The road to 0.47

Following announcement about our participation at Google Summer of Code 2009 we declare that we are beginning to wrap up to release long anticipated 0.47 version of Inkscape.

Here is the current plan

1. Chill phase (in progress). Development focuses on wrapping up with no further refactoring. We identify 'make distcheck' issues, triage bug reports, run an About Screen contest (more on that soon) and create a draft of Release Notes, then update tutorials and other docs.
2. Frost phase (May 1, 2009). Most development is complete. Release Notes should be >90% filled in. Bug Hunt: 500 points. We also post inkscape-0.47-alpha.tar.gz
3. Feature Freeze (May 15, 2009). There will be no further development work and all features that can't be finished in time will be disabled. We focus on critical bug fixing, finalize all tutorials, docs, etc., we finalize all extensions. Translators do their work too. Inkscape must pass 'make distcheck'. We upload inkscape-0.47-beta.tar.gz
4. Hard freeze (May 25, 2009). Only release wardens can commit to mainline. We focus on release-critical bug fixing, finish translations, release notes etc. Packagers test creating pkgs of the -beta release. We upload inkscape-0.47-rc1.tar.gz
5. Branch (June 5, 2009). We establish the stable branch for release and complete any late-late-late work, also do final verification of packaging, release notes, docs, etc. and publish more release candidates until it's ready for releasing. We also plan 0.47.1+ release(s), if it's required.
6. Release. We upload inkscape-0.47.tar.gz and builds for various systems on June 15, 2009 and post official announcements.

Any help much appreciated!

Inkscape at Google Summer of Code 2009

Today approved Google Summer of Code 2009 projects were announced, and we have five projects:

• Felipe Sanches will work on ICC/CMYK workflow, mentored by Jon Cruz;
• Soren Berg will create scriptable API, mentored by Ted Gould;
• Krzysztof Kosiński will implement multiple path editing in the Node tool, mentored by bulia byak;
• Arcadie Cracan will improve our somewhat forgotten Connector tool, mentored by Michael Wybrow;
• Marco Cecchetti will further develop lib2geom, mentored by Nathan Hurst.

That makes three new and two returned students. We wish our students and mentors an amazing summer!

SVG Open 2009 is announced

The 7th international conference on Scalable Vector Graphics will take place from October 2-4, 2009, in Mountain View, California, hosted by Google at the Crittenden Campus. At this conference you can learn about subjects varying from specialized technical visualizations to interactive multimedia art. The program includes presentations, beginner and advanced level workshops. And of course you will have the ultimate opportunity to meet people from the SVG community, industry and the W3C SVG Working Group.

The organizing committee is looking for contributors presenting a paper or teaching a course. Presenters are asked to submit an extended abstract in English with an approximate length of 400 to 800 words by May 15 to svgopen.org. The abstracts are reviewed by a reviewing committee and presenters will be informed about acceptance on or before June 26. If your abstract is accepted, you will be asked to submit your full paper by August 31, according to instructions that will be sent to you. Accepted abstracts, papers and presentations will be published in web proceedings.

The list of potential presentation and course topics is published at SVG Open website. However organizers are still investigating a venue for holding workshops and courses. Potential course instructors are asked to submit a course outline by May 15. The outlines will be reviewed by a committee and instructors will be informed about acceptance on or before June 26.

All Inkscape users and contributors are welcome to attend!

JessyInk 1.0 released!

Recently Hannes Hochreiner released the first stable version of JessyInk — a JavaScript that can be incorporated into an Inkscape SVG image containing several layers to create a presentation. Each layer will be converted into one slide of a presentation. With features like slide transition effects, index sheet, master slide and autotext like slide title, slide number and number of slide it makes a perfect excuse to use your favourite browser instead of any of the heavier packages like OpenOffice.org Impress or MS PowerPoint.

Some fixes in Inkscape source code were done by Ted Gould to specifically adress issues reported by Hannes.

You can also watch a screencast by heathenx that demonstrates use of JessyInk.