Linux for Designers

There is a lot of discussion this time about a real single-window GIMP at the development list. Peter Sikking which is one of the heads behind GUI improvements of GIMP created a nice proposal which includes anything i dreamed of! Real good work Peter!

The Generic Graphics Library GEGL is now available as version 0.1.0. All changes of GEGL can be found at the release post. GEGL is part of the core libraries of the image editor Gimp too.
A important hint of the developers is that GEGL 0.1.0 didn't work with Gimp 2.6.6, as they wrote "This is not because GEGL would be incompatible, but rather because of a stupid bug in the run-time version check.". So we all have to wait for Gimp 2.6.7 which will ship with some other bugfixes too

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.

Once i was very happy getting a message from Jan Dudek about his PSD PixBuf loader for Photoshop PSD files for the Gnome Linux Desktop. It makes it possible viewing such files with any Gnome application supporting PixBuf loaders.
Now i'm very happy again because Stephane Delcroix did the same for Gimp XCF files. So Nautilus, gThumb, F-Spot, EOG etc. can display the open standard and the industrie standard for layered image documents
The bad thing is i didn't get it running at the moment. May someone can create a Deb package for it .

For those that can't get enough filters for GIMP should check out G'MIC Toolbox, a GIMP plug-in which defines a set of various filters, including artistic filters, image denoising and enhancement, 3D renderers, etc.
A Deb package for Ubuntu is available too.

Today i get a real amazing message from Jan Dudek. He started developing a PixBuf load for Photoshop PSD files for the Gnome Linux Desktop. That means PSD support for any Gnome application like the image viewer EOG, the document viewer Evince and in combination a thumbnailer for *.psd or *.pdd files for Nautilus too.

Read more...

Ok, this is not a really new message but the update progress at the Pixel website is really slow - so i visited not often: Pavel Kanzelsberger, the developer of the image editor Pisel (which is a commercial Photoshop clone), had announced that he found an investor and so the final release of Pixel will be at the 30. April 2009. Pixel will be available for Linux too.

Gimp 2.6.0 is new & fresh and the first bugfix release will arrive us soon. As Sven Neumann the maintainer wrote:
...probably on Wednesday
...couple of bug-fixes
...GIMP 2.7 and we can start to add new stuff
...define some goals for GIMP 2.8. A few items are...
- merge the successful GSoC projects
- attempt a port of the projection code (and perhaps more) to GEGL
- change tools to draw using the Cairo library
It seems we have a lively development That renembers me on going further with my webtools for Gimp.

The release of Gimp 2.6 is very close and so there are a bunch of new features added to the Gimp 2.5.x development version. The developers looking know for people helping to update the translations of GIMP.
UPDATE: You can grab some Deb archives for Ubuntu Hardy here (but be carefull it replaces Gimp 2.4.x): https://launchpad.net/~c-korn/+archive

It rumors that the final of Gimp 2.6 will be available this month. I do not know the truth especially we hadn't a official announcement of 2.5.2 yet. At Gimpusers.com you will find a first summery about what's new in Gimp 2.6.