Open source image editing program
the GIMP is celebrating its 10th birthday and to commemorate it they held a contest to design a splash screen. The
winner, announced this week, is "Dialed In" by an artist called
ix. The winning splash screen accompanies the GIMP’s birthday release, version 2.2.10, which can be downloaded from its many mirrors. You can check out all of the entries in the gallery.
[Via Slashdot]
There’s a little design geek inside me and inside him is an even littler typography geek, and that geek
loves Typographica’s Favorite Fonts of 2005. With fanciful names like
Lisboa, Deréon, and Zingha, these are some truly beautiful fonts, but I think my favorite of the bunch may be
Robert Slimbach’s Garamond Premier Pro, and gorgeous update to the old serifed standby. There’s also several dozen
runners-up for your perusal, and this is only Part 1, comprising the first six months of the year. The article’s
writer, Stephen Coles, also notes the expanding role of the OpenType format and the fact that many type designers have
completely abandoned PostScript and TrueType fonts in favor of OpenType.
Version 2.40 of the powerful open source
3D rendering program Blender was released today with an
impressive list of changes. The new release’s is "packed with rewrites, new features and improvements. The
major additions this release are the Character Animation rewrite, the added Fluid Dynamics system, improved editing and
rendering of Particle Based Hair, and the Modifier Stack." While the particle hair is less than stunning, the fluid
simulator, a product of Google’s Summer of Code, looks fantastic.
Synfig is an open source app for
creating film-quality animation. The main feature Synfig’s developers seem to be touting is tweening, i.e.
automatically filling in frames between two points in an animation much like Flash does, a feature they claim no other
professional animation package has. I think the real feature here is that Synfig is open source and cross-platform and
seems to be a pretty complete package. Unfortunately the demo animations is the Gallery section of the site aren’t
especially impressive, but I suspect that has more to do with the artists than with the software. If they play their
cards write, Synfig could grow to fill the same niche in the animation field that the Gimp has for static images.
Who
doesn’t love fonts, particularly of the free variety? I remember my first
experiences with a Mac – I spent hours, actually DAYS making handouts and
posters with as many different typefaces as possible on them. That was my
introduction to desktop publishing, and it was good. These days we know that
mixing a bunch of fonts on the same page is almost as annoying as the HTML
“blink” tag, but finding the right font for a given print or web page is even
more critical. If you just don’t feel like you have the selection of fonts you
need, check out Webpage Publicity,
where they are offering 6500 free TrueType Fonts, a site dedicated to feeding
your font craving. Beware though, browsing this site can eat away
hours.
I have to applaud Adobe for continuing to give out full-featured 30-day
trial versions of its software. While some other companies don’t
provide any test versions of their programs, or give out tryouts that
cripple key features, Adobe has long been at the forefront of
commercial try-before-you-buy, even with such high-end programs as
Photoshop. And I’ve been taking advantage of this, checking out Photoshop CS2
for the past month. I know I’ve been trying it out for a month, because
when I tried to launch it today, I was greeted with a message that my
trial had expired. Fair enough; that’s what the trial is all about.
However, I was greeted by another surprise when I tried to launch
ImageReady CS2, Photoshop’s companion app for optimizing images for web
use. It still worked! As far as I can tell, there’s no expiration date
attached to the version of ImageReady installed with the CS2 tryout,
making it a freebie. Somehow, I suspect that Adobe didn’t intend this,
and I assume that at some point I clicked on licensing terms requiring
me to delete it after 30 days. But it’s still surprising to see Adobe
slipping up like this. Oh, and if it’s not a mistake, thanks, Adobe! I
love ImageReady, and would be happy to keep using it, as long as you’re
giving it away.
This program is neat. Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Seriously, Neat Image is a really cool digital image filter that can clean up images that suffer from noise. Digital noise is most noticeable in photos where too little light was used, but it occurs in almost all digital photos to greater or lesser degrees. Neat Image understands what causes this noise, and has the unique ability of being able to reduce the noise, sometimes completely. Check out the before and after photos for an example of what I’m talking about. There is a fully functional free demo version with a few limitations (does that mean it’s not “fully functional”? You know what I mean) - the most important of which is that it will limit the JPEG quality of any image it saves to 91 out of 100, which in reality is still very good. Chances are the improvements you’ll see due to cleaned up noise will outweigh the loss of quality. There are 4 other versions available, including a Photoshop plug-in version. And it has Windows and Mac versions, and will even run in Wine for you Linux folks!
"After several relatively sad years for all font users who were looking for a professional font manager," font juggernaut Linotype has released a new free font management tool called FontExplorer X. To quote Dave Shea, FontExplorer X is an "iTunes for fonts," making it easy for the sort of people who accumulate thousands of different typefaces to manage their thousands of different typefaces. Dave also provides a tip: You can use the Comment field to "tag" your fonts and then easily find particular sorts of fonts by searching or setting up a smart list. Linotype FontExplorer X is Mac-only, and did I mention it’s free?
Xara has announced that their flagship vector graphics product Xara X—or at least some version of it—is going open source and will be ported to Linux and Mac OS X. The new Open Source Xara Xtreme web site has a download page for a "proof-of-concept" demo of Xara Xtreme on Linux ("Xara LX"—shouldn’t that be Xara XL?) and are seeking developers, but so far the source code itself is not available. The FAQ is an interesting read, especially the part about how it isn’t inconceivable that Xara Xtreme will be ported back to Windows and compete with their commercial product, but they "hope that doesn’t happen."
Via Slashdot.
Previously on DLS I’ve mentioned Toon Boom Studio, a Flash-based animation package. Well now they’ve debuted Toon Boom Solo, a "new stand-alone animation software solution designed to meet the needs of small size studios and independent animation filmmakers" How is this different than TBS? Well, a few thousand bucks, for one… Why the added expense? Whereas TBS is a sort of Flash knockoff, designed specifically for creating character animations in Flash format, Solo is a complete animation studio. As such, there are industrial-strength tools included that you’d likely see on a decent 3D app. Like inverse kinematics, a sort of simple way to "rig" characters with bone systems so they are easier to animate. If Flash had IK, oh man that’d be sweet… Apparently there is a free trial you can download, but with the steep price, cool toolset, and hardware dongle, no doubt this will be lighting up the p2p boards in no time. Oh, and they’re running a promo until the end of October where you get a free Mac mini with every Solo. So for about three grand you get a computer and the software to make your animated classic. Not a bad deal.
[Via TUAW]