Inkscape 0.44 Hard Freeze

May 31, 2006

This past week has seen an intensive focus on bug fixing. After only a week's work, we've already surpassed our goal. The must-fix bugs identified for this release have been addressed.

Due to this achievement, we're now moving into Hard Freeze, in final preparation for release. Translators are hard at work bringing translations up to date, and the Release Wardens (Jon and Aaron) are coordinating final bug fixes and general spit and polish. We hope to have the final release out within a couple weeks or so.

Inkscape 0.44-pre1 Preview Release

May 30, 2006

A new preview (beta) release of Inkscape 0.44.0 is now available. If you aren't already testing 0.44, you'd better hop to it! We're making fast work of our bugs and expect to have the final release within a week or two. At this point, we are especially interested in hearing of installation or packaging problems.

You can download pre-releases from our SourceForge Files Page. Check our Release Notes for details of what's changed, and our Reporting Bugs page for directions on helping to ensure Inkscape 0.44 is solid.

Inkscape Translation Progress

May 28, 2006

Inkscape has now entered 'String Freeze' for the 0.44 release. This enables our translators to focus on bringing all the translations up to date without worry of strings changing at the last minute.

We'd like to give special recognition to Inkscape user Chrisjia, whose work has improved the translation status of zh_CN (Chinese) from 5% to 99%!

Inkscape is translated into many languages, but not all! Check if it is translated well into your language, and if not, please consider working on this. Translation is a very important way to help improve Inkscape, and directly benefits those who share your language. We have documented the steps to doing translation - you don't need to know anything at all about programming! We have an active, fun translation team, that we'd love to encourage other translators to join.

Average translated: 1067 ( 49 %), fuzzy:  458 ( 21 %), untranslated: 616 ( 28 %)

Total number of PO files: 38
Significantly translated PO file count:    9
  Average number of strings translated: 2052 ( 95 %)
  Significantly translated locales:      ca cs de es fr it lt sl zh_CN

Inkscape 0.44-pre0 Preview Release

May 25, 2006

A preview (beta) release of Inkscape 0.44.0 is now available. We're asking that users please download and test it out, and report any bugs they find, and encouraging packagers to provide packaged versions of this release. We're particularly interested in hearing about installation issues, crash or data loss bugs, or problems with any of the new features.

You can download pre-releases from our SourceForge Files Page. Check our Release Notes for details of what's changed, and our Reporting Bugs page for directions on helping to ensure Inkscape 0.44 is solid.

Final Summer of Code Projects

May 22, 2006

Thank you to all the students who sent proposals, and all the mentors who volunteered to participate! Google has announced the final selections based on our rankings. As you can imagine, the selection was tough to arrive at, but we feel these projects will have a transformational effect on Inkscape's power for users:

 Application                                Student            Mentor
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
 SVG Filter Effects #1                      Niko Kiirala       Bulia
 Inkboard Protocol Spec / Lib Conversion    Dale Harvey        David Yip
 PDF Export with Cairo                      Mikos Erdelyi      Ted Gould
 Memory Optimization                        Marina Diezler     MenTaLguY
 SVG Filter Effects #2                      Hugo Rodrigues     Bulia

One of the SVG filter effects projects will focus on implementing the effects in the renderer, the other will focus on the backend SPObject/XML portion.

Status for Inkscape 0.44 Release

21 May, 2006

The latest Inkscape Release Status shows that we are nearly ready for Feature Freeze. We have fixed the date for freezing to the 23rd; there's several efforts that need to wrap up, but hopefully this will give sufficient time.

Next, we will be generating a "Must Fix" bug list, and producing a -pre0 release for people to test. Due to the huge number of new features, we really need to ask the community for help banging on the codebase and looking for issues.

    Apr 23rd - Development continues on the ~24 items identified
               For non-0.44 feature work, please use branches
 
    May 18th - Achieve completion of at least 50% of the items.
               Work continues on the remaining 12.
               Work ceases on any other features.
               Notification to translators
               Begin focusing on bugfixes.
               Identify preliminary "must-fix" buglist
 
    May 23rd - Feature Freeze
               All feature development work ends
               Finalize the "must-fix" buglist
               Issue pre-release packages for testing
               Focus on bug fixes, translations, & docs

   ~May 27th - String Freeze
               All tutorial work finished
               No further changes to internal text

    June     - Hard Freeze
               Translation work finishes
               Final resolution on all "must-fix" bugs
               Issue one or more release candidates
 
    Jun/Jul  - 0.44 Release

New Site Design

15 May 2006

Inkscape.org has a new look. The new site design is based on AJ Ashton's winning entry to the 2005 website design contest on Deviant Art. Special thanks to Josef Vybiral and Dale Harvey for their work crafting the design in CSS and HTML.