How rating of GSoC projects happens

Published on May 7, 2011 in Development. 0 Comments

Two years ago I wrote a large article on Google Summer of Code program, full of tips how to be a successful GSoC organization, mentor and/or GSoC student. The article was based on my experience of participating as primary and backup admin. I never translated the article into English, and now, two years (and two GSoCs) later I see things I’d probably adjust first.

Last few weeks have been rather crazy here, and it hasn’t exactly stopped yet, but I’ll do my best to find some time and do a series of blog postings on Google Summer from the inside. Just to answer a potential question, in the past years I was primary and backup admin for Hugin, Audacity, Scribus and OpenICC, and this year I’m primary admin for darktable.

This year accepted projects were announced on April 25 (you can read more on the multimedia related ones here), and some students got a sorry-to-tell-you notification from Google. I think not everyone was happy with that, and some people would probably like to know how decisions on proposals are done by organizations. Let’s start with that.
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darktable in GSoC2011

Published on March 20, 2011 in Development and Photography. 1 Comment

It’s hard to say goodbye to GSoC. So why do it? :) This year I’m primary admin for darktable, with Jeremy Rosen backing me up. Darktable is the digital photography tool I’ve been wanting for too long and since two years it’s real. We are still a rather small project, so we probably won’t go beyond two students, but if you want fun, fun you will get :) The list of project ideas is here, both darktable-devel@ mailing list and the IRC channel (#darktable at FreeNode) are preferred communication channels.

Darktable is pretty much modularized, so creating new stuff is rather easy. We’ve seen a number of contributors who come up with a complete new darkroom plug-in in practically no time. Most recently it was Rostyslav Pidgornyi with his “low light” plug-in that reuses our spiffy curve widget to provide simple UI for simulating human vision adapting to various lighting conditions.

If you like the idea of doing a GSoC project for us, you have nearly three weeks (till April 8th) to think about a project, introduce yourself, get accustomed, prepare an application, discuss it with your mentor and submit it.

EXIT project is back to gigs

Published on March 9, 2011 in Music and Photography. 0 Comments Tags: .

Most recent tutorial on GIMP and darktable covering split toning features a couple of pictures from this gig:

I’m very happy my good friends are playing gigs again. There are two albums in production, hopefully to be out soon (under CC as usual).

Screencasting

Published on March 3, 2011 in Graphics. 2 Comments

As far as I can tell, the best way to deal with inability to do good public presentations (yes, I do mean my darktable talk at last LGM) is to tame and reprogram it. For you it means a series of truly horrible screencasts with voiceovers :) The first one is out along with usual textual review to do some promo for Gpick — a real kick-ass color exploration tool for Linux and Windows.

And I think it’s time to have another look at RecordItNow in case it can unscrew screencasting on Linux just a little.

Sixth sense gets to you

Published on February 23, 2011 in Sound. 4 Comments

Since several years we [Audacity team] have a feedback email. People write to it to tell us that Audacity rocks or, equally common, that it sucks. Several mails a week tell us Audacity was rebranded and sold under a different name at eBay (we stopped worrying about that ever since the Luxuriosity thing all them years ago). Some people ask if Audacity could be redone as a web app (it can’t). Well, since today we also have our little share of pranksters. As pranks go, however, this one is a little disturbing:

have you considered developing a ghost phone with your software to alow the dead to call the living with voice dialing, i’ve done a little bit of research into it and its acheiveable, thomas dolby discovered that there are certian places on the earth where the dead can be heard with a tape recorder and with modern psionics it is posible to recreate these energy feilds to alow cross dimensional communication dead to living, are you down for a little occult scientist network administration, like honestly i live in the same house as my dead grandpa and it would be great if he could call his living relatives up, maybe you could throw the ideal around the office or something maybe even come up with a skype plugin or something

Now, the only thing I really hope is that it’s nothing but a prank. Otherwise someone is bound to have his/her head examined.

Why GIMP and Inkscape are not funded by Linux vendors

Published on February 20, 2011 in Development and Graphics. 6 Comments Tags: , .

Martin wrote few days ago about why GIMP 2.8 is delayed. Apart from some annoying yet predictable mini-hatefests an interesting comment was provided by Alexander Hunziker:

One thing I wonder about is why none of the big Linux distributors steps forward and funds development. Both Gimp and also Inkscape I feel are very close to being useful also for professional designers, so just a handful of full-time developers could make a big difference. Surely, this would be an interesting market to enter into?

It’s a very valid question, and it is actually easy to answer. There are, in short, several reasons why it hasn’t happened yet.

1. Canonical already tried that back in 2004. The full story is here. TL;DR: money doesn’t magically solve everything.

2. The Linux vendors that have commercial interests (i.e. RedHat, Novell) make money on enterprise clients and governments, and their few attempts at non-enterprise desktop software (Banshee for Novell, GNOME Color Manager for RedHat) are rather personal hobbies of developers than paid projects. Entering a market means doing business with people. I’d love to see a business model around GIMP that would work for someone like RedHat.

