Week highlights: new major releases of PixiEditor and Flameshot, new features in GIMP, FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, and Ardour.
GIMP
There were two user-visible changes this past week:
- The newly added GEGL API browser by Ondřej Míchal (GSoC2025 student) will help developers use GEGL operations in their own plugins.
- The initial support for importing PAA textures by CmykStudent will help game developers who need to open texture files in this format developed by the Bohemia Interactive game studio.
PixiEditor 2.0
Krzysztof Krysiński announced the release of PixiEditor 2.0. This image editor was originally designed for pixel art, but that’s in the past now. The new release brings general image editing features and some vector graphics tools.
Here are some of the major changes:
- Node graph compositing
- Bezier curves, lines, and vector shapes
- Text tool
- Frame-by-frame animations
- Brush with a pixel-perfect option
- Transformation tools: scale, move, skew, rotate, perspective
The developers released a quick overview video (below) and a much more detailed walkthrough.
They are building a business model where the software is free (both LGPLv3 and gratis), and extensions are paid.
Downloads are available for all major desktop platforms.
Flameshot 13
This is a major new release with Qt6 support and various quality-of-life improvements, including these:
- Support for more Wayland compositors.
- Symmetric resize with Shift is now possible.
- JPEG quality can now be selected.
- Saving WebP is now available on Windows.
Downloads are here.
FreeCAD
Ryan Kembrey submitted a pretty exciting patch for TechDraw, that replaces the old static view frames with new dynamic ones that autoresize when you tweak the position of dimensions or add new ones, and hide technical details like the frame caption until you hover over the frame. Here is the demonstration:
captain0xff created a draft PR for the project he’s been working on as part of the GSoC program this year: interactive controls for the Part Design workbench. So far, the patch covers the Pad, Additive and Subtractive Loft/Pipe/Helix, Pocket, Fillet, Chamfer, and Thickness commands. Here is an excerpt from his video demonstration:
Meanwhile, drwho495 started working on a new 3rd-party workbench called Constraint Design. His intention is to create a more stable version of the Part Design workbench that uses custom elements rather than OpenCascade elements and thus has fewer toponaming issues.
OpenSCAD
The OpenSCAD team started posting on Fediverse about the recently added new features. One of them is support for navigation presets, similar to what you can find in e.g. FreeCAD:
Ardour
Paul merged the initial code for displaying the audio editor on the Cue page. This will help with audio clips on live sessions. The implementation still has some issues to be ironed out.
Artworks
Aurora Settlement by Pedro Arnaut (Colapso studio), made with Blender and Photoshop:
Athens by Lucas M. Molina, made with Blender and Photoshop:
The Caelus Station by alex_liangbo, made with Blender and Photoshop:
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