Weekly recap — 26 January 2025

Sun Jan 26, 2025 by Aleksandr Prokudin

New releases of Skyfill, Mayo, and Shotcut; the FreeCAD Project Association offers jobs

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Week highlights: new releases of Skyfill, Mayo, and Shotcut; great new features in Dune3D; FreeCAD Project Association has part-time job openings.

Resynthesizer

Lloyd Konneker now has a preliminary port of the Resynthesizer plugin for the upcoming GIMP 3.0. It’s a texture synthesis plugin from the early 2000s, mainly used to make selected objects disappear from photos, Stalin-style.

The port is available in the resynthesizer3 branch on GitHub. I briefly tested it. The plugin seems to be functional on smaller images, but it does on larger ones.

Skyfill 1.6

From the missed-the-entire-thing department (thanks to Tobias for the tip): back in November, Sybren A. Stüvel released a new version of Skyfill, an automatic sky-gap filler for spherical panorama photos.

Release highlights:

Sky gap detection is now a bit more relaxed and will not assume that sky gaps have one uniform color.
A new CLI option allows you to control the output format (auto, jpeg, png, or tiff).
It’s now possible to copy an ICC profile, as well as EXIF, IPTC, and XMP metadata (including GPano XMP data) from the input to the output file. Currently, this is only possible for JPEG files.
The Windows executable now has an icon and some metadata (product version, copyright, etc).
WebP reading is now available.

Mayo 0.9

Hugue Delorme released a new version of Mayo, a FOSS 3D CAD files viewer. Here are some of the changes:

Mayo’s GUI and CLI versions are now two separate apps. For Linux, a separate appimage, MayoConv, is available.
The program has been updated to use OpenCascade v7.8.0, the latest stable version of the kernel.
The DXF reader now supports 3D meshes with POLYLINE and 3DFACE.
Mayo now supports reading DirectX files.
The program now has an option to silently reload documents on file change.
Mayo can now retain UI size and state between sessions.
The Measure tool can now measure and visualize bounding boxes.

Mayo 0.9, bounding box

See? Mayo is good for you!

Dune3D

This relatively new 3D CAD program keeps getting better. I keep hearing people praising it for its simplicity. There’s no new release, I just looked into what’s going on there. Here are some of the recently added features:

Horizontal/vertical mirror groups
Constraint previews: the view gets updated as you change the value in the numeric input
Constraint context menu (select a geometric feature, press z).

Quick demo of the latter two:

FreeCAD

There’s not much to discuss regarding code changes this time, but do check out Yorik’s NativeIFC tutorial. He explains the native IFC concept and guides you through opening and creating IFC files, exploring architectural designs, adding and modifying elements, and creating views and 2D content, as well as doing some Python scripting.

Meanwhile, the FreeCAD Project Association announced three positions for people interested in doing non-coding work that benefits the project:

OpenCASCADE Liaison, to coordinate collaboration with the OpenCASCADE development team.
Addon Ecosystem Coordinator, to help ensure that 3rd-party addons remain functional for the latest stable FreeCAD releases.
Translatable Text Reviewer, to improve spelling/grammar and consistency of original user-visible messages in the program.

All positions assume part-time remote work and invoices. Compensation is $500/month. Contracts are for 1 year.

Shotcut 25.01

Here are some of the changes in the new version of the video editor:

Added Bins and media type & text search to ‘Playlist’
New ‘View > Files’ panel, and new ‘Show in Files’ command in ‘Properties’ and ‘Jobs’
New filters: HSL Primaries, HSL Range, Gradient Map
New ‘Settings > Player > Pause After Seek’ toggle, on by default
New ‘Type’ parameter in Fade In Audio and Fade Out Audio filters
Hardware encoding is now available for Windows on ARM, for h264_mf and hevc_mf codecs

Full release notes are here.