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The game player in 2.42 release did not work, and Python for Linux had to be upgraded to a newer...

Packed with features and upgrades, mostly as a result of the Elephants Dream movie project, we...

Firefox 2 Beta 1 milestone release is intended for testing purposes only by developers and testers.
New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include specially support for SVG text using svg:textPath

SVG Tiny is used by a great constructor of mobile phone “N*k*a”. Vector graphics must be very simple and less than 10K. They are converted with SVG2SVGT.
See this two links for more explanations :
S60_Platform_Vector_Graphics_Optimization_v1_0_en.pdf
Creating_Themes_for_Series_40_and_S60_Devices_Visual_Guide_v2_1_en.pdf
Good sketching !

I just wanted to say a BIG THANK YOU! to everyone who has contributed to this project and to let you know about an NGO in South Africa that uses Open Clip Art Library’s clipart. We have a portal http://www.sangonet.org.za that uses the clipart. The open clipart website has been a real bonus for us! Thanks again, Diane

The Inkscape community have announced since June 22, 2006, the release of Inkscape 0.44, a cross-platform Open Source Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) drawing tool.

Stable release 0.44 intended for production use is available at http://www.inkscape.org

Yes, this project is very much alive. While this year has seen its ups and downs, we are now on the up and up while continuing to transition to using ccHost. We are still in great need of PHP/MySQL developers to help us transition our project. Please see where we are currently at and what the new site is looking like right now.

We will go live with ccHost as soon as Phase I is complete. Here is a brief list of tasks that we need help with:

phase I

• (DONE) Add Open Clip Art Library logo to header
• (DONE) upload screenshots
• SVG support (ccHost uses getid3.sf.net for metadata, the bug for this)
• Here is what we have so far of hacking on getid3 to support SVG
• add some glue code to get SVG generation of thumbnails from the commandline (for ccHost’s thumbnail generation of SVG files)
• Port current collection in bulk over to the new system
• Add full support for Creative Commons Metadata
• Port current menus and navigation to the new site.

Phase 2: After Going Live

• Port blog/news over to the new site
• Come up with way to package clip art together
• (Add your own tasks you found here)

Please help the project by joining the discussion:

• Join the mailing list: ask and help answer questions
• Join the #openclipart chat channel on irc.freenode.net
• Help add to and edit the wiki

If all of this is foreign to you, please just contact us and say how you would like to help out.

All the above tasks are the most needed help right now. Please join us in making this great resouce even more accessible and easy to use!

Version 2.3.10 is a development snapshot leading up to GIMP 2.4. The source code can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Changes are listed at developer.gimp.org. If you want to try this unstable development snapshot, please read the release notes for the development releases.

A few users are reporting that Windows anti-virus programs (Norton Antivirus and Symantec Scanner) are giving a false positive on the Inkscape Windows binary. These programs are erroneously giving indicators of Trojan.Zlob. It is thought that the NSIS installer we use for installing Inkscape on Windows was incorrectly listed as a trojan by the antivirus vendors, but this is not yet confirmed; others have reported that there were similar problems reported in other Open Source applications that use NSIS on Windows. This problem appears to be affecting only some Windows machines. We don't know what the best work around is, but make sure to use the latest antivirus definitions (it may already been fixed).

Just one week after the 0.44 release our software was distributed to over 54,100 users through the SourceForge download servers. The largest share was from the Windows users, who totalled nearly 38,000 downloads. The next highest number was from the Mac users with 9,115 downloads. The Unix/Linux users scored 7,104 downloads.

The fifth annual Blender Conference will be from October 20 to 22, in "de Waag" in Amsterdam, the...

Some re-edited versions of Elephants Dream have started to emerge around the web, taking advantage of the Creative Commons license, which is great to see.

Ilia writes:

My name is Ilia Bis. I am a composer and musician, raised in Moscow and currently based in New York, recording and performing under the name “Tonearm”. You can find my instrumental music at www.myspace.com/tonearminst and my songs at www.myspace.com/itonearm and www.tonearm.net/music.html.

