gimp news

GIMP News

September 15

New Official Gtk
Peter Mattis has released a new version of Gtk, available from ftp.gimp.org, a mirror site, or from GIMP news.

Mailing List Blues
I apologize to everyone who has signed up for the mailing list recently and hasn't seen any activity. There have been some serious delivery lag times, and I haven't taken the time to discuss it with the volunteers who have generously donated me their SMTP services to run the list. Sorry! I'll try to resolve this soon.

New Animation Player
Adam D. Moss has created a very nifty animation player. It can take an animated GIF, for example, and display it as it would play in a web browser. It's available at the Registry.

September 12

GTK Needs A Logo
...and you can win fabulous prizes by entering the Gtk Logo Contest.

SANE 0.63 Released
For those of you with scanners, SANE 0.63 has been released and is available at the SANE homepage. Notable improvements have been made to the UMAX backend.

September (gulp) 10

I Am Not Dead
Here's a few quick hits from GIMP land:

There's been a big debate about the Flame plugin. Its license places serious restrictions on what you can do with the output of the plugin. This usually spells death for a piece of otherwise-free software.
Trae McCombs (OctobrX (he of the Themes)) has started a #gimp IRC channel on EFnet. Hang out there if you dig EFnet.
My IRC network (ByxNet) still hosts a #gimp channel. We feature Adam D. Moss, Adrian Likins, Federico Mena, Jens Lautenbacher, and an all-star cast of other developers. Our servers are listed here.
There was a big debate about how people still like to download and use version 0.54 because for them, it was stabler and had some features not found in 0.99.x. My feeling is this: use 0.54 if you must, but use 0.99.x if you can. If you have trouble with 0.99.x, please send a bug report to the developer list; don't just stew about it and then post flames to usenet about how GIMP sucks.
I have had some problems with the GIMP News mailing list (mainly related to time issues). I'll try to straighten them out soon.

Thanks! More news soon...

August 28

It's Official: New GIMP FTP Site
Peter Mattis announced today that the official FTP site for GIMP distribution will be moving off ftp.xcf.berkeley.edu and onto ftp.gimp.org. From here foreward, all new releases will appear there first.

Peter also had an interesting stat about the number of people who have downloaded 0.99.9 recently, and even, surprisingly enough, 0.54. If you have 0.99.9 or lower, get 0.99.10 or higher! There's no point in running an older version.

August 25

ObjectMenus III
Thorsten Schnier has released a third version of his patches to provide object menus for GIMP.

Here are a few words from Thorsten describing the new version:

In this version, object menus are used for the main gimp popup menus as well, adding customizability, previews and shortcut propagation to the main menus. Don't like where the 'holes' plugin is in the filter menu ? Change it in you objects-menurc, without recompilation ! Dont' know what script would produce the best headline for the web page? Activate preview, it will show typical results of the scripts as you select the script!

ObjectMenus are available from Thorsten's web page.

GIMP Gets Its Own Domain
Over the past week, Adrian has been working on the main website for www.gimp.org. There's not much there yet, but I intend to move some GIMP news over there very soon, and it will undoubtedly become a clearinghouse for all sorts of important GIMP info.

GIMP.org was registered by Shawn Amundson, and he has very generously given several GIMP developers accounts. The InterNIC registration fees were paid by Complete Internet Solutions.

Registry Watch
Here's a few items from the GIMP Plug-In Registry:

BumpMap 2.04 and
WhirlPinch 2.09, both from Quartic
Flame (a type of fractal generation plugin) from Scott Draves
A PostgreSQL plugin is listed as in the planning stage by Alessandro Baldoni

SCO GIMP Binary
Steve Ginzburg mailed me last week about a GIMP binary for SCO OpenServer 5.0. It's available from SCO's Skunkware archive.

August 20

New GIMP Website
Daniel Dunbar has created a new GIMP page, titled "The GIMP Revolution". Among other things, you can find his excellent Polar Coordinates plugin there.

Interesting Program For Inspiration
I stumbled across this program earlier today, and I think it might provide some inspiration for GIMP 1.1 or beyond; check out TIFFany for OpenStep.

Updated Debian Package
Ben Gertzfield has posted a new version of his Debian GIMP package. It does not include the source from Matt Hawkins' pre-11 package, but it does, according to Ben, have the XInput pressure extensions. You can get it from Ben's GIMP page.

August 18

GUBI Is Back
Tim Janik's Gtk interface builder program has recently had a new release, and now has its own web page. If you use Gtk to develop applications, you may find this program very helpful.

North American Mirror
Dennis Moore has created a North American mirror of Matt Hawkins' unofficial GIMP distribution. Says Dennis: "It only has the GIMP prereleasse and data on it, but it should be useful for anyone on this side of the globe."

August 15

Colormap Rotation Completed
Pavel Greenfield recently put up a notice about his new colormap rotation plugin. It's designed to map one segment of the color wheel in HSV space onto another.

GIMP Developers Wanted
I saw this interesting message to gimp-developer today from Gary Rozenblat:

We are a small software developer in hollywood with a 2-d film compositing tool called Chalice. We would like to make the GIMP available to our customers which will require some additional development. We understand the licensing issues. Looking for people willing and able to do some wor> Transfer interrupted! Woops. Damn. I broke this page...however, older news is available at this page.