Wednesday, 18 April 2007 01:31 GMT Even though Inkscape 0.45 has only been out for a couple of months there are already many new features that have been implemented that will be available in the next full release. Below is a quote from the inkscape news that talks about the new features, and if you want to give them a go download a development version of Inkscape. A new Paint Bucket tool allows you to click in any area bounded on all sides and fill it with color. So now you can scan in a pencil sketch, import the bitmap into Inkscape, and quickly fill its cells with vector paint, letting you completely skip the bitmap tracing step.

Monday, 16 Apr 2007 22:28 GMT Redhead Anime Girl
by gopher

Monday, 16 April 2007 03:35 GMT The Google Summer of Code projects have been announced and like always there are tons of great open source projects that will get a boost from this great program. Even though openclipart.org does not have a directly linked participant, there are a few projects that will benefit users and contributors of openclipart.org.

1. Importing from, and Exporting to, a remote ccHost instance
   The project is a implementation of a new feature in Inkscape, integrating this software with the Open Clip Art Library. It will allow Inkscape's users to publish their work to OCAL in an automated fashion and also import pictures from it, by merely pressing a key sequence.
   - From the google summer of code website (link)

Scribus Team got two project slots for Google Summer of Code 2007. We had 7 applications and coming up with two selections really wasn’t easy. I’d like to thank all students who applied to the program whether selected or not. You guys make it fun. The selected projects are Imposition plugin, which is our number [...]

Thursday, 12 Apr 2007 22:51 am GMT The Open Clip Art Library is proud to announce its first ever contest - the Xiph.Org - Spread Open Media Logo/Mascot Contest. The main goal of this contest is to finish up with a highly identifiable logo and or mascot for the Spread Open Media project. Spread Open Media (acronymn SOM) is a project that will spread the word about Open Media Formats in the same manner as Spread Firefox did for the open source web browser. SOM will promote Open Media formats like Xiph's ( Vorbis, FLAC, Speex, Theora and XSPF) and others like SVG and ODF.

In parallel of hacking on Krita, for quiet some time, I have been working on three small applications, written in ruby and Qt4, and today I feel it was time for a joint release of the code, even if it's early alpha software.

Weab
I have let my personal page dye when I started engineering school around five years ago, mostly by lack of motivation, and also because I wanted to rewrite the engine on a cleaner base, it use to be a php script that would read the content from text files and fill a template. The php wasn't really needed but at the time it felt like the easiest way to do. As I don't really need something dynamic, for the rewrite, I wanted to do the filling of the templates off-line, using a bunch of scripts.

Clipart of the Week Monday, 9 Apr 2007 23:41 am GMT Expresso
by Pipo

You know how it is, idly chatting in #scribus, compiling a little, surfing here and there… and suddenly you want to know the distance from Montreal (site of LGM2 ) to Victoria (site of FOSS4G 2007 ). Nothing as easy as that, just ask Google Maps for directions and it’ll give you the km [...]

Image alignment has quiet a lot of applications, for instance for creating panoramas. Or when creating HDR images from a bracketing when images weren't perfectly taken from the same position. And I want something simple, one click and done. Hugin is a good tool for creating panorama, but you need a degree of computer science with a major in panorama creation to achieve a good enough result.

It's a feature I wanted to have for 1.6, but at the same time I started to work on 1.6 features, my PHD director ask me to work on a similar stuff, and working on the same thing during the day and during the evening is not something I am capable of doing. So I left some unfinished code sleeping for almost a year and decided to resurrect it last week. The two images below were automatically aligned:

It has been quiet a long time since my last blog entry, but it has also been a long time since I have make presentable progress in Krita's feature, not that I have been sleeping. But today, thanks to the recent move of the KPlot widget in kdelibs (thanks to Jason and Pino for the hard work on it), I have made good progress on a plugin for creating HDR images (High Dynamic Range) from a set of pictures taken with bracketing. For some better examples of HDR images have a look to the flickr hdr group.