Tuesday, 6 Feb 2007 00:50am GMT

Inkscape (the free, open source SVG editor) has announced the release of version 0.45 of their great vector drawing program.

Links & Downloads:
- inkscape.org
- Download Inkscape 0.45 - Linux & Mac OS X packages (Windows should be there within 24hrs)
- Inkscape 0.45 Community submitted screenshots
- Inkscape Press Contact Jon Phillips' Blog on 0.45 Release

The following excerpt is from the Inkscape Press Release:

February 5, 2007 - The Inkscape community today announced the newest version of its cross-platform open source vector graphic drawing software, Inkscape. Inkscape 0.45 features a new Gaussian Blur SVG filter.
Sponsored by Google's Summer of Code program, Gaussian Blur allows you to softly and naturally blur any Inkscape objects, including shapes, text, and images. This enables a wide range of photorealistic effects: arbitrarily shaped shades and lights, depth of field, drop shadows, glows, etc.

Numerous other new features, enhancements to existing features, and bug fixes have been included. A history dialog allows you to browse your change history. Many new extension effects are added including Pattern along Path and Color Effects.
There are performance improvements to rendering speed, on the order of 2-3% in general, and up to 5-10% for drawings using heavy transparency and/or radial gradients. Compositing quality is also improved through the removal of banding seen in gradients.

For more details, see the complete Release Notes for 0.45

Wednesday, 31 Jan 2007 03:28 am GMT

Monday, 29 Jan 2007 02:47am GMT

Tom Whiteley has developed an extremely cool little web application aptly titled "Search with Pictures" which allows a user to draw a image in a javascript canvas, then it searches Open Clip Art library images for similar images based on the drawing.

This little app is still being developed by Tom, however after playing with it for a bit, it is clear that is has awesome potential as a search tool for the Open Clip Art Library. Hopefully, once it has been developed further, it can be integrated into our ccHost engine to allow users to search the Open Clip Art Library visually, as well as using tags.

The URL of the application is: http://www.lococitato.com/search_with_pic/search_with_pic.html

Below is a screenshot of this tool in action:

Sunday, 21 Jan 2006 10:47pm GMT

Good news for all you Inkscape-using Open Clip Art artists out there; the newest installment of the open source vector graphics editor should be released very soon.

If you want to give it a test-run, inkscape.org have released a preview source release that is available for download and use. If, during your testing of the preview release, you encounter any major crashes, you can log them on the inkscape bug tracker

Recently, inkscape has also just hit over 2 Million downloads of their software, and with the upcoming release, this total is sure to rise a lot more. Inkscape has a large team of developers, testers, documentation-ists and translators which all work to make a great opensource product for us to use, so if you see any of them around, make sure you give them a friendly thanks!

Thursday, 18 Jan 2006 03:28 pm GMT

Congratulations are in order for one of the Open Clip Art Library's resident librarians, Molumen; as his design was chosen as the winner of the the Inkscape 0.45 About Screen competition.

Molumen's Design, which samples an Open Clip Art Library image also utilises the blur filter which makes it's debut as a feature in the upcoming 0.45 release of inkscape.

If you see Molumen around, make sure you congratulate him on his great work!