Linux for Designers

May many Blender heads know that there is always a dev build of Blender at Graphicall.org, but now a first official alpha of the new Blender 2.5 is released.
3D artists that hate the old interface of Blender should definetly check out the new version! I tested the Alpha0 myself and it was running fast and very stable. The new Blender 2.5 interface looks quite amazing.
By studing the timeline and documentation you will see this is just a beginning and we get a lot but we will get much more

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

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!

Dennis Ippel has created a script which export scenes of Blender as Flash ActionScript 3.0 objects for various Flash 3D engines like Papervision3D. That is a real cool addon to bring 3D into the web using Flash.
For details visit the official exporter webpage.

This year Gran Canaria hosted both the Akademy and GUADEC conferences. The most important hackers from KDE and GNOME were for the first time at the same place.
Now the videos of a large amount of talks are available. My favorite one is Matthew Paul Thomas about Common interface bloopers - really true, very funny

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.

After Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny - Durian is the third Blender movie project. The movie will based on a script of Martin Lodewijk, a comic author from the Netherlands. Colin Levy from the USA will be the director and David Revoy from France will create the concept art. Ton Roosendaal will be again the producer and Brecht van Rommel will be again one of the developers. Check out the team page for more details.
If you are a Blender pro and artist or a developer then polish your portfolio and submit your profile up to the 10th of June 2009.

At the last days a lot of interesting news about Blender poped up:
* First: There will be soon a version 2.49 including improvements and new features: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=152631

* Second: The documentation of the new particle system has been completely updated:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Physics/Particles

* Third: The Blender Foundation released some guidlines about the logo and name usage:
http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/logo/

Here is a short summery of what is going on at the Inkscape project:
* GSoC student Jasper van der Gronde started working on support for OpenMP which brings multi processor support to Inkscape
* A spray tool is planed to be integrated based on some GSOC work from 2008
* students are wanted for GSOC 2009 working on new Inkscape features

I'm a little bit late with it: InnerWorld, a landscape generator running inside the 3d suite Blender and uses internal noise functions and external height fields, is now available as alpha 0.0.6:
* Procedural object placement.
* User defined objects can be duplicated to populate the generated mesh.
* For calculating locations different strategies can be selected. Supported are grids, Poisson disk sampling and spirals.
* Random generators can add variations in size, locations and rotation of duplicated objects.

A tutorial about procedural object placement is available too.