Week highlights: new releases of GIMP, LittleCMS, HDRView, FLAC, and Faircamp; AstoCAD replaces Ondsel ES as a sexier soft-fork of FreeCAD.
GIMP 3.0rc3
This is hopefully the last release candidate before the final release of GIMP 3.0. The update comes with bug fixes, enhanced API, and improved support for various file formats. In particular, the PSD plugin now loads 16-bit-per-channel files in the LAB color space, and the DDS plugin now loads images with BC7 compression.
LittleCMS 2.17
Marti Maria released a new version of his color management module. This is mostly a bugfix release with a few notable changes:
- Initial fuzzer implementation developed with financial support from the Open-Source Technology Improvement Fund and Google.
- Color management can now apply to memory blocks larger than 4Gb.
- Better coverage of pre-multiplied alpha.
There’s just source code available, no binaries are expected.
HDRView 2.2(.1)
Wojciech Jarosz released an update of HDRView with new features, improvements, and fixes. Here are some release highlights:
- Support for QOI, JPEG-XL, Ultra HDR jpegs, and HEIF/AVIF files, including multi-image and auxiliary-channel support in JXL and HEIF/AVIF files;
- Better support for ICC profiles and colorspaces via LittleCMS;
- Support for extracting and displaying more image metadata in the Info panel;
- Various emscripten/web version improvements.
Builds are available for Windows and macOS.
AstoCAD
Pierre-Louis Boyer (ex-Ondsel) announced his soft fork of FreeCAD, AstoCAD. Users who buy a subscription will enjoy early access to new features and improvements. Changes will be publicly available (it’s LGPL, after all) and upstreamed. Here is a video where Pierre talks about the project and shows some recent improvements he made (mostly UX-wise).
FLAC 1.5
The new version has one major new feature: multithreaded encoding of FLAC files. Unless you are a developer, you will probably not notice all the other improvements. But here is the changelog.
Faircamp 1.2
Simon Repp released a new version of Faircamp, a static site generator for self-hosting and selling your own audio content, e.g. music. Release highlights:
- Track directories and manifests
- Differentiation between release and track download access.
- Per-track extra downloads.
Simon published a video explaining the new features. All the download options are listed here.
The development of Faircamp is supported through an NGI0 grant by NLNet.
Artworks
Pokemon Fanart by Rodrigo Alvarez, made with Krita:
The Arch by Dmitry Myagkov, made with Blender, Photoshop, and 3DCoat:
Tar-Gorthalion by Prometheus Studio, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Temple of Oblivion by Carlos Ryal, made with Krita:
Colossus Fall by Cyril Mergan, made with Blender and Photoshop:
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