I have been collaborating with filmmakers and visual artists for a while, and, like many people, having been quite impressed with Blender and Elephant’s Dream, wanted to try and juxtapose the visuals from the film with my music. I have written a track for it (about 3 minutes long) and did a rough edit of the film together with a professional film editor, and I think the result is pretty interesting and tasteful, even though it may be different from the original.

‘roschler’ writes:

I made another animated music video using footage remixed from the astonishing Elephants Dream project. This time it’s a parody on “Ma Ya Hi” which is the English version of “Numa Ye”; the song that has been lip synched and parodied so many times before. It’s called “My PC (is on fire)”.

In this parody, Emo’s computer is broken and wants Proog, who is his computer repair man, to fix it. Proog refuses to fix it until Emo pays his last bill. But, Emo won’t pay the last bill until Proog fixes his computer!

It’s called My PC and you can download it here:

http://www.spokenring.com/numa-numa-english.php

Elsewhere, Elephants Dream also appears in screenshots from a video conversion and encoding program: VisualHub.

All these uses and more are perfectly legal, and encouraged! We’d love to see more of what people get up to with the movie and/or production files, so if you know of any other appearances, let us know here, or get to work making something yourself! :)

Translators have made serious progress this past month. Compare this to the May 28th numbers! am: 4% az: 3% be: 7% ca: 99% cs: 100% da: 5% de: 99% el: 15% en_GB: 100% es: 100% es_MX: 16% et: 0% eu: 99% fr: 100% ga: 1% gl: 4% hu: 100% it: 100% ja: 60% ko: 40% lt: 90% mk: 0% nb: 100% nl: 69% nn: 76% pa: 42% pl: 99% pt: 9% pt_BR: 72% ru: 100% sk: 39% sl: 99% sr: 100% sr@Latn: 100% sv: 26% tr: 42% uk: 71% vi: 100% zh_CN: 100% zh_TW: 100%

Pardon the slow site, particularly the screenshots and wiki, but do please enjoy the newly released Inkscape. Some packages are just starting to become available. See our downloads page or head to the SourceForge file list for the latest uploads. Note that SourceForge has been a bit unreliable lately, so if the links aren't working, please keep trying.

The Release Wardens have blessed the official Inkscape 0.44.0 release tarball. We will be making the official announcement once packagers have had a couple days to build the release packages, but if you're in a compiling mood, please feel free to download the source today! :-)

The third Release Candidate (RC3) is ready for testing now!

We have given the folks at Xiph, the developers and custodians of the various Ogg video and audio compression codecs, a lossless copy of the Elephants Dream audio and video, as FLAC files and a PNG sequence, and they are hosting BitTorrent downloads of them on their server.

This will be of great value to people interested in developing, testing or benchmarking video/audio compression software. Unlike a DVD movie, which many video compression benchmarks are based on, the PNG files are losslessly compressed, identical to the pristine original output, in full 1920×1080 HD resolution. It would be great to see Elephants Dream become the new standard source footage for video and audio compression testing!

The files are many, and very large (around 20GB total), so this is not something that you can play back and watch - this won’t really be of interest to most people who just want to see the video. If this describes you, it would be polite to have mercy on Xiph’s servers if you don’t really need the files :) Having said that, it can be fun to have a poke around and see a few of the original HD frames, but you don’t need the entire sequence for that. The files are, like the other versions of the movie, are available for download under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license. Thanks to Ralph Giles for helping to set this up.

Note: The BitTorrent version 4 client is required!

640×360 PNG image sequence (BitTorrent)
1920×1080 PNG image sequence (BitTorrent)

Audio tracks (5.1 and stereo) and raw PNG files

Out of 25 submissions, 10 proposals have been selected for a grant.

Yes, if you’ve been reading other news sources, you’ll know this is a bit late, but better late than never! We’ve all been taking a breather and getting on with some other things in the meantime (including Ton organising an awesome ‘‘Open Source Pavilion’ booth for the SIGGRAPH tradeshow, which will feature Elephants Dream).

