Week highlights: new releases of Shotcut and Qtractor, the Blender team starts working on an iPad port.
Flameshot 13 release candidates
The Flameshot team started making release candidates for the upcoming v13 of this screen capture and annotation tool. The next big release will ship with Qt6-based builds, better Wayland support, and various other changes. You can help the team test the builds and discover bugs.
Blender on iPad
Dalai Felinto announced that Blender is coming to iPad users, with later versions arriving for users of other touch devices (the post mentions Microsoft Surface, Huawei MatePad, and the Wacom MovinkPad).
The team is planning to release a tech demo in time for SIGGRAPH 2025. Although one might argue that the teaser is already out 🙂
You can follow the project’s progress here.
askNK did a pretty decent coverage of the news, check it out:
Shotcut 25.07
The new version of the editor no longer ships Whisper speech-to-text models inside the build to reduce download sizes. Instead, you should now use the built-in downloader.
Here are some of the other changes:
- Various UI theme improvements, mostly to make the UI look more native on Windows and macOS.
- A new Outline video filter, mostly useful in conjunction with the rich text filter and images that have an alpha channel.
- A new Soft Focus filter set (Mask: From file > Blur: Gaussian > Opacity > Mask: Apply).
- The Channels toggle buttons have been added to many audio filters.
For the full list of changes, please see the release notes.
On a related matter, Shotcut seems important enough for Filmora to spend money on the ads targeting (potential) Shotcut users:
Qtractor 1.5.7
Here are some of the new features in this release:
- The Aux Send bus now has an I/O matrix (see below for a screenshot).
- The waveform is now rendered correctly for audio clips with more than two channels.
- All audio clip peaks+rms waveforms are now rendered slightly compressed to make the low-level signal more visible.
Downloads are here.
Ardour
Some websites recently reported that Ardour dropped GTK2 support entirely in favor of its vendored version called YTK. This led to a number of discussions where people became severely confused (sometimes aggressively so) about why Ardour relies on a vendored GTK2 and which parts of GTK the team had to replace with custom solutions.
So, Paul wrote a detailed explanation in a thread on Phoronix. Check it out if you are puzzled too.
Artworks
Realm of Specters: Buried in permafrost by Eugeny Romanov, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Haunted Forest by Mattias Lind, made with Blender and Krita:
European City by Jaechan Gwon, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Patreon subscribers get early access to my posts. If you are feeling generous, you can also make a one-time donation on BuyMeACoffee.
