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A blog for designer, artists and developers programming websites, painting icons, creating multimedia content, doing dtp or constructing in 3D space using (Ubuntu) Linux.
Today the KOffice project released the 7th alpha of KOffice 2 including the image editor Krita 2 and the vector drawing app Karbon14 2. In this alpha Krita brings a new plugin architecture. Of course the alpha 7 includes a lot of bugfixes too.
Today the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 starts in Warsow (Poland). I visited the website and looking through the schedule table. There i found Phatch a photo batch processor. Phatch is an standalone alternative to David's Batch Processor that works only inside of GIMP. Ubuntu Linux ships with it, you just have to install the package "phatch". If you looking for a mass renaming utility take a look at pyRenamer.
A new monthly release of the powerful, cross platform font editor FontForge. Again a lot of bugfixes and smaller improvements . Read the change log for details. What I'm missing are news about the progress of the GTK port Hopefully this port didn't died. A Deb packages of Fontforge for Ubuntu can be grabed here.
JiriH has created a very cool squash and stretch ball rig demonstrating the animation features of Blender. The rig only works with Blender 2.46 RC and above. More details and Downloads at Blenderartists.org.
Qtpfsgui, a graphical user interface that enables users to work with HDR images, is updated to version 1.9.2. This Version tries to fix several filename encoding bugs.
Light Crafts has released Lightzone 3.5, a professional photo editor supporting 16bit image depth editing for RAW and HDR images, for Linux. You can download a trial too.
Adobe did another step towards to Open Source. With the Open Screen Project Adobe opens the FLV/FLV4- and SWF specification to everybody. Of course Adobe did this too push its AIR and Flash technology against the M$'s Silverlight and Sun's JavaFX.
During my own update session and the talk about WINE at the Hardy release party Berlin i forget that besides the normal Ubuntu distribution Ubuntu Studio 8.04 is available too. Ubuntu Studio is a special edition packed with a lot off tools for creatives focused on Graphics, Sound and Video. It ships with a special dark theme too and supports realtime audio by the kernel. You can update your normal Ubuntu installation to Ubuntu Studio by installing the "ubuntu-studio-*" packages. Thanx to Dan for reminding me
There are a lot of sites presenting you funny or horrible pictures - no deal. But to find something interesting and inspiring is quite hard. Two days ago i sit together with Nic in front of the screen and discovering two hours long FFFFOUND! - deal!
Developing websites is a lot of copy and paste work too but sometimes you loose the code in the clipboard by copying another code line. There are two clipboard applets for the Gnome desktop to fix this problem Glipper and Parcellite. First i trieb Glipper but it crashes on restart, now i'm using Parcellite which runs very smooth and is a ncie tiny tool. Glipper is in the sources of Ubuntu, a Deb package of Parcellite can grabed at Getdeb.
Based on a lot of bug reports the DevTeam reaches the first milestone of RawTherapee 2.4: * Full EXIF support & EXIF Browser * IPTC tag support * More input ICC profile options * A new highlight recovery method * Histogram now corresponds to cropped area * Runtime theme switching * Lots of other minor bugfixes und Tweaks
More details at the RawTherapee website. You can download this milestone too. Any bug and suggestion can be reported at the forum. RawTherapee is not open source but you can specify yourself what you like to donate to the author.
Those who looking for a solution creating video tutorials or screencasts should try out Salasaga (formaly known as Flame Project). A Deb package for Ubuntu Linux is available too. Or download the binaries of Wink 1.5 for Linux. Both solution will creating suberp Flash videos and allowing more then a simple capturing like xvidcap does. UPDATE: Check out recordMyDesktop too.
Yesterday i switched to Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 and it runs straight forward - very cool at all! Exploring it i found some interesting things: - Pimp up your Gimp: Check out the Package gimp-plugin-registry This package will add 14 plugins and inludes a batch converter too
- Search in Synaptic for "Gimp" you will find more additional plugins like ufraw, gtkam-gimp, gimp-data-extras, pandora
- If you have the vector drawing software Inkscape installed install UniConverter too so you can open and save much more vector file formats
- if you are a fanboy of the Tango icons goto /usr/share/inkscape/icons and * rename as root icons.svg to old_icons.svg * make a copy of tango_icons.svg and rename it to icons.svg * next time running Inkscape you have a nicer interface
- if you are using gEdit for web development install the package gedit-plugins too, after it enable all the plugins in the preferences for a very powerfull gEdit
If you are missing features in Gimp and didn't like to pay a lot for Photoshop you should definitely tryout Photoline. It's powerfull and stable as Photoshop itself, has the best PSD file support i ever saw and it is really cheap. The only bad thing is you need Wine to get it running on Linux. At the moment i getting some problems with the icons of the toolbars and sometimes the cursor is not visible. I think this could be fixed soon when a new stable version of Wine is available. All about Photoline 14.51 can be found in the release notes. UPDATE: I added a bug report to the bugzilla of the Wine project.
F-Spot, a full-featured personal photo management application with a modern interface, is official released as 0.4.3. It shipped with many bugfixes and some feature enhancements: * new print dialog with preview, new print options * new filmstrip widget in Edit mode * allow custom selection ratios for cropping * sort tags by popularity (desc) in tag-typing autocompletion * x-content/* support, integrate seemlessly with gnome 2.22 * works again on ppc architecture * tons of bugfixes, translation updates and improvments all over the place
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Today the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 starts in Warsow (Poland). I visited the website and looking through the schedule table. There i found Phatch a photo batch processor. Phatch is an standalone alternative to David's Batch Processor that works only inside of GIMP.
A new monthly release of the powerful, cross platform font editor FontForge. Again a lot of bugfixes and smaller improvements . Read the change log for details.
Hopefully this port didn't died.
The final of Blender 2.46 is very close but there are some todos on the list before releasing it. The 4th release candidate of Blender 2.46 is now available for download. Take a tour of the new features of Blender 2.46 in the Wiki or as a video too.
Qtpfsgui, a graphical user interface that enables users to work with HDR images, is updated to version 1.9.2. This Version tries to fix several filename encoding bugs.
Adobe did another step towards to Open Source. With the Open Screen Project Adobe opens the FLV/FLV4- and SWF specification to everybody. Of course Adobe did this too push its AIR and Flash technology against the M$'s Silverlight and Sun's JavaFX. 
During my own update session and the talk about WINE at the Hardy release party Berlin i forget that besides the normal Ubuntu distribution Ubuntu Studio 8.04 is available too. 
Developing websites is a lot of copy and paste work too but sometimes you loose the code in the clipboard by copying another code line. There are two clipboard applets for the Gnome desktop to fix this problem Glipper and Parcellite. 
Based on a lot of bug reports the DevTeam reaches the first milestone of RawTherapee 2.4:
Roman Cortes has built a graphic of Homer Simpson based on normal text elements and CSS. At the moment the server page is not answering so try the cached page of Google.
Those who looking for a solution creating video tutorials or screencasts should try out Salasaga (formaly known as Flame Project). A Deb package for Ubuntu Linux is available too.
If you are missing features in Gimp and didn't like to pay a lot for Photoshop you should definitely tryout Photoline. It's powerfull and stable as Photoshop itself, has the best PSD file support i ever saw and it is really cheap.
F-Spot, a full-featured personal photo management application with a modern interface, is official released as 0.4.3. It shipped with many bugfixes and some feature enhancements:
