"The open palette: How to use Inkscape's new blur filter"

Nicu Buculei has written an article on Inkscape's blur feature For RedHat Magazine. It includes a tutorial of shiny, reflective balls with shadows and specular highlights and other nifty things. :-)

Open Font Library Logo Competition

From Ryan Lerch: The Open Font Library (OFL.o, www.openfontlibrary.org) is proud to announce the commencement of the Open Font Library Logo competition today, February 26, 2007. Artists and designers of all ranges are invited to make a logo to help identify the project.

Spanish article in Linux Magazine on Inkscape

An article in the Spanish version of Linux Magazine by Juan Miguel Ramirez shows off examples and make an evaluation of the program. Even if you don't speak Spanish, check out the example of a penguin swatting a butterfly! ;-)

New Bucket Fill tool

John Bintz has added a new flood fill tool, that performs a bitmap-based fill of a rendered version of the canvas, then traces the result back into SVG. There's a spiffy new bucket icon on the toolbar for accessing it.

Cairoification of Inkscape

Bulia reports good results from an experiment in converting Inkscape's outline mode to using Cairo:

...in about 3 hours I converted our outline mode rendering to cairo. The result of this experiment, after I adjusted the tolerance of cairo to match our outline mode quality, is near parity. That is, cairo is about as fast as our own renderer, at least for outline mode (i.e. lots of paths but no gradients or transparency).

Photorealistic art with inkscape 0.45

Luciano Lourenco, a member of our Brazilian Inkscape community, has produced a rather stunning example of the power of the new Gaussian Blur capability:

Everyone <3's Inkscape

Happy Valentine's Day! While the press hasn't seemed to get too excited over our latest release, Inkscape 0.45 is seeing a lot of love by the community, and the word of mouth is really bubbling. Lots of signs show that this has been accepted as a very successful release.

Jon Galloway blogs about the release, as does Renaissance Man, #sh, and Planet Beranger. Thank you's to everyone who have helped spread word of the release through their blogs!

We succeeded in getting 0.45 done in time for Ubuntu's feature freeze for Feisty, and it's been incorporated. Already demand is building to see a backport to Edgy.

Also, it's interesting that Apple is now listing Inkscape in their collection of UNIX and Open Source Downloads.

SCALE Roundup

Ted and others were kind enough to give summaries of their experiences at the Southern California Linux Expo this past weekend. Some interesting observations:

• 50% of the people there hadn't even heard of inkscape! They must be living under a rock!! Come on everyone, help us get the good word spread further. :-)
• The inkscape booth easily outdrew the commercial booths nearby.
• David Uhlman's talk on top Linux Desktop Applications is always the most popular talk and this year he cited Inkscape as the best graphics package, due principly to Inkscape's "continual improvement".

"LA hosts laid-back Southern California Linux Expo"

Here's an article with a rundown on this past weekend's SCALE conference:

The fifth annual Southern California Linux Expo last weekend at the Westin Los Angeles Airport Hotel brought in more than 1,200 paying attendees. SCALE featured a wide range of talks on topics from Inkscape to OpenNMS, and an exhibit hall with about 70 projects and companies from the Linux and open source community.

New development work

With the release only a week old, development activity is already purring along. Kees Cook has started reworking the printing dialog -- a long requested feature, but one that's only just become easy to do thanks to Gtk+ 2.10. Jasper has contributed code that implements a faster blur algorithm for the best and better settings, which will hopefully address some of the performance issues users have reported with the new blur feature.

Rilascio di Inkscape 0.45

Inkscape 0.45 è ora ufficialmente disponibile per il download.

Questa versione porta con sè molte novità introdotte grazie ai partecipanti del Google Summer of Code 2006, nonchè molte altre migliorie. La più importante è certamente il filtro gaussiano che permette di sfuocare in maniera naturale e omogenea qualsiasi oggetto in Inkscape, sia esso un testo, una forma, un'immagine o quant'altro.

Per informazioni più approfondite si leggano le Note di Rilascio per Inkscape 0.45.

Rilascio Inkscape 0.45-pre3 Beta

L'ultimo rilascio di test per Inkscape 0.45 è scaricabile da Sourceforge.

Sono stati scoperti alcuni problemi nei pacchetti della pre2 e sono state aggiunte un gran numero di traduzioni. Non mancano inoltre correzioni di bug dell'ultimo minuto. Siete tutti invitati a testare e a segnalare problemi; se non si presentano ulteriori problemi siano fiduciosi di rilasciare finalmente la versione 0.45.0 questo weekend.