The rest? Mandriva recently had a very instable finanical situation, followed by separation of the core team into a new project. As for Canonical, they still have problems making money and anyway they are now more focused on cloud computing which doesn’t have much place for heavy desktop apps such as GIMP and Inkscape. (As a matter of fact, three of the former active Inkscape developers work for Canonical.)

3. The teams themselves have diverse opinions on paid development. Inkscape committee is 3/4 (or 4/5?) dead against it. The GIMP team doesn’t seem to be sure: a year ago they didn’t mind, fairly recently they did mind (or so it seemed to me).

The way I see it, the future of these projects is in the hands of people who care about it so much that they are willing to work on it come hell or high water. So unless you can come up with a business model that doesn’t rely on donations, and the teams suddenly stop minding paid development, the state of affairs won’t change drastically.

Is it waving goodbye to GIMP and Inkscape? Not really. Relying on volunteers is what these projects have been doing for years, and despite the will of some people they are still around and about. A great many thanks for some of the new stuff (up to 50% in case of Inkscape) we see in the new releases of both of them goes to Google for its Google Summer of Code program.

Finally, can we get Linux vendors do at least something for the projects? Sure. They already do something actually: both RedHat and Novell are rather open about how their designers use free software: Mairin does Inkscape classes, and the whole Fedora design team uses both GIMP and Inkscape all around; Jimmac used almost complete free toolbox (GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Fontforge) in Novell which he now does for RedHat, and now Andy Fitzsimon is in his place at Novell doing the same. It’s much less so in case of Canonical for some reason or another. Also, both RedHat (Fedora) and Novell used to publish short tutorials on using free design tools, both don’t do it much these days, so maybe they could give the initiative another go.

The important thing to understand here is that since we do eat our own dog food, we shouldn’t be shy about it. After all, not using Adobe products isn’t a mortal sin. If we don’t share excitement of using free tools, then who will?

What’s up with darktable

Published on February 19, 2011 in Graphics. 0 Comments

In case you’ve been living under a rock for last several days, darktable 0.8 is out with some important changes. There’s quite a bit of work done on the next version already, including blending modes + opacity for every darkroom mode (currently in blendops branch) and an on-canvas vignetting editor:

On-canvas vignetting editing

It’s the second darkroom mode that goes on-canvas, the first one being crop/rotation. The next one hopefully will be graduated filter.

In other words, darktable development continues in its best traditions: providing a working UI for a new feature first to get people something to use, then improving it at the next stage.

Inkscape FAQ taken to extremes

Published on February 18, 2011 in Graphics. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

The first FAQ-like article on Inkscape I did was back in May last year and explained how to create layer effects. It looks like I missed the demand for them all this time. This is now changing. Most recent two ones published within last two weeks explain in details:

Some GIMP related things are coming too. If you feel like you want some particular stuff explained, be it GIMP, Inkscape or Scribus related, just say the word :)

Contributing to free software projects

Published on February 14, 2011 in Development. 3 Comments

If you keep an eye on this blog, you definitely noticed that I’m quite concerned about community involvement into free software projects. Having circled around the monster I started working on in January long enough I’m so sick of polishing it here and there that it’s finally out: “Contributing to free software projects”.

The ultimate goal is to both answer the question “How can I help a free software project, if I don’t code” I keep seeing asked, and help teams to understand how to improve their work with communities. Yes, it’s also a shameless plug for several major projects. If you like to yell — I’m all ears :)

Now that it’s out, I’m unpausing other projects I had to put on hold. The GSoC guide is likely to be next. Stay tuned :)

Listening to users and drawing conclusions

Published on February 14, 2011 in Development, Graphics and Sound. 0 Comments

This posting somehow complements the previous one where I quoted a couple of Audacity’s users both having diametrically opposed opninions on the tool’s usability.

Several days ago Harrison Consoles released new version of Mixbus — their Ardour-based digital audio workstation. The thread at Create Digital Music progressed quite a bit since I looked at it first, and I’ve just discovered that Paul Davis, Ardour’s lead developer, joined in and, probably not realizing it, provided the best explanation why software projects need design architects who listen to all opinions, but think about big picture first:

“Background: in the 10 years I’ve worked on Ardour, it has been my experience that listening too carefully to any one person’s experience with a given piece of technology always tends to be misleading. We have heard from people who tried Ardour and found it mostly unusable. We have others who have had years of experience with Logic or PT who find Ardour much more functional for them. Both these points of view are right, and its taken me a long time to realize that once a tool becomes even remotely complex (possibly at the point where there is any user choice at all), there’s no way to make that tool be the choice of all possible users. So these days, while I try to listen very carefully to the reports I get from people who have issues when using the software, I’ve learnt to not take anyone’s verdict (e.g. “its much harder to use than Logic”, “its ugly”, “its not mature yet”) as a comment about their specific working style and the way that Ardour fits into it rather than anything more general.”

If you take any big free software project, especially one that you bend your production workflow around, you’ll immediately stumble into X vs. Y battles. This is inevitable, but one needs to understand that any software developer who tries to please everyone usually ends up pleasing nobody, because complex software is always about vision, and visions are never shared by all of the human race, HIG or no HIG.