Week highlights: new releases of Inkscape, Friction, and Ardour, update on upcoming major releases from GIMP and FreeCAD.
Disclaimer: yes, it’s been quite a while. I’m bringing back weekly recaps under different terms. Now they will show up for Patreon and Buy Me a Coffee supporters first ($3 tier and higher on Patreon, all subscribers on BMAC) and for regular Libre Arts readers later. The same will apply to more types of posts, but not all of them. If you have better options for this type of a soft paywall, please bring them up. Okay, let’s get on with it.
GIMP 3.0 state of affairs
There are currently 3 blockers preventing the team from rolling out the first release candidate of v3.0, and another 2 blockers preventing it from releasing v3.0. Just like with FreeCAD (see below) it’s unclear when the final release is going to hit the streets, and the blockers aren’t trivial and rather require some hands-on experience with GIMP code. So I guess it’s a call for patience for all of us.
Inkscape 1.4
The team released Inkscape 1.4 a week ago with many improvements.
Here are some of the major ones:
- Filter Gallery: finding the right built-in SVG filter used to be a major pain in the neck; this is no longer the case because now you can see what each filter actually does (cryptic names are still there).
- Modular grids are a new grid type in the program. This is really useful whether you do web design or print design. Everything is configurable, including the coordinate origin.
- Better swatches UI: you now actually get color palette previews when you open the drop-down list, there’s now search for colors by name, and the ACB importer now supports palettes with colors in CIELAB.
- Initial support for importing Affinity Designer documents is now available, which is important because Affinity has been kicking Adobe’s butt in the recent years big time, and it’s good that the team is acknowledging the shift in the market.
- The Object Properties dialog now allows editing shape-specific options (think rounding in rectangles).
There have been more changes than that, you can read all about those in release notes.
Personally, I have mixed feelings about this release. It does bring a lot of improvements, some of which have been on my wishlist for a long time (for one, I hope that GIMP devs take notes from the modular grids implementation whenever they have the manpower to tackle that one).
At the same time, usability-wise, v1.4 has been problematic for me for a variety of reasons. I’m usually on fairly tight deadlines, I don’t have the luxury of having the time for fighting against glitches, so I temporarily downgraded to v1.3. But I’ll keep an eye on bugfix releases and happily upgrade again when I can.
It looks like the next major update will bring both GTK4 port and better CMYK support. Fingers crossed!
Friction 1.0 beta
Friction is a fork of Enve, a 2D animation originally developed by Maurycy Liebner who unfortunately stopped working on the project. The fork is maintained and developed by Ole-André Rodlie, former contributor to Natron.
The project entered 1.0beta status earlier this week, with multiple changes over 0.9.6:
- Brand new color toolbar in the top right corner to quickly set fills and strokes
- Easing support on timeline and graph
- New and improved UI theme/style
- Support for splitting video clips on the timeline (press K)
- Basic support for markers
- You can now set in/out zones with I and O shortcuts
- Ctrl+Space now brings up a command palette similar to that of Blender, GIMP, and more programs, but with more capabilities.
- Experimental support for interactive SVG transforms and optimized SVG exporting
Ole-André posted really neat release notes for the beta, with short videos demonstrating each new feature.
I’ve been using Friction for some simple sequences in Ardour tutorial videos and I generally love it. But some features essential for motion design (like easy alignment of objects against centers etc.) are scheduled after v1.0, and drawing tools are not very mature yet. Thankfully, Friction has good SVG support, so you can do some initial drawing and layouting in Inkscape and carry it over to Friction (do all the horrible puns you like here, I can take it).
FreeCAD 1.0 state of affairs
It’s been a long way towards v1.0. The team is now down to 8 release blockers again, and the FreeCAD Project Association is willing to release funds to pay bounties to hunt the rest of those. It’s unclear how much it will take to eliminate those. It could be two weeks, it could be more. Someone will probably submit more issue reports that are critical. We’ll see.
The project went through a significant loss recently: Bradley ‘bgbsww‘ McLean unexpectedly passed away two weeks ago. He only joined the project about a year ago. His major contribution was the TNP fixes port from the RT fork over to upstream FreeCAD. He did a huge share of the overall work, moving RT’s code, cleaning it up, and writing tests.
It wasn’t even all Bradley was up to. Shortly before passing, he started doing some performance-related contract work for Ondsel that would end up upstream. He was also gearing up towards another FPA grant: one that focuses on multi-threading (his preliminary analysis suggested that recomputation was a major culprit in the overall performance). But more importantly, the project lost a very kind and passionate person who everyone loved.
Ardour 8.10
Ardour has had an unfortunate series of ‘brown paper bag‘ releases lately, starting with v8.8.
Things seem to have calmed down, the team merged a major piece of new code for upcoming v9.0 to the main development branch: recording audio and MIDI clips to trigger slots on the Cue page and editing those MIDI clips in a bottom panel.
It doesn’t look like v9.0 will follow shortly: apart from further fixes and improvements, you should expect Paul to hook up the new functionality to control surfaces code, in particular to Novation Launchpad and Launchkey mk4, as well as to Ableton Push 2 modules.
A lot of work has already been done to support region-level effects, ad there will likely be further cleanup. Robin also added some support for touch displays via xinput2 (the team isn’t planning Wayland support any time soon, and since there are no Wayland-ready LV2/VST3 plugins in the wild anyway, that’s understandable).
Apart from those, it isn’t yet clear what else is coming in v9.0. At any rate, it might be too early to tell.
Elektroid 3.1
I already posted the news two weeks ago, but it’s worth repeating: if you own any Elektron devices, Novation Summit or Peak, or Arturia Microfreak, and you are a Linux user, you should absolutely check it out. Elektroid by David García Goñi is how you can upload presets, wavetables, and samples to those devices natively on Linux. David also develops Overwitch, a libre Overbridge 2 replacement for Elektron users who want to sync their devices.
Artworks of the week
The Playkot team has a long history of using free/libre software in some of their online game projects. This is recent Blender-powered artwork by Gregory Khodyrev for SuperCity:
Sylvia Ritter painted new Ubuntu-themed artwork to commemorate v24.10 release, made with Krita as usual:
Alberto Trujillo posted artwork he recently made with krita while practicing 2D lighting:
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