Linux for Designers

At familie redlich :systeme we do not care only about SEO and a perfect Typo3-based website, we care much about the customers needs and business workflow too. So developed an in-house standard that features anything needed for TYPO3 editors.
Besides the typical features like versioning, workspaces, groups, workflows and a perfect rich text editor - our websites ships now with a cool, clean, easy to use backend skin:

Compared with the admin standard TYPO3 interface this is a big step forward for editors using TYPO3 CMS. These screens illustrates again that TYPO3 can be very user friendly when it is setted up by pros

There is so much tech talk about the long run of the upcoming Typo3 5.0. Now the first time screenies of the new interface of the content management system are available. They are a radical break and they look promising. Check out the article at the T3N.

While there are no news updates since January of the BlueGriffon WYSIWYG Webeditor project, the Kompozer project is still alive and kicking. A 4th alpha (which runs pretty stable) of Kompozer 0.8 is availabe for download. Kompozer 0.8 is focused on a new Mozilla core and the new UI displays more relevant information about the current HTML element: DOM tree, style properties, HTML code.
A lot of localisations for Kompozer 0.8 are available too.

How to get Kompozer 0.8 running:
* Make sure the package "xulrunner" is installed
* Download the Kompozer 0.8 binaries for Linux
* Extract the archive as root in "/opt/kompozer"
* Now create a new starter at your Gnome main menu or panel with command:
    "/opt/kompozer/kompozer".

The SWFtools, basis of various other Flash tools and my SWF Exporter for GIMP, are now available in version 0.9. Besides improvement of existing tools the developers added a new tool calles AS3Compile. AS3Compile is a standalone ActionScript 3.0 compiler that is mostly compatible with Adobe Flex. This will open a new chapter of Flash development on Linux.

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 SVGSlice addon for Inkscape could be a start of something really cool! That would be really great for webdesign. Nearly the same idea is in my mind for GIMP since a year.

"Internet Explorer 6 will be SEVEN years old on August 27th. It came out a few weeks before the Twin Towers fell. It came out before the Nintendo GameCube. It came out before the first iPod." Dave Auayan is right with his initiative "IE Death March". Enough is enough! Please stop using Internet Explorer 6! May update to Internet Explorer 7 or use alternatives like Firefox or Opera.

A while NVU and the unofficial further development branch Kompozer seems to be the only real WYSIWYG web editors on Linux. With BlueGriffon the company Disruptive Innovations (a W3C member too) brings fresh blood into this area. Disruptive Innovations are the developers of the older NVU too. Against the older WYSIWYG web editors BlueGriffon is based on Firefox. At the moment it is only available via SVN or as nightly for Windows.

For me one of the best features of the upcoming Firefox 3.1 is the support for @font-face. This will bring real typos into the web and let web designers create more cool sites. So now we have @font-face support in Webkit (Safari), Gecko (Firefox) and Opera. That's great!
All about the new features of Firefox 3.1 can be found at the Mozilla Developer Center.

After we getting the Beta2 of the Internet Explorer 8 and Googles Chrome Beta now the fight about the fastes browser is opened again. This Time it is now about rendering HTML, this time it is all about JavaScript. 2 Day's Chrome take the throne of speed but the new build of Firefox 3.1 with TracMonkey is very close. Check out that stats:
http://scr3.golem.de/?d=0809/Firefox_TraceMonkey&a=62200

Some older performance tests:
http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/
http://scr3.golem.de/?d=0809/Google_Chrome&a=62163

Ok you notice the difference between 17866ms of the IE 7 and 1209 of Google Chrome, but can you notice the difference of 200ms? In fact that Google collects so many data, i didn't like the vision that Google collect any step i make at the web.