Inkscape finalistes des Open Source Awards 2010

Packt Publishing vient d'annoncer la liste des finalistes des Open Source Awards 2010, et Inkscape est parmi les nominés dans la catégorie logiciels graphiques Open Source ! Les votes pour désigner les vainqueurs ont débuté ce lundi et dureront jusqu'au 5 novembre.

Eggbot, un robot artiste animé par Inkscape

Nous sommes à l'affut de toute utilisation fantaisiste d'Inkscape depuis un bon moment, et celle-ci mérite la mention Fantaisiste avec un grand F : Eggbot. Pour citer le site web officiel :

Eggbot est un robot artiste open source capable de dessiner sur des objets sphériques ou en forme d'œuf dont la taille peut aller de celle d'un balle de ping pong à celle d'un pamplemousse — soit approximativement de 1,25 à 4,25 pouces (soit entre 4 et 10 cm). Super ajustable ; conçu pour dessiner sur toutes sortes de choses sur lesquelles il est généralement « impossible » d'imprimer. Pas seulement des œufs, mais également des balles de golf, des ampoules, des petites citrouilles et même sur des objets tels que des verres à vin  — avec un peu de travail.

Le logiciel d'Eggbot vous permet de contrôler le robot à partir d'Inkscape — un magnifique logiciel d'illustration gratuit — sur Mac, Windows ou Linux. Vous pouvez dessiner l'image directement, vectoriser une photo, ou importer des dessins réalisés avec d'autres programmes.

Restez à l'écoute pour plus d'information sur l'utilisation d'Inkscape en 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.