Weekly recap — 5 January 2024

Week highlights: new releases of Our Paint, vokoscreenNG, Ratatouille.lv2, Faircamp; improvements in KDE’s drawing tablets configuration app; new AI feature in Kdenlive.

KDE is getting improved graphic tablets support

Providing better support for graphic tablets is part of the new KDE’s Goals initiative, and here are the first results. The Drawing Tablet configurator now has two new features.

First, on the Display page, you can now map an area of a drawing tablet’s surface to the entire screen area (only the reverse was possible before.

Secondly, on the Pen page, you can now customize the response curve to pressure for a stylus. E.g. you can kill off the high and low ends of pressure values.

Our Paint 0.4

Yiming Wu has been tirelessly hacking on Our Paint for a little over two years. It’s a free (GPLv3) self-proclaimed featureless painting application with a programmable node-based brush engine. Oh heck, I’ll just show you a screenshot from the project’s website, okay?

So this is the latest release, and it comes with impressive changes:

• Android version is now available, with a limitation: the canvas only has a 8-bit/channel canvas, while the desktop version has 16-bit/channel precision for the canvas. File formats are fully compatible between the two versions, though.
• CMYK soft proofing is now available, with out-of-gamut preview. Yiming Wu hardcoded a modified color matrix based on SWOP_V2 for now, but selecting any ICC profile will be supported in the future.
• Brush size can now be adjusted with a shortcut.
• You can now create a custom toolbox to keep frequently used buttons readily available.
• The user interface got various fixes and stability improvements.

For a full list of changes, please see the announcement.

FreeCAD

The entire team seems to have spent some quality family time on the holidays, and one of the maintainers was proving flat- and hollow-earthers wrong by actually traveling to Antarctica. So far, there have been no reports about the mysterious disappearance of a FreeCAD contributor and black ops sighted on scene, so I trust all is well. In other words, very few commits have been merged in the last couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, Hakan Seven resumed his work on transportation and geomatics engineering features in FreeCAD and created a new workbench called Road. His previous project was a workbench called Trails, built in collaboration with Joel Graff.

The initial code of Road is available in a GitHub repo. If this is something you really need, please consider supporting Hakan on Patreon.

Kdenlive

The team released a technical preview of a new tool that uses AI for background/foreground removal:

The tech they use is Facebook’s SAM2‘s object segmentation. Developers expect to make this new feature part of the v25.04 release, there’s some polishing ahead, and you can already download builds for Linux and Windows to try it. The post linked above has a quick explainer of how it all works.

vokoscreenNG 4.4.0

My screencasting program of choice has been updated. The new version comes mainly with Wayland and PipeWire support improvements. See here for details.

Ratatouille.lv2 v0.9.5

It’s a neural model loader for all you guitar players wishing for a nice sound on Linux. The plugin covers both amp modelers, cabsims, and pedals — whichever models you got.

New in this release:

• Optional automatic phase correction for loaded models
• Optional buffered mode to move all heavy processing into a background thread.
• UI for MOD desktop.
• “Erase” buttons to quickly remove a model or IR file from the processing.

Builds are available on GitHub.

Faircamp 1.0

Simon Repp released the “pretty number” version of Faircamp, his static website generator for audio producers. Faircamp can be used as a self-hosted Bandcamp replacement: the downloads feature supports unlock codes to provide exclusive access to downloadable files.

Release highlights:

• Faircamp sites now use three types of dedicated manifest files: artist.eno, catalog.eno, and release.eno
• Error messages in the console output now display snippets from the files where errors occur.
• Documentation has been updated and improved.
• A new cache system was implemented.
• Embeds are now ready to use.
• Standalone track pages are now possible.
• The browse/search feature is now available.
• M3U playlists are now supported (RSS feeds are planned for 2025).

The development was partially funded by NLnet. See the blog post for more information about the release.

Artworks

Tower Number 68 by Deepak Kushwaha, made with Blender:

Happy New Year 2025! by David Revoy, made with Krita:

Thanks to all patrons!

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