan is to speak about CREATE and Shared Resources, OpenRaster/CPX/XCF2, SVG, DNG and OpenIcc.
Archive for the 'Specs' Category
Long time no blog 
I’m pretty busy here with translations, docs and work on www.linuxgraphics.ru that I announced available for public yesterday. There are quite a few articles to read there and more are coming this weekend.
Another release of CREATE shared resources will be done soon. I’m planning to add TRC curves to the spec and prepare a separate package of burningwell.org public domain hi-res textures. Yep — you get me right, shared resources will be modularized.
Short summary on other software related stuff:
- work on translation of Scribus’s docs into Russian has begun;
- I’m mentoring translation of XaraLX into Russian;
- hugin 0.6 has new docs browser, and v0.7 will have more docs both in English and Russian.
In early May I was in expedition to Caucasus. Had much fun shooting fake animals
Another brain feeding idea for upcoming LGM
Recently I compiled SVN build of Hydrogen — a cross platform open source drum machine. Hydrogen uses drumkits — libraries of drum samples that are usually stored in a local directory. SVN version features a network drumkits installator. It fetches updated list of available drumkits and lets users download new ones or remove existing ones.
What do you think about creating a similar online repository for shared resources and either internal or external clients to it? Internal client for each application means tighter integration, but also more work in common. External standalone-client means less work, but also less integration.
The most serious cons, I guess, is that this would clearly be installation into ~/.create and thus not efficient for multiuser desktops.
Subjects to further consideration:
- introducing modularization of shared resources (and thus having separate branches in repo for each kind of shared resource);
- introducing basic metadata for resources (name, description);
- organization of repository;
- administration of repository.
You might already know that OpenDocument is shaping up to a widely accepted set of standards.
It looks like we are about to start working on another OpenDocument format for multilayered raster graphics. This is actually all about filling the gap. We have OMF and AES when it comes to exchanging audio projects, we have AAF when it comes to video. But there is no one uniform standard to store multiply layers, their compositing options, clipping paths, text on path etc.
When I say “we”, I mean developers from different projects. Several people independantly from each other were talking about very much the same at the same time. However, Boudewijn Rempt and Simon Budig were the guys pushed the magic button in this case
What is the point behind creating such a file format? Continue reading ‘Exchanging graphics project data’
Many audio related applications are known to have a not really nice ID3 editing capabilities. Often they provide either very few fields or too many. Let’s take for example SoundJuicer.
What is good? UI is simple. What is not so good? There is no way to edit more tags that are possibly available. You can’t tell if there is a “Year” field. And you can’t add a composer, if “Artist” represents only performer (classical music, jazz etc.).
So here is my simple proof-of-concept mockup: Continue reading ‘Editing ID3 tags’
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!
It looks like I will finally pay for hosting and finish my website. I’m just really tired by having snapshots here, there and everywhere. They should be in one place really, and Jakub‘s Original looks like a perfect tool for a web gallery.
So far, CREATE is moving forward. There is still no common decision on name of root directory, however.
To my excitement, after setting up SpamBlacklist extension on mediawiki we have much less issues with spammers.
Several interesting software project are about to release new code: Inkscape 0.43, Audacity 1.2.4 and 1.3.0, Hugin 0.5, Grisbi 0.5.8. And all of them except Inkscape require updated translation into Russian
Besides, Bulia claims to have ~120 Kbyte of diffs of new code in his local Inkscape development tree, which means that I should once again forget about using stable version of this awesome application