The version 1.6 of KOffice has been released today. With a lot of new stuff to check, including:

• in krita: perspective framework, layer mask, magnetic selection, a lot of new filters
• in kexi: a lot of improvement in the UI, a new data type : Images.
• in kormula: the best support of OpenDocumentFormula/MathML

And many more, as you can see in the official announcement.

This afternoon and tonight, I had a chance to thoroughly beat up on a very recent snapshot Krita 1.6svn What I wanted to see was if I could at last do simple RGB to CMYK conversions andAvoid diving to the command line.Would be usable and understandable for mere mortals who are not color [...]

After three weeks of bug smashing, and of polishing, KOffice 1.6 is ready for its first (and hopefully only) Release Candidate. Including a lot of bugs fixes since beta. As it is the last planned release before the final version, we will need a lot of people to start using it for real work.

This week, Seb Ruiz, a developper from Amarok team have created a new kipi plugin to export album collections to an Ipod device.An Ipod interface already exist in Amarok to export music. Seb have contributed to kipi-plugins project to add the same feature on all kipi host applications like digiKam.Take a look into the Seb blog for details.

While everyone seems to be packing and preparing for the Akademy, now that KOffice 1.6 is at the last stage of release, I started yesterday to forward port my changes from 1.6 to trunk.

My first impressions weren't so good. A lot of cosmetic changes, a lot of new stuff to relearn. But after a while, you get used to them, and most of them makes a lot of sense, even more sense than what was before in Qt3/KDE3.

Since digiKam provide a GPS locator, we need a tool to set the GPS informations in pictures.This week, i have created a new kipi plugin for that : GPSSync.This plugin use a GPX data file generated by a GPS device and set the Exif GPS metadata of pictures to correlate the date from the camera pictures and the GPS device.There is a screenshot of this plugin in action at this url

Fewer bugs
While I have been away in Fermo (a nice Italian city) last week to attend a summer school for my PhD, I was somehow expecting a flood of bug reports against krita 1.6 Beta1, but I got disappointed, or should I say: I got a pleasant surprise, there was very few bug reports, I can see two possibilities, either no one tested it or there was a very few number of visible bugs. Somehow, I tend to think that it is the second solution, mostly because krita's internal architecture hasn't changed much between 1.5 and 1.6 which means that there was less possibilities to add bugs in core functions. On the other, I tend to think that unfortunately, very few people test beta version, and that a lot of issues will be discovered after the release of 1.6.0.

Exiv2 0.11 library is now available for download. This new release include 2 new file format :- Sony Alpha 100 ARW raw files.
- PNG.Look the full announce on the web project pageI recommend all digiKam users to use this new version with the recent digiKam/DigikamImagePlugins 0.9.0-beta2 packages.

Since Paco work on digiKam/DigikamImagePlugins 0.9.0-beta2 tarballs, svn is frozen until this release is completed.This week i have toggle to kipi plugins to re-write completly the RAW converter plugin. See below the new features :- Fully compatible with the last dcraw version available .
- A lots of new conversion options (look the screenshoots at this url).
- Color space profile saved to target images.
- Metadata preservation during conversion (Exif/makernote) using Exiv2 library (JPEG/PNG).
- Using multithreading.

Paco working actually on next 0.9.0-beta2 release. Test packages are available at this url. Please report all compilation problems to the [email protected] mailing list.Over 50 bug entries in B.K.O have been fixed with this release and lots of new features have been added, especially in camera interface. Take a look at the current NEWS file for details.There is a fresh camera interface screenshot available at this url