Linux for Designers

Now it's time to protect your rights, join the worldwide protest against ACTA, PIPA and SOPA:
http://www.facebook.com/events/182716005161256/

Sign online against ACTA here: http://www.avaaz.org/de/eu_save_the_internet_spread/?copy

The release candidate of Speed Dreams 2.0 is out. I'm very proud of all the last minute graphic fixes i did and of course about all the bug fixes the coding guys did.

Since 2.30 (Ubuntu 10.04) a color management tool ship with the Gnome desktop. Just install the package "gnome-color-management" and you will find it at "System > Preferences > Color Profiles" (or start gcm-prefs at the shell).
That sounds great but it didn't help you a lot when you do not have a color spider and your hardware is just customer level. A third part that is missing is the fitting color profile.
May you can download it on the manufactor page for some pro displays. But what to do if there is no manufactor support for color profiles? Then went over to the ICC Profiles and Monitor Settings Database and download it there.
This helps me a lot to get the colors of my new Dell L702x correctly display without the touch of too much blue.
BTW: There is a database of profiles for photographers too: http://www.drycreekphoto.com/icc/

On work i had to create screencasts for a customer and i really failed with Open Shot and Pitivi. Both have a nice UI but far from being stable and bug free. Meanwhile there are may much improved because Open Shot 1.4 and PiTiVi 0.15 hit the streets.
So i ask myself why not using Blender? It was a full success without any trouble. I really enjoyed video editing with Blender 2.59. The trick using Blender as a video editor is quite easy:
* You do not create 3D stuff at all
* Endable "Sequenzer" and "Compositing" in "Render (camera icon) > Post Processing"
* Setup at "Render (camera icon) > Encoding" the output type
* Arrange your screen layout in Blender to use "Video Sequence Editor" with its previews and a properties area (buttons)
* After importing and arranging the sources (strips) in the "Video Sequence Editor" you have only to press the "Animation" button at the properties area to render your video

Here is a screeny of my workspace:


Blender 2.5 is really rock stable, fast and delivers any feature i need. A great tool for recording screencasts is XVidCap which is available at the Ubuntu repositories.

With the release of version 2.59 the Blender 2.5 project remains as stable. The development started at 2007 and brings uncountable improvements to Blender (features, usability etc.).
If you started once with Blender and thought it was to hard to learn try it now again!
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-259/

Often newbies on Ubuntu use default apps as they are. Later they try "more powerful" ones. Wrong way - you can empower default apps a lot by installing additional plugin packages. You may have to activate them at the program preferences after install them.

Read more...

Wow i'd like to get that piece of Hao-Chun Huang - more about it on Designboom

It seems the WYSIWYG webeditor will ship in a few days including CSS3 und HTML5 support: http://www.bluegriffon.org

At all it looks interesting and is may a good addition to my favorite gedit.

For my next talks on IICO and may on TYPO3 Camp Berlin i bought a nice Phillips SNP 3000 presentation stick. It is made for OS X and Windows and so i get sure it will run on Ubuntu Linux too. The USB hardware was identified (use dmesg on shell) but it didn't work at all

After some tries on a Mac i figured out that it runs their only when using teh USA keyboard option. So i added an additional "USA" keyboard layout to my Ubuntu Lucid (System > Preferences > Keyboard). Now anything works fine in Evince (PDF) and OpenOffice Impress and.

While the presenter stick works like a simple keyboard device it is software independent and can be used on any software.