Linux for Designers

Firebug is, besides Web Developer, one of the best extensions for web development on Firefox. A week ago Firebug raised from the death and this week another beta update of the 1.2 brunch shipped. A lot of potentials developers formed now the Firebug Working Group. They got a new member too: Azer Koçulu.
Azer Koçulu is the developer of the JavaScript tool pi.debugger. He startet now bringing Firebug to The Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera. This port called Firebug Lite and is now available for download.

I will be at the next get-together of Ubuntu Berlin at the BELUG on Wednesday the 2nd July 2008. So if you are in town let's meet there
BTW the appointment of my workshop about open source graphic software is now finalized: Grafikprogramme unter Ubuntu

After 15 years of development and 5 release candidates Wine is published today as 1.0. In the release candidate phase so many bugs were fixed and Wine runs really smooth now my favorite Windows apps. If you ever had problems with older versions of Wine you should give it a try again
Read my post about the smoothest way getting you Windows app running too.

William Jon McCann has collected an interesting overview about operating systems and their bundled wallpapers - a lot of eyecandy.

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 are missing features in Gimp and didn't like to pay a lot for Photoshop you should definitely tryout Photoline. It's powerfull and stable as Photoshop itself, has the best PSD file support i ever saw and it is really cheap.
The only bad thing is you need Wine to get it running on Linux. At the moment i getting some problems with the icons of the toolbars and sometimes the cursor is not visible. I think this could be fixed soon when a new stable version of Wine is available.
All about Photoline 14.51 can be found in the release notes.
UPDATE: I added a bug report to the bugzilla of the Wine project.

Yesterday i had my talk about Wine at the Ubuntu Hardy release party Berlin. There were a lot of other interesting talks too and i met very nice people interested in graphic design, web development and Wine (greetings to Marcus, Renee and Gabriel ).
On some demo PC's i played around with Ubuntu Hardy Heron and i geting the feeling its very fast and runs much better then Gutsy did.
Soon i will publish my talk about WINE and getting Windows software running here.

If you are missing features in Gimp and didn't like to pay a lot for Photoshop you should definitely tryout Photoline. It's powerfull and stable as Photoshop itself, has the best PSD file support i ever saw and it is really cheap.
The only bad thing is you need Wine to get it running on Linux. All about Photoline 14.50 can be found in the release notes.

I found several posts about font comparsion for web development and cascading stylesheets. But most are incomplete or didn't compare all three major systems Linux, MacOS X and Windows.
Based on my own experience and a list of websites (Linux font equivalents, Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 font list, MacOS X Safari, iPhone fonts and Microsoft products and fonts) i created my own list.
Most users have Windows installed and Microsoft has once startet a webfont project. So i use typical Windows fonts as the base of my list. Another rule of the selection was that the alternative font faces didn't have a larger width then the the original has:
* Arial,Helvetica,FreeSans,"Liberation Sans","Nimbus Sans L",sans-serif
* "Courier New",Courier,FreeMono,"Nimbus Mono L","Liberation Mono",monospace
* Georgia,"Bitstream Charter","Century Schoolbook L","Liberation Serif",Times,serif
* "Lucida Sans","Lucida Sans Unicode","Lucida Grande",Lucida,sans-serif
* "Lucida Console",Monaco,"DejaVu Sans Mono","Bitstream Vera Sans Mono","Liberation Mono",monospace
* Palatino,"Palatino Linotype",Palladio,"URW Palladio L","Book Antiqua","Liberation Serif",Times,serif
* Tahoma,Geneva,"DejaVu Sans Condensed",sans-serif
* "Times New Roman",Times,"Nimbus Roman No9 L","FreeSerif","Liberation Serif",serif
* Verdana,"Bitstream Vera Sans","DejaVu Sans","Liberation Sans",Geneva,sans-serif

Some newer Vista fonts are still uncompared. An update will follow soon

Google has hired Codeweavers, which are the leaders of the Wine project and offering commercial services around it. Codeweavers should add better support for Photoshop on Linux. Since Wine 0.9.54 there are much improvements that let running Photoshop CS2 under Wine. This patches has nice side effects, so Flash 8 is working well too.
If you using Ubuntu there is a repository and a .deb packages archive to get the newest version.

You can tweak the Wine GUI too to give it a more Ubuntu styled look.