Bug Hunt for Inkscape 0.40 Release

Oct 29, 2004 - Since the announcement to begin the release process, bug fixers have closed an impressive number of bugs: 7 high priority, 11 medium priority, and 10 low priority. This work brings us to a total of 159 points, attaining our bug-fix goal. :-) There's some additional work to be done in completing the implementation of the layers feature, but hopefully we can achieve most of that within a week or so.

Meantime, WE NEED YOUR HELP! Right now, please download one of the pre-release snapshots from the download page and play with it. Look for any bugs, performance issues, installation problems, and especially crashes, and report them to us. Continue this as you have time in the days leading up to the release; the more you review, the better Inkscape 0.40 will be.

(We also plan to produce one or two pre-release statically compiled packages, so folks that have trouble installing the snapshots may have better luck with these instead.)

Happy Birthday Inkscape!

Oct 26, 2004 - Has it only been a year?? Yup, today is Inkscape's first anniversary. This time last year we registered Inkscape at SourceForge. Nov 6th was the first announcement of the project, and Nov 10th was our first release on Freshmeat.

It's been an amazing year with the project. We've had five very solid releases, each a major advancement over the previous. Tens of thousands of people use Inkscape today! Most importantly, we've succeeded in building a wonderful community of prolific developers and friendly users.

For the year to come, I think we can look forward to gaining solutions to many of the features and issues we're worrying about right now like PDF, extensions, Gtkmm, etc. CSS will probably be a major effort, but one we'll gain a huge amount of benefit from. I think (hope) we'll see expansion of Inkscape's audience to include technical drawing in a big way. I'd like to put some effort into building up a healthy donation system since we already have users asking about that.

I also hope we can continue to expand the size of the development team and the userbase. We should continue to encourage users to peek under the hood and fiddle with stuff; I'm hopeful the extensions system will also provide an easy way for users to get involved. We would also do well to expand our efforts at demoing and presenting Inkscape at trade shows and conferences.

Congratulations and thank you to everyone that's helped us get this far, and look forward to seeing what Inkscape can achieve in 2005. :-)

Plans for Inkscape 0.40 Release

Oct 25, 2004 - We've decided that the time's about right for a release. We've completed a decent amount of the goals set for this release but not all of them. However, it's been a while since we did a release and there's a lot of cool new features we'd like users to be able to start playing with.

As of today, we've shifted focus to bug fixing and finalizing current work to prepare for the release. To track our bug fixing progess, starting today we've adopted a point system and are attempting to achieve 150 points - each fixed bug counts as 3, 6, or 9 points depending on its priority. Already today we've scored 42 points!

New tutorial

Oct 21, 2004 - Bulia has completed a thorough tutorial on the four shape tools, as he feels they've reached maturity. "Inkscape shapes are clearly ahead of the competition both in features and in usability, implement everything that I can possibly think of, and are virtually bugless." The new "Shapes" tutorial is more extensive than other tutorials and includes both detailed descriptions of the shape tools and types as well as tips and examples. A preview is available via webcvs.

Inkscape at Universidad de A Coruna

Oct 18, 2004 - The University of A Coruna in Galicia, Spain will be having a celebration of Days of Graphical Design with Free Software in the evenings of October 27-28. Adrian Perez will be presenting 'Vectorial drawing with Inkscape' on the 28th.

Project Status 2004-10-15

Oct 15, 2004 - The bi-monthly status report for Oct 15 is online for review.

New Features: default gradients, master opacity, node editing

Oct 12, 2004 - Three new features have been added:

* When you switch an object to gradient fill or stroke, the new gradient is created with that object's previous fill or stroke color going from 1 to 0 opacity (instead of the hardcoded black-to-white fully opaque gradient as before). New objects do not share gradients now, unless you explicitly set two or more objects to use the same gradient via the Fill and Stroke dialog.

* The master opacity slider is moved from Object Properties to Fill and Stroke and can now work on multiple selected objects. It is now more convenient to adjust the transparency of objects with gradients or patterns.

* If a node has straight line path fragments on one or both sides, Ctrl+Alt+dragging that node in the node tool moves it along the direction(s) of these straight line(s) and their perpendiculars. This is an easy way to change the length of a straight line without changing its angle.

More on-canvas star interactivity

Oct 11, 2004 - The Roundedness and Randomization fields in the star controls panel are precise, but not very convenient. Now you can round a star interactively by Shift+dragging a star handle on the canvas, or adjust a star's randomization level by Alt+dragging a handle. Correspondingly, Shift+click on a handle zeroes roundedness, Alt+click removes randomization.

New Feature: Make bitmap copy

Oct 8, 2004 - The new command, "Make a bitmap copy" (Alt+B), exports a bitmap of the selected objects (hiding all other objects of the document), saves it as a PNG file in the directory of the document, and imports it back into the document placing it exactly over the original. This can be used e.g. to replace objects with gradients or transparency by bitmaps for printing or PS/EPS export, or for producing blurred shadows (see previous report).

New Feature: Blurred shadows

Oct 6, 2004 - Via prefs, you can specify an external filter that will be run on the PNG file after it is exported but before it is imported back. I use this for grayscaling and blurring the image to create a soft drop shadow for any object.

The script itself is share/extensions/inkscape-shadow.sh. It's not integrated into the extensions or plugin system in any way (Ted, I may need your help on this). The script requires Imagemagick 6.x to be installed.

Presently, to enable this requires a tweak to your preferences.xml (see bulia's Oct 5th post to the inkscape-devel mailing list for details). There are no plans currently for implementing a GUI, for various reasons, but for those who desperately need blurred shadows right now, this feature works well enough.

Python-based SVG-Utils package

Oct 4, 2004 - Daniel Taylor mentions that he's developed a library and some python scripts to help work with SVG files.

New Feature: Current style

Oct 2, 2004 - All object-creating tools can use the current style for new objects. The current style is the style that you last applied to an object (when changing its fill, stroke, transparency, etc). For example, after you paint some object black, new shapes you create will be black too. Alternatively, a tool can use its own style for new objects, which is not affected by document editing. The Preferences dialog lets you choose between using the current style (shape tools by default) and the tool's own style (text, pen, and pencil by default) for any tool, as well as to set the style of a tool from current selection. The "Apply to" list in the Fill & Stroke dialog is removed; this dialog now always sets the style of the selection.

Two other misc. usability enhancements have been added:

Double-clicking a tool button calls up the Preferences dialog open on the page of that tool.

The Preferences dialog remembers and reopens the page that was active the last time you used it.

Project Status 2004-10-01

Oct 1, 2004 - The bi-monthly status report for Oct 1 is online for review.