Linux for Designers

A first demo reel of Ben Dansie's applictaion for the open source Blender movie project Durian is available. It looks quite amazing and we all can hope getting much more of this stuff:


BTW: The Durian project is looking for sponsors

Again a the Google Summer of Code is started. Here is an overview of interesting and accepted graphic applications, web development apps and multimedia tools:
* Aqsis Renderer http://wiki.aqsis.org/dev/soc_2009
* Audacity http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=GSoC_Ideas
* Blender http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GSoC/2009/Ideas
* FFmpeg http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=FFmpeg_Summer_Of_Code_2009
* GIMP http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/SummerOfCode2009ideas
* Gnome Desktop http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2009/Ideas
* Hugin/ Panotools http://wiki.panotools.org/SoC_2009_idea
* Inkscape http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Googles_Summer_Of_Code_2009
* OSM http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/GSoC_Applications_2009
* Python http://wiki.python.org/moin/SummerOfCode/2009
* Scribus http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/GSoC_2009_Ideas
* TYPO3 CMS http://typo3.org/development/gsoc2009/ideas/

Hopefully a lot of ideas become reality and all these projects will get a lot of new, strong, powerful developers!

The project Renaissance startet, its goal is a new, intuitive interface for OpenOffice or how they descibed themeself: "Create a User interface so that OpenOffice.org becomes the users' choice not only out of need but also out of desire.".
As Frank Loehmann at the Sun-Blog wrote the project is in the beginning. Everybody is invited to tell the team more about the pros and cons of the existing user interface.

The Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) May 2009 is set to happen in Montréal, Québec, Canada (like the 2007 meeting, it will take place at L'École Polytechnique). Dam this is far away. This year i planed to travel to LGM 2008 in Warsaw (Poland) but i missed it

Wasja (Vasiliy Kirilichev) have posted screenies and a summery of his GSOC F-Spot project progress.
Lars-Peter Clausen has posted an interesting status report of the GSOC PyGimp which sounds great too.
GSOC projects for Scribus have their own mailing list, it seems their a little bit on hold.
The GSOC projects of Inkscape are still alive, take a look at their mailing list and watch out about posts from Maximilian Albert and Felipe Sanches.

It is nice to see that this blog isn't the only one about open source and design. A friend droped me the url of Open Source Publishing - Design Tools For Designers - check it out its interesting!

Who is using GIMP, Inkscape. Blender, Scribus & Co? Linux people only or Mac fans and Windows users too?
Check out my poll at the side bar

Again M$ has a "new" strategy for "opening" there formats and APIs. So at the moment they contact open source projects for some kind of "help" and took as an example for moving towards to open source their OpenXML - very strange behavior at all. They contacted the Blender heads too . Read the article at Groklaw about the true goals of M$. There is a discussion about that email at the Blenderartitst board too.

If you like to use Eclipse for web development you should definetly try out Aptana Studio Community Edition. Aptana Studio Community Edition is really amazing and adds so much nice and cool features to Eclipse:
* A normal file tree
* FTP support
* AJAX development
* Validation
* Help and references
* additional plugins for Ruby, Adobe AIR and Php
A howto to add Aptana to your existing Eclipse is available too.
If you haven't Eclipse installed yet take as a base the Php Developer Tools (PDT).

Besides of an first alpha of Adobes richmedia kit AIR for Linux and the final release of Flex Builder 3.0 for Linux, Adobe is now member of the Linux Foundation.
At eWeek you can find an interestung interview with Kevin Lynch which is the technical chief of Adobe. Some weeks ago Adobe opened the doors of its open source labs too.