Anyway, we still need to do a nice big publicity/news roundup, but until then, there are a few new videos from the DVD set online for your viewing pleasure. The making of documentary is now available, along with the commentary tracks. Watching these may not only give you an insight into what went on during the project, but also give you a picture of what we thought is going on in the movie, straight from our own exhausted mouths :) These are available under the CC-Attribution 2.5 license. Thanks Joeri for putting these online!

Update 28 June: We now have downloadable versions of the making of available.
3gp, MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV versions (Austria)
MPEG4, 100MB (Netherlands)
MPEG2, 550MB (Netherlands)

Making Of: 31MB Divx 5 (Germany)
Making Of, Part 1: Streaming (YouTube)
Making Of, Part 2: Streaming (YouTube)
Making Of, Part 3: Streaming (YouTube)
Making Of, Part 4: Streaming (YouTube)

And the commentary tracks:
Video & Commentary, Bassam and Andy, Streaming (YouTube)
Video & Commentary, Ton and Andy, Streaming (YouTube)
Video & Commentary, Jan, Streaming (YouTube)
Video & Commentary, Ton and Bassam, Streaming (YouTube)

There’s also the voice actor recording videos:
Voice Recording: 6MB Divx 5 (Germany)
Voice Recording: Streaming (YouTube)
Listen to the Sound of the Machine: 2MB Divx 5 (Germany)

Version 2.2.1 of gimp-gap, the GIMP animation package, is now available. This release features mainly bugfixes but also some new features:

• additional functions to modify frames (set layer modes, and layer mask handling)
• storyboard dialog supports drag&drop; and editing of transition attributes
• new plug-in to reverse frame sequence

Please note that gimp-gap 2.2.1 requires gimp 2.2 and glib 2.8 or higher. It is recommended to use gtk+ 2.8. The source code can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org; binary packages should become available soon.

JonCruz reports, "I just picked up the June issue of Linux Format magazine (Issue 80). Their cover this time is on 'Libre Graphics', and is coverage of the LGM. Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus and Xara each got two pages. Also, Inkscape people can be seen teeny-tiny on the pic of the lecture hall on the initial page, and then recognizable later on the Xara pages checking it out." "Oh, and I was personally very excited to see it, as it's the first time I've really been interviewed for anything significant. :-)" "Oh, and coming up, I hear that issue 81 will probably have a good article by Jon Phillips, covering many things."

Matiphas reports the current status on translations: Translations have been quite improved : Total number of PO files: 38 Significantly translated locales: (12 with a mean translation ratio of 98%) ca cs de es fr hu it lt ru sl zh_CN zh_TW Global average translation ratio has raised from 49% to 55%

Aaron reports: "The tarball for 0.44pre3 is now available at: at: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/inkscape/inkscape-0.43%2B0.44pre3.tar.gz?download http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/inkscape/inkscape-0.43%2B0.44pre3.sig?download As they become available, binary packages can be found at: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93438&package;_id=99112&release;_id=422874 Let's give a round of applause to our prerelease packagers. Thanks for getting these packages up so quickly. We all appreciate your efforts."

A number of Debian Unstable users have reported major problems when using Inkscape. The symptoms vary but usually involve inkscape failing to start up. This appears to affect both Inkscape 0.43, and Inkscape compiled from SVN. Wolfram Quester, Debian's Inkscape Package Maintainer, reports that currently there are two separate issues. Neither are technically Inkscape-specific nor Debian-specific but are due to related components. The first issue is a libgc problem. Inkscape 0.43 dead locks with the new libgc 6.7; The new inkscape-pre1 simply segfaults. If you attach to the process using strace, you get millions of: futex(0x10679060, FUTEX_WAIT, 2, NULL) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable) futex(0x10679060, FUTEX_WAIT, 2, NULL) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable) futex(0x10679060, FUTEX_WAIT, 2, NULL Process 32245 detached The solution for this issue is to downgrade libgc. The second issue is seen by KDE users that have the gtk2-engines-gtk-qt package installed. Wolfi reports, 'The package is used for different theming of gtk applications under KDE. You have it if there is an item "appearance-->gtk styles and themes" in your KControl menu. It causes duplicate inclusion of themes via different rc-files. Yuya Nishihara found out that this leads to a crash if the theme uses the smooth engine of gtk. Other applications are affected by this, too.'

Thanks to the bundling of organization power and sponsoring we can present ourselves on a large...

GIMP 2.3.9 is the latest and hopefully one of the last development snapshots on our way to version 2.4 of the GNU Image Manipulation Program. The source code can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. There are quite a number of changes, all listed at developer.gimp.org. If you want to try this unstable development snapshot, please read the release notes for the development releases

ACSpike has uploaded a 0.44pre2 tarball to Sourceforge. http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/inkscape/inkscape-0.43%2B0.44pre2.tar.gz?download http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/inkscape/inkscape-0.43%2B0.44pre2.sig?download We are hurling quickly toward final release. We would encourage everyone to sit down with this package for a good testing session. You can find binary pacakges for your system as they are created at: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93438&package;_id=99112&release;_id=422108

Translators have recently improved the following: ko (8 to 40%), nb (6 to 34%) and nn (64 to 75%) are now ramping up , zh_CN has undergone a BIG boost (5 to 99%), hu is back in the race (72 to 76% and Arpad looks like wanting to commit some other things, but failed due to down svn), lt back in the race too (82 to 90%), and sk has maybe found a new volunteer.

This past week has seen an intensive focus on bug fixing. After only a week's work, we've already surpassed our goal. The must-fix bugs identified for this release have been addressed. Due to this achievement, we're now moving into Hard Freeze, in final preparation for release. Translators are hard at work bringing translations up to date, and the Release Wardens (Jon and Aaron) are coordinating final bug fixes and general spit and polish. We hope to have the final release out within a couple weeks or so.

Now the real download craze is over we’ve checked some of the statistics. For example, in the two days we offered the movie on blender.org it was downloaded over 53k times. I had to remove the links because our servers were smoking.

I didn’t get all stats yet from the other mirrors, but the confirmed numbers (including torrent) are 533k now. Might be in reality a million though, our download page alone attracted daily over 150k pageviews for almost a week.

Further; Jan Morgenstern has finished the audiotrack without voices, for your karaoke and dubbing pleasure, available under the CC Attribution 2.5 license:

ED-ME-5.1-DVD.ac3 (35 MB)

We’ve already been contacted by an Italian TV production studio interested to do the Italian dubbed version. Just a note; you can just do this without asking permission, fits perfectly in the CC license!

Thanks,

-Ton-

A new preview (beta) release of Inkscape 0.44.0 is now available. If you aren't already testing 0.44, you'd better hop to it! We're making fast work of our bugs and expect to have the final release within a week or two. At this point, we are especially interested in hearing of installation or packaging problems. You can download pre-releases from our SourceForge Files Page. Check our Release Notes for details of what's changed, and our Reporting Bugs page for directions on helping to ensure Inkscape 0.44 is solid.

GIMP had eight projects accepted for this Summer of Code:

• Vector Layers
• Vanishing Point Cloning
• Healing Brush Tool
• GIMP Resource repository
• New Brush System
• JPEG 2000
• Ruby Scripting
• UI Improvements

Congratulations to all.

Inkscape has now entered 'String Freeze' for the 0.44 release. This enables our translators to focus on bringing all the translations up to date without worry of strings changing at the last minute. We'd like to give special recognition to Inkscape user Chrisjia, whose work has improved the translation status of zh_CN (Chinese) from 5% to 99%! Inkscape is translated into many languages, but not all! Check if it is translated well into your language, and if not, please consider working on this. Translation is a very important way to help improve Inkscape, and directly benefits those who share your language. We have documented the steps to doing translation - you don't need to know anything at all about programming! We have an active, fun translation team, that we'd love to encourage other translators to join. am: 3% az: 2% be: 7% ca: 95% cs: 97% da: 4% de: 98% el: 2% es: 99% es_MX: 15% et: 0% eu: 72% fr: 99% ga: 0% gl: 3% hu: 72% it: 93% ja: 60% ko: 8% lt: 82% mk: 0% nb: 6% nl: 69% nn: 64% pa: 42% pl: 70% pt: 8% pt_BR: 72% ru: 71% sk: 39% sl: 95% sr: 63% sr@Latn: 63% sv: 19% tr: 42% uk: 70% zh_CN: 99% zh_TW: 72%

A preview (beta) release of Inkscape 0.44.0 is now available. We're asking that users please download and test it out, and report any bugs they find, and encouraging packagers to provide packaged versions of this release. We're particularly interested in hearing about installation issues, crash or data loss bugs, or problems with any of the new features. You can download pre-releases from our SourceForge Files Page. Check our Release Notes for details of what's changed, and our Reporting Bugs page for directions on helping to ensure Inkscape 0.44 is solid.

Thank you to all the students who sent proposals, and all the mentors who volunteered to participate! Google has announced the final selections based on our rankings. As you can imagine, the selection was tough to arrive at, but we feel these projects will have a transformational effect on Inkscape's power for users: Application Student Mentor ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SVG Filter Effects #1 Niko Kiirala Bulia Inkboard Protocol Spec / Lib Conversion Dale Harvey David Yip PDF Export with Cairo Mikos Erdelyi Ted Gould Memory Optimization Marina Diezler MenTaLguY SVG Filter Effects #2 Hugo Rodrigues Bulia One of the SVG filter effects projects will focus on implementing the effects in the renderer, the other will focus on the backend SPObject/XML portion.

The latest Inkscape Release Status shows that we are nearly ready for Feature Freeze. We have fixed the date for freezing to the 23rd; there's several efforts that need to wrap up, but hopefully this will give sufficient time. Next, we will be generating a "Must Fix" bug list, and producing a -pre0 release for people to test. Due to the huge number of new features, we really need to ask the community for help banging on the codebase and looking for issues. Apr 23rd - Development continues on the ~24 items identified For non-0.44 feature work, please use branches May 18th - Achieve completion of at least 50% of the items. Work continues on the remaining 12. Work ceases on any other features. Notification to translators Begin focusing on bugfixes. Identify preliminary "must-fix" buglist May 23rd - Feature Freeze All feature development work ends Finalize the "must-fix" buglist Issue pre-release packages for testing Focus on bug fixes, translations, & docs ~May 27th - String Freeze All tutorial work finished No further changes to internal text June - Hard Freeze Translation work finishes Final resolution on all "must-fix" bugs Issue one or more release candidates Jun/Jul - 0.44 Release

Inkscape.org has a new look. The new site design is based on AJ Ashton's winning entry to the 2005 website design contest on Deviant Art. Special thanks to Josef Vybiral and Dale Harvey for their work crafting the design in CSS and HTML.

The movie and all its production files have been released for public download.

Now almost all of our donation sponsors have received their DVDs, it’s about time to finalize the Orange Open Movie Project with the much anticipated online release of the movie and the studio production files.

We are all incredibly proud to present to you the world’s first true Open Movie:

Elephants Dream download page

The movie and all of its production files are licensed as Creative Commons, only requiring a proper crediting for public screening, re-using and distribution.

Note that the Elephants Dream DVD set remains for sale via the blender.org e-shop as a support product for future Open Movie projects. The Blender Foundation is committed to start working on similar projects soon.

Stay tuned, have fun, and surprise us with great follow-ups!

Studio Orange

Ton Roosendaal
Bassam Kurdali
Andreas Goralczyk
Matt Ebb
Bastian Salmela
Lee Salvemini