Linux for Designers

Ruben Vermeersch answers about: Is F-Spot Live and kicking?
Yes it is There are several real interesting things going on:
* Mike Gemünde is currently cleaning and refactoring quite a lot of IconView code
* Geotagging is coming (Mike Gemünde is working on it too)
* Paul Wellner Bou is working on a nice extension to compare different image versions
* Lorenzo Milesi is working on export support to tabblo and taking care of bugzilla
* Ruben Vermeersch himself working on prototyping some stuff related to progressive image loading and preloading. He is also looking into RAW processing

Read the complete post and check out the screenies!

And the winner is...

Not bad at all but the typography could be improved, it is to thin for my taste.

Other participations can be found at deviantART.

A new issue of the Blender Art Magazine is available. This time it includes a lot of "Making of":
* Using Blender to Animate Your Family Photos
* Editing a Music Video in Blender
* Product Visualization
* Mystery of The BLEND
* Making of:
- Game Art for Project Aftershock
- Cricket and Friends See a Comet!
- Modeling and Rigging a Mechanical Model
- Making of the Sun
- Building Online Generators with Blender

A new fantastic release of the 3D suite Blender hit the streets. Again filled up with tons of lovely new features. This time a lot is focused on the Blender Game Engine (BGE):
* Texture Nodes
* Projection Painting
* Etch-a-ton armature
* Boolean Improvements
* JPEG2000 Support
* Video Texture in BGE
* Real-time Dome rendering in BGE
* BGE speedup
* Bullet Physics upgrade
* Game Engine Modifier support
* Improved Game Logic and Python API
* New Python scripts and a lot of bug fixes
All new features in detail and download available at the Blender website.

One of the oldest projects where i'm part of it (and in this case i'm founder of it too) is: Webcuts - Internet Film Fest Berlin. Now the call of submission started and everybody is invoked to submit his movie (don't forget to read the rules).
Of course the Webcuts project is looking for sponsors too
This time i started to design the flyer and website using Inkscape. For the prepress PDF of the flyer and web graphics export i used GIMP.

Since May 15 the Inkscape 0.47 development is in feature freeze and in some days the Hard freeze follows. In mid of June the vector graphics software Inkscape 0.47 will be available. For more details about the 0.47 release check out the roadmap and my older posts about Inkscape:
http://my.opera.com/area42/blog/2008/05/25/inkscape-0-47-space-optimization
http://my.opera.com/area42/blog/2008/07/16/inkscape-0-47-path-effects
http://my.opera.com/area42/blog/show.dml/1993194

Of course this upcoming release needs a new About screen. So the typical Inkscape About Screen Contest is announced.

From my beginings i know it's really hard to lose your own creative work by a disk crash or another unwanted behavior. Since i switched to Ubuntu Linux i really enjoy the backup possibilities:

* Simple Backup (package sbackup)
* Time Vault
* Back in Time

Pavel Kanzelsberger, the developer of the image editor Pixel, wrote at his blog again that the release of the Pixel 1.0 comes closer. He presented a distributor for it too. This isn't the first message about a final release and after so much announcements it isn't save if this will really happend.

After nearly 2 years the publishing software Passepartout get's a new update and is now available as version 0.7.1. The development will go on and we may 0.8.0 release this year too. The GTK based Passepartout could be an alternative to Scribus which based on QT.
Scribus is now available as version 1.3.3.13 (after releasing 1.3.3.12 nearly a year ago).
Qtpfsgui has a longer development break too and is ready for download as version 1.9.3 since yesterday. This update fixes some bugs and brings speedups on multicore computers.

The Smashing Magazine published an interesting collection of logo designs. Well done again!
Check out their older posts too:
* 58 Creative Logos
* Creative Logos