Linux for Designers

The first TYPO3 User eXperience Week is over. A lot of interesting projects that will improve the usability of TYPO3 will come. I wish i could be there
A short summery can be found at the TYPO3 news website.

If you like the Gnome Desktop (which ships by Ubuntu) and you buy often books online then buy your books next time at the Gnome Amazon Store to support the Gnome Desktop!
PS: Available in many languages!

Since my post "Pixel 1.0 final next year" and "Pixel 1.0: Release soon or Vaporware again?" a lot of time goes by without a final release of the image editor Pixel. Now Pawel Kanzelsberger wrote "...Pixel Studio Pro is still not ready for market release (and we’re working hard to prepare it for the market)".
Besides that he released a maintenance release of Beta 0.8 that includes a Linux version too.

This year seems to be a year of operating systems. There was Ubuntu Jaunty, Moblin 2, the announcement of Chrome OS, Snow Leopard from Apple, WebOS for the Palm Pre and Windows 7.
Besides the release of Jaunty all these releases has no real impact to me but today i switched to Ubuntu Karmic Koala which is another fine Ubuntu release - and that rocks me

The 4th and hopefully last prerelease of Inkscape 0.47 is out. This prerelease is focused on stable live path effects.
So test it and send the developers your feedback. The bad news is that there is no prerelease4 package for Ubuntu yet:
https://launchpad.net/~inkscape-nightly/+ppa-packages
https://launchpad.net/~inkscape.testers/+archive/ppa

While it seem that the BlueGriffon WYSIWYG Webeditor project is dead, the Kompozer project is still alive and kicking. After the 4th alpha, now a first beta of Kompozer 0.8 is availabe for download.

New in 0.8 beta are:
* FTP support
* Syntax highlighting in split view
* Ability to edit text files
* Better PHP support on GNU/Linux
* New icon UUID

A lot of localisations for Kompozer 0.8 are available too.

UPDATE
The 0.8 beta of Kompozer is available as a deb package on GetDeb.net.

Synfig 0.62, a vector-based 2D animation software package, is released.
This version brings new features, improvements and bugfixes:
* SVG import module supporting supports SVG 1.0
* Keyframe widget: This allows drag and drop of individual keyframes and altering keyframe length
* New toggle buttons in the canvas window
* Onion skin past and future are selectable individually up to four in total
* New Curve Warp Layer
* Updated options for Polygon, Circle and Star Tools
* New Value Nodes: Greyed, Power, And, Not, Compare
* Reverse manipulation for Scale Value Nodes
* Input Device configuration can be saved/loaded now
* New icons and updated new translation
* lots of bugs fixed
Besides that a new website is now online and the code of Synfig is now hosted at Sourceforge.

That wallpapers not only beautify your desktop shows that collection of 23 real wallpapers:
http://www.secondose.com/23-fantastic-wallpapers/

BTW: If you are looking for wallpapers for your desktop, check out these:
http://abduzeedo.com/tags/wallpaper
http://www.vladstudio.com/wallpapers/

...or my older post about wallpapers.

At the beginning of this year i wrote a post about Moonshiner, a PDF utility for Linux simliar too Adobe Distiller. In May this year the final version was released and now a Deb package for Ubuntu is available at GetDeb.net.

Ever dreamed about using Adobe Kuler color palettes with GIMP or use Scribus color palettes in Inkscape? SwatchBooker allows you to view, convert and edit a huge bunch of color palette files formats. SwatchBooker 0.4 is now color managed too. Too bad there is no Debian/ Ubuntu package these days.