Google Summer of Code projects announced

We are delighted to inform you that five students will be working on Inkscape this summer to bring a lot of significant improvements, both user visible and under-the-hood ones.

• Evangelos Katsikaros, mentored by Nathan Hurst, will implement spatiotemporal indexing which will improve perfomance of Inkscape.
• Krzysztof Kosinski, mentored by bulia byak, will implement Cairo-based rendering. Inkscape already uses Cairo for things like wireframe mode rendering, so the rest of it is going to use Cairo now.
• Zhenfeng Zhao, mentored by Johan Engelen, will implement Power Stroke LPE for Inkscape. Zhenfeng already did a successful brush related GSoC project for GIMP last year.
• Alex Trujillo. mentored by Ted Gould, will rework existing Save/Export implementation and improve the Export pane.
• Abhishek Sharma, mentored by Jon Cruz, will C++ify the SP layer and make XML nodes private.

We wish all our students and mentors to succeed at the respective projects and have a lot of fun while doing so!

Bug hunt, third week

Another week later we have gained 216 out of 300 points which means still almost 1/3 to go. Apart from fixing bugs you can report the ones you discovered by testing preliminary builds.

Please support Libre Graphics Meeting 2010

Libre Graphics Meeting is an annual working conference for the free software graphics application community. Developers from the full spectrum of graphics applications — image editors, photography, 3-D and 2-D animation, vector art, graphic design, typography — collaborate with each other on interoperability, push the state of the art in application functionality and user experience, and get important face-to-face interaction with users.

Attendance at LGM is free for developers and users alike — so the conference counts on the generosity of the open source graphics community to help underwrite the costs of putting on the conference and to help make it possible for individual open source developers to attend.

Please make a donation to the community fundraising campaign at http://pledgie.com/campaigns/8926 — and help a free graphics software developer benefit from the in-person collaboration at this year's LGM. Any amount, no matter how small, is helpful; many developers in Europe need only a small stipend for rail travel to make the trip a possibility. All donations are tax deductible for US taxpayers. For larger donations from corporations and individuals, contact us directly at lgm(at)gnome.org

Some of Inkscape developers are planning to attend the conference, and Jimmac (Novell design team, Tango project) is going to give a talk on icon design. To find out more about the conference please read this article.

Bug hunt, second week

A week later we reached 165 out of 300 points. Come join us in fixing bugs to make Inkscape 0.48 a great experience. Or test builds and report issues you encounter.

Bug Hunt Update

It's been a little over a week since we moved to the Frost stage and started the traditional bug hunt. Reportedly we have gained 93 out of 300 points for fixing bugs. It's not so bad, but we need more. If you want to help us fixing bugs, don't hesitate to visit the tracker and pick a task.