Linux for Designers

The Gnome Color Management project has now it's own website. GNOME Color Manager is a session framework for the GNOME desktop environment that makes it easy to manage, install and generate color profiles. They integrated ArgyllCMS for calibrating devices. A lot of the progress and the details can be found on Richard Hughes blog too.

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

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!

As i wrote in my post about my new Dell Studio 17 and Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 i've lost the possibility to get thumbnails Photoshop PSD files in Nautilus.
But now i discovered how to get thumbnails of GIMP XCF files Just install the packages "xcftools" and "gnome-xcf-thumbnailer". It seems there is a bug in the package "gnome-scf-thumbnailer" because the dependency about the packages "xcftools" is missing.

After a longer development break the image viewer gThumb is back. This time again with bugfixes and translation updates. All details about this release can be found at the "News" page.

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...

Once i reported that i kicked of the steppers of my theme, in the last weeks i started now to redesign it. The goal is again to think about what is really needed if you are a power user and you are very familiar with your desktop. I ask my self what i'm using/ where i'm looking often (accelerators and toolbar) and what/ where not (menu, statusbar, windows titles).
As a UI designer i really enjoy it that you need just gEdit and Gimp to modify/ create a theme and not any additional theming-switching-patch-hidden-registry-stuff-tool
Here is a screen of the actual state of "New Glory":

Besides Phatch the mass file renamer pyRenamer is one of my favorite batch tools. Version 0.6 brings besides many bugfixes a lot of new features:
→ You can save your favorite patterns to reuse them
→ Undo/redo feature
→ Now you can rename more music formats (ogg, real... those supported by hachoir)
→ You can keep file extensions untouched while renaming
→ Now you can rename directories
→ Allow renaming files and moving them to another directory
→ Added some icons to identify file types
→ Added random number pattern {rand}
→ Added refresh option, to reload files and directories
→ Added autopreview option
→ Add option to fix duplicated symbols on filename
→ Add option to ignore next errors while renaming
→ Better explanations on error dialogs
→ New icon
A Deb archive fur Ubuntu is available for download too.

Whoo-Hoo - Gnomefiles is back! It was hard to read that after it get hacked it may didn't come back. But it does. Thanks Eugenia!

The GSoC F-Spot Color Profile project are now in alpha state or like Wasja wrote in his blog: "So all big bugs with color profiles were fixed".
Ruben made a huge speed improvement for tagging in SVN too. More about his sidebar work can be found in his blog.
BTW if you like to know what's going on in the GSoC projects check out the Planet SoC blog.