Sunday, June 21st, 1998

GIMP History Page
Seth Burgess has a page up describing the history of GIMP from its birth up until a couple months ago. It's an interesting read; check it out.

Tuesday, June 16th, 1998

Italian Net-Fu
There's a Net-Fu server available now that is very similar to Cooltext, except it's in Italian. Check it out.

Monday, June 15th, 1998

Plug-In Writing Documentation
Kevin Turner has created a guide to writing plug-ins. If you wanted to write plugins but needed some help understanding the source, this is an excellent place to start.

Saturday, June 13th, 1998

Online Newspaper Uses GIMP
Check out The Eastside Journal, a Washington-based newspaper that is using GIMP for the graphics on its homepage. You can see Wilber in all his glory in the lower right hand corner. In addition, several of the graphics have the GIF comment "Made with GIMP".

Tile Tutorial
Ville Pätsi wrote in with a new tile tutorial he has written.

"Tile" in this case refers to the button backgrounds used by window managers such as WindowMaker or AfterStep. They're not seamlessly tiling textures.

Friday, June 12th, 1998

GIMP Manual Online
In case you hadn't seen it, the HTML version of the GIMP Manual is available online. Be warned, though, that the conversion from FrameMaker to HTML was a little spotty. It is preferable to view the Postscript or PDF versions.

There's also a mirror online courtesy of Marco Giardini.

Wednesday, June 10th, 1998

Plug-In Binaries
Marco Giardini wrote to me to let me know that he has the latest plug-in binaries available on his GIMP page. These are binaries for ix86 systems compiled on a Red Hat 4.2 system. They include all plugins on the Registry, not just officially distributed ones.

Saturday, June 6th, 1998

New Tutorials
Nick Moraitakis wrote in to announce a few new tutorials he's written, available at his website.

Friday, June 5th, 1998

GIMP 1.0 RELEASED
At long last, GIMP 1.0 is now available. Since there's been a feature freeze for months now, there are no new features; this version is almost identical to 0.99.31 (save bugfixes). 1.0 is now out the door, so you should see a flurry of very interesting changes as the development branch goes into full swing.

Version 1.0 should be extremely stable and reliable. If you do experience any crashes, you should probably fill out the bug report form at WilberWorks. And remember, you can also order 1.0 (and a whole lot more) on CD from WilberWorks as well.

If you have trouble getting into the FTP site, you can use the mirror at GIMP News or another mirror.

UPDATE Trond has made RPMs and source RPMs for GIMP 1.0, available at his FTP site.

There will be an informal little celebration thing on irc.gimp.org port 6666, channel #party. You can also connect via irc.canweb.net port 6667 or irc.coherent.net port 6667. Europeans might want to try connecting to irc.germany.gimp.org port 6667. I'll see you there!

HAPPY GIMPING!

Wednesday, June 3rd, 1998

GIMP Covered In Publish Magazine
Luke Jones wrote in to let me know that GIMP was discussed in the July issue of Publish magazine, page 24. "Very positive; mentions major weakness is color management support." I'll try and get a copy of this article and give you all more info.

GIMP Reviewed
Australian computer