Inkscape is finalist of Open Source Awards 2010

Packt Publishing announced finalists of the Open Source Awards 2010, and Inkscape is among them in the Open Source Graphics Software category! Voting for the winner among finalists started this Monday and will last till November 5.

Eggbot, and Inkscape powered art robot

We'be been tracking all kinds of fancy uses of Inkscape for quite a while, and this one deserves Fancy with a capital F: Eggbot. Quoting the official website:

The Eggbot is an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball size to that of a small grapefruit — roughly 1.25 to 4.25 inches in diameter (4-10 cm). Super adjustable; designed to draw on all kinds of things that are normally "impossible" to print on. Not just eggs but golf balls, light bulbs, mini pumpkins, and even things like wine glasses — with a bit of work.

The Eggbot software allows you to control the 'bot from within Inkscape — a superb freeware illustration program — on Mac, Windows, or Linux computers. You can draw an image directly, trace a photograph, or import designs from other programs.

Stay tuned for more news on using Inkscape in production.

Inkscape in a computer orientation class

On September 2, 2010, Carl Symons led a one-day beginner's computer orientation class for a Native American community. He was very pleased with the response to Inkscape:

"They all wanted Inkscape loaded on their new computers. It is a wonder-full, wonderful application. This Native American nation's (Coastal Salish) heritage and culture is loaded with arts, in particular totem-like images where Inkscape excels. These students were already making exceptional images after just a few hours.

"One girl did a piece with one star, Ctrl-D-ing, tweaking and arranging the copies. She was gone into the timelessness of creativity. I think that she started with the star tool immediately after launching Inkscape. I showed her a couple of things and she was on her way. This girl is also a bead artist, and was excited about using Inkscape to envision some beadwork.

"One student got a big kick out of Inkscaping the tutorials… Another guy was drawing caricatures with the calligraphic tool.

"Inkscape is such a great way for new digital artists to get amazing results quickly. There's something valuable about people being able to get a good result quickly with Inkscape that makes it a nice tool for artists. They don't have to fight with the technical learning curve."

Plans for 0.48.1

We have discussed possibility of releasing the first point version, 0.48.1, with bugfixes and translation updates, and agreed to do it around October 25. That gives you, our dear community, over a month to report issues and update translation to have them in the next stable release. We already have fixed a number of bugs, including a couple of crashers, and there are likely to be some improvements to the new input devices configuration dialog.

In the mean time we restored broken LiveJournal syndication of news from inkscape.org, so if you are a LiveJournal user, you can add this feed to your friends list

Google Summer of Code 2010 is over

Google Summer of Code is over now, and we have mixed results. Unfortunately we lost two students at midterm evaluation in July, and another student at final evaluation in August. On the other hand, we have two very successful projects.

The first project, by Krzysztof Kosiński, was about porting the whole rendering to Cairo, which resulted in a considerable performance boost itself. But Krzysztof also implemented support for multiple cores/processors to use multiple threads for rendering SVG filters. He is also planning to implement SVG filters in OpenCL, so that rendering could be delegated to GPU where available. The second project, by Abhishek Sharma, was about C++ification of SPLayer and privatization of XML nodes which is also going to help parallel processing.

The other good news is that one of the projects that failed at midterm evaluation, PowerStroke live path effect, was picked by the student's mentor, Johan Engelen. Initial implementation is already available in development tree, but currently disabled by default. It is quite possible that this LPE will be available in 0.49, as well as both successful GSoC projects.