Week highlights: new digiKam release, new features coming to GIMP, Inkscape, and Ardour.
GIMP
CmykStudent created a patch adding support for MyPaint v2 brushes (1.5+ really) with the exception of spectral blending. There are three additional changes coming with this patch:
- A new Posterize blending mode for the MyPaint Brush tool.
- Zoom factor and canvas rotation mode are now taken into consideration when painting.
- A new tool option named Gain, which is a multiplier for input pressure.
digiKam 8.7.0
The new version comes with multiple improvements:
- Optional background face recognition.
- The application will now show the next best face match (where applicable) if the user rejects the first match.
- digiKam now has a test to discover if it can use OpenCL- or CUDA-based GPU-side processing for running AI pipelines.
- The Batch Queue Manager now features a plugin for AI-based automatic rotation.
See here for the full list of changes and some illustrations.
Inkscape
Martin Owens patched the PDF code to correctly apply document ICC profiles as well as device-cmyk with and without ICC profiles on exporting.
Jabier Arraiza is working on Trim Shape LPE — a live path effect that allows hiding parts of strokes. Here is a screenshot from Jabier’s video:
Tavmjong Bah is adding hatch to path functionality.
There are now merge requests from at least two of the five GSoC students. Aarav Oswal is adding on-canvas spellchecking (based on libspelling) and Fatma Omara is adding artwork recoloring functionality to the Fill & Stroke dock.
FreeCAD
The major upstream project news is that WandererFan is retiring from TechDraw maintenance and active involvement with the FreeCAD Project Association. So that’s one less maintainer in the projecе, which sucks. The workbench has seen some great action in the v1.0 development cycle, so hopefully some of those contributors will return to deliver even more and take over.
In other news, Grub created a new addon to track the release of new weekly builds, and Pieter Hijma got an NLnet grant to resume his work on the Ondsel Lens add-on. Both the Ondsel Lens code (a FreeCAD-specific online PDM system) and the Lens addon for FreeCAD are now hosted by the FreeCAD org on GitHub.
Zolko’s Assembly4 workbench has moved from GitHub to Codeberg. When I say “moved”, what I really mean is that he posted a threatening message to the FreeCAD team, and GitHub banned him, so he reopened the shop elsewhere. He also launched a fork of FreeCAD 0.21, “the last that remains compatible with earlier versions of FreeCAD user data”.
Ardour
Most recently, Robin removed the possibility of building Ardour with system-wide installed GTK/GDK2 instead of Ardour’s forks (YTK/YDK). The commit message specifically says:
After patching gtk/ytk to add touch support and macOS rendering, upstream gtk+2 is no longer an option
Some of the conversations around this spilled to the next week, and I’ve seen a lot of completely misinformed opinions, with some people even claiming that this is somehow a retribution for major desktop environments dropping X11 support or for some “political” actions by GTK developers. None of that is remotely true.
Ardour doesn’t use much of GTK in the first place, but they use enough of it to want to avoid another toolkit port. The changes they introduced to YTK/YDK make builds against system-wide GTK2 less functional as compared to official builds. So there you have it.
But most work lately is about pianoroll windows. It’s still too early to talk about the potential v9 release timeline, and it will likely stay that way for at least a few more months.
Artworks
Some practice by Mathieu Boyer, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Talking in the kitchen by npc, made with Krita:
Patreon subscribers get early access to my posts. If you are feeling generous, you can also make a one-time donation on BuyMeACoffee.
