GIMP 1.3.17
Greetings, color-space voyagers on board GIMP 1.3.
We are approaching our target coordinates and will soon go into
feature freeze. Please bring your monitors into an upright position
and prepare for download.
Lately the course has been changed; it was decided that our
journey will not go past version 1.4 as was avised in the infamous
“The Future of The GIMP” document. Instead the next stop will be
2.0. This doesn’t mean that we will miss our rendezvous with GEGL,
only the coordinates were changed.
The reason for this change is the fact that although there are
some expectations for GIMP version 2.0 that will not be met, GIMP
has improved a lot over the last three years and is certainly past
the state that was imagined as version 1.4. People got used to
refer to GIMP-1.4 as the next stable version and used to think of
GIMP-2.0 as the all-singing-all-dancing wonder tool that would rule
the world hand in hand with GEGL. This is still our goal but we
feel that so much work has gone into the code base since version
1.2, that the time has come for a major version number increment.
The application core has been completely restructured and large
parts of it have been rewritten. Along with the port to GTK+-2.0,
we continued the revamp of the user interface code that was started
after GIMP 1.0 was released. The current code base gives us lots of
room for further improvements and it should allow a smooth
transition to GEGL. But I don’t want to talk more on details of
future development. We will be discussing this topic on the GIMP
Developers Conference that is going to happen in about two weeks
(see http://developer.gimp.org/gimpcon.html).
The plan is to go into feature freeze during the heat of the
camp. We will then start to make pre-releases for 2.0 in regular
intervals asking a larger audience to test our code. Hopefully we
can get enough testers for all platforms including Mac OS and Win32
to be able to release version 2.0 with support for as many
platforms as possible.
Before I get hyped away, let me get back to the original subject
of this mail. GIMP version 1.3.17 is now available from the FTP
server:
ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v1.3/v1.3.17/
and should soon find it’s way to your favorite mirror:
http://www.gimp.org/download.html
There is a chance that you will experience build problems due to
the inclusion of a new compositing sub-system that uses MMX and SSE
to accelerate common operations in the layer compositing. If you
experience such or any other problem with this release, please file
a bug-report at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/. But
please check beforehand if the problem has already been reported.
If you are hit by the mentioned problems with MMX or SSE assembler
code, you can fix your build using the –disable-mmx and/or
–disable-sse configure options.
Below is a list of changes since version 1.3.16. There are some
noteable improvements among them. More to come before the
freeze…
Overview of Changes in GIMP
1.3.17
- Made the text tool optionally create a path [Sven, Mitch]
- Added the ability to reverse gradients to the blend tool
[Mitch] - Added dithering to the blend tool [Alastair M. Robinson]
- Changed all(?) GIMP-1.4 references to GIMP-2.0 [Sven]
- Allow to transform paths using the transform tools [Mitch]
- Added a simple CMYK color selector [Sven]
- Added naive RGB <-> CMYK conversion routines [Sven]
- Generalized paint tools [Mitch]
- Finally a brush-shaped cursor for all paint tools [Mitch]
- Started to integrate new composite functions [Helvetix]
- Made the style for dockable tabs configurable [Mitch]
- Some preparations for text transformations [Sven]
- Store grid settings in XCF [Brix]
- Redone assembly checks and run-time checks for CPU features
[Sven] - Added lots of mnemonics to the menus [Jimmac]
- Support for comments in PNG files [Sven]
- Constified the libgimp API and adapted all plug-ins [Yosh,
Sven] - Cleaned up the brush/font/gradient/pattern selector API
[Mitch] - Support for patterns with alpha channel [Bolsh]
- Lots of bug fixes
Other contributors:
Eric Pierce, Joao S. O. Bueno, Tor Lillqvist, Damien Carbery,
Maurits Rijk
The weather forecast for our next stop, Altlandsberg, announces
a hot sunny weekend close to a LovelyLake. Please make sure you are
bringing your towel.
Happy GIMPing, Sven