Peter Sikking, one (or the?) main UI designers for GIMP has some intersting news on his blog. What I like again in his posting is the documentation of the way he came to the final (for now) design of the UI.

The step done in 2.8 seems to be even larger now. And I can’t wait for the time line thumbnails!

And of course Gimpusers has more about this.

Edit: Gimpusers gets hammered from Digg, but is keeping up. I thought our site was sluggish because of a lot of stray people from there – but it was a wld download script in Manila. IP is blocked now.

Tags: 2.8, Gimp development, UI, user interface
Posted in Gimp | 5 Comments »

There are news about it on gimpusers.com. Thanks to Torbjorn, who posted in the forum about this.

Some highlights:

Years over years GIMPusers waited for this feature – now a dream has finally become true: Layer Groups for GIMP will be available in GIMP 2.8! more…

There is an interesting message of Martin Nordholts, one of the core developers of GIMP, in the official mailing list about GIMP 2.8 being shipped in a single window mode. more…

And finally a writeup of all the goodies we will get (perhaps for Christmas ):
Most probably, GIMP 2.8 will yet be released 2009, so it has been time to have a look at the current developer version. There are many cool new features, but the most important thing for us are the layer groups. more…

Tags: 2.8, GIMP Version 2.8
Posted in Gimp | 19 Comments »

This just went through the mailing list:

Martin Nordholts

We are pleased to announce the release of GIMP 2.7.0 which is the
first step towards GIMP 2.8, the next stable release. Even though GEGL
related work has been made, the primary focus for GIMP 2.8 is to get
work not related to GEGL done. This will enable us to fully focus on
GEGL once GIMP 2.8 has been released and finish the integration we
have tentatively started.

You will need GEGL 0.1.0 and babl 0.1.0 found at http://www.gegl.org
and http://www.gegl.org/babl to build GIMP 2.7.0. The GIMP 2.7 release
notes can be read at http://gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.7.html. A
more complete but summarized list of changes is in the NEWS file found
at http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gimp/tree/NEWS. This file is also quoted
below.

/ Martin

Changes in GIMP 2.7.0
=====================

UI:

- Change the Text Tool to perform text editing on-canvas (GSoC 2008)
- Add support for tagging GIMP resources such as brushes and allow
filtering based on these tags (GSoC 2008)
- Separate the activies of saving an image and exporting it, there is
now an ‘File->Export…’ for example
- Port file plug-ins to new export API which gets rid of many
annoying export dialogs
- Add a simple parser to size entry widgets, images can be scaled
to e.g. “50%” or “2 * 37px + 10in”
- Arrange layer modes into more logical and useful groups
- Added support for rotation of brushes
- Make the Pointer dockable show information about selection position
and size
- Get rid of the Tools dockable and move toolbox configuration to
Preferences
- Add status bar feedback for keyboard changes to brush paramaters
- Add diagonal guides to the Crop Tool
- New docks are created at the pointer position
- Add support for printing crop marks for images
- Move ‘Text along path’ from tool options to text context menu
- Change default shortcuts for “Shrink Wrap” and “Fit in Window” to
Ctrl+R and Ctrl+Shift+R respectively since the previous shortcuts
are now used for the save+export feature
- Make Alt+Click on layers in Layers dockable create a selection from
the layer
- Allow to specify written language in the Text Tool

Plug-ins:

- Map the ‘Linear Dodge’ layer mode in PSD files to the ‘Addition’
layer mode in GIMP
- Add JPEG2000 load plug-in
- Add X11 mouse cursor plug-in
- Add support for loading 16bit (RGB565) raw data
- Add palette exporter for CSS, PHP, Python, txt and Java, accessed
through palette context menu
- Add plug-in API for getting image URI, for manipulating size of
text layers, for getting and setting text layer hint, and for
unified export dialog appearance

Data:

- Add large variants of round brushes and remove duplicate and
useless brushes
- Add “FG to BG (Hardedge)” gradient

GEGL:

- Port the projection code, the code that composes a single image
from a stack of layers, to GEGL
- Port layer modes to GEGL
- Port the floating selection code to GEGL
- Refactor the layer stack code to prepare for layer groups later
- Prepare better and more intuitive handling of the floating
selection
- Add File->Debug->Show Image Graph that show the GEGL graph of an
image
- Allow to benchmark projection performance with
File->Debug->Benchmark Projection
- When using GEGL for the projection, use CIELCH instead of HSV/HSL
for color based layer modes

Core:

- Make painting strokes Catmull-Rom Spline interpolated
- Add support for arbitrary affine transforms of brushes
- Add support for brush dynamics to depend on tilt
- Add aspect ratio to brush dynamics
- Add infrastructure to soon support vector layers (GSoC 2006)
- Rearrange legacy layer mode code to increase maintainability
- Drop support for the obsolete GnomeVFS file-uri backend
- Allow to dump keyboard shortucts ith File->Debug->Dump Keyboard
Shortcuts
- Prepare data structures for layer groups
- Remove gimprc setting “menu-mnemonics”,
“GtkSettings:gtk-enable-

mnemonics” shall be used instead
- Remove “transient-docks” gimprc setting, the ‘Utility window’ hint
and a sane window manager does a better job
- Remove “web-browser” gimprc setting and use gtk_show_uri() instead

General:

- Changed licence to (L)GPLv3+
- Use the automake 1.11 feature ’silent build rules’ by default
- Lots of bug fixes and cleanup
_______________________________________________
Gimp-developer mailing list
Gimp-developer@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU
https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer

Tags: 2.7, 2.8
Posted in Gimp | 13 Comments »

There is a lot to do until then, too much to get finished in the planned half year interval. So don’t hold your breath and enjoy 2.6.x. Behind the link are some examples of GEGL effects.

And consider to help in developing or donate to speed things up!

Tags: 2.8
Posted in Gimp | 10 Comments »

 

 Podcast Video (40MB) [36:52m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 Torrent: Download

This is basically Episode 002 – but with a really new GIMP (and a more experienced screen caster). But before that I have some news for you about the future of the “Meet the GIMP” project and about the development of GIMP 2.7 and 2.8. I’ll try to explain why we will NOT have 16 bit in 2.8 – and that the developers are not to blame for it. The comments from David Gowers are here and here.
The future of this project is brighter than ever. Philippe will be a regular contributor with his own show track. The forum is really getting off. I never had to interfere there because everybody is friendly and behaves. On the other hand nobody steps around on his toes. And a lot of answers are there before I come to read the question.

The show will go wide screen as in Episode 64, but we’ll have a separate feed for mobile devices.
The funding is secure. In Episode 49 I had asked for donations. They are still coming in. I just paid the demorecorder license for Philippe from that money and have left enough to pay my 20€/month for the server well into January. If the funds are running out I’ll give notice.
BTW, I don’t publish donor names and amounts. I feel that such lists, especially sorted by amount, are humiliating. An amount easily spent by e.g. a German teacher with tenure is a high investment for people in other parts of the geographical or social map. Each donor gets a thank you mail from me as a receipt.
And there are more ways to donate to this project. Time for example. Spread the word about this on your blog or in forums where appropriate. Write comments or go to the forum. Or become a correspondent for the blog if you are stumbling over newsworthy stuff while surfing around on all the other graphics web sites.

The TOC

00:20 Housekeeping – New shows, file formats, feeds and so on
04:40 Look at 2.7, 2.8 and further
11:50 Why not 16 bit in 2.8
12:40 Setting up 2.6
14:20 Preferences dialogue
14:30 Environment
15:30 User interface, previews and keyboard shortcuts
16:00 Theme – Big or small icons
16:40 Help system
17:20 Tool options
18:55 Toolbox
19:10 Default image
19:30 Image window
20:10 Display
20:50 Input devices – activating a Wacom tablet
24:10 Tweaking gimprc for getting rid of the drop space in the toolbox
28:00 Configuring the dockable dialogs
30:30 Selecting tools for the Toolbox
34:00 Recap

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

Tags: 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, Gimp development, setup
Posted in Gimp, Gimp video tutorial | 33 Comments »