Today, I finished a new feature for krita, a perspective grid. If you wonder what it is, you can either skip the text and look at the screenshot, or read it: it's a grid for which all "parallel" lines intersect on a vanishing point. It's a very important feature when you are drawing buildings, because if you want to have a realistic picture, you have to be able to correctly draw parallel lines.

First, you need to use a special tool, to create your grid:

This is my fourth flash screen movie to promote again the future digiKam 0.9.0 with the new black and white converter.- See the digiKam search tool in action. Now digiKam indexes the metadata from RAW, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF files (where 0.8.x indexed only JPEG files). This information will be used to perform items searching on albums collection.- See how a RAW color picture is imported into the editor in 16 bits color depth.- See how the black & white converter is used to change color tonality and to apply black & white effects. Each set of filters and tonality is independent and shows a thumbnail preview on the right sidebar. Finally, a curve can be edited to set the exposure.

This is my third flash screen movie to promote again the future digiKam 0.9.0 about the new image editor tool supporting 16 bits color depth.- Shows how digiKam includes a new fast mode to show pictures preview without loading the whole image.- See as you can import a Canon RAW file in 16 bits color depth using a color profile from BibblePro .- Show how all the image editor plugins support 16 bits color depth. The new Noise Reduction tool will be used to reduce CCD noise due to long exposures.- See how all image editor plugins use sidebar (again), and provide new tools to change the zoom factor and preview rendering mode.

This is my second flash screen movie to promote again the future digiKam 0.9.0 about the camera interface improvements.- The sidebar is used everywhere now. This provides a homogeneous interface and optimized space.- You see new options to set IPTC tags during download, especially about photographer information and internal date.- The camera interface is a non-modal dialog. You can minimize it during a long download.- See how in the main interface JPEG files can be tagged using IPTC metadata to store Comments, Date, Ratings and Tags at the same time as digiKam database. In the future, PNG and TIFF will can be tagged like this as well.

Trying the "Wink" program to capture screen shots as a movie, I have created a Flash file about how to import a RAW file in 16 bits color depth into digiKam image editor using Color Management.- See how the Color Management plugin has been improved and is used automatically to properly import a RAW file in 16 bits. All the settings will be saved between plugin instances to work easily with a lot of RAW files.- The target image saved with editor is a PNG file in 16 bits color depth.- See how the metadata will be preserved in target file (Exif/Makernote).

Well, we said CMake rocks, but after the time we have used it, we have generally come to like it. So far it has provided our escape we wanted, and given us more flexibility and ease of build system modification. A generally good experience all round you could say.Well thats all very nice, technically, but [...]

The team is working hard actually to complete the next digiKam final release 0.8.2. Test packages are available at this url. Please report all compilation problems to the [email protected] mailing list.0.8.2 will be the last 0.8.x release. It's just a bugfix release (look the fix list on the NEWS file. The real future of digiKam project will be the 0.9.0 release. Marcel and me have planned to build the first 0.9.0-beta1 packages next week. Over 100 bug entries in B.K.O have been fixed with this release and lots of new features have been added. Take a look at the current

Firefox 2 Beta 1 milestone release is intended for testing purposes only by developers and testers.New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include specially support for SVG text using svg:textPath

Two days ago I filed issue #4000 on Scribus’s bug tracker. I also wanted to file #3000 but mrdocs beat me on that this January.Ugh? Another 1000 bugs in merely six months??Yep. This shows that the Scribus project is not only active at the development front but also has people who care about its quality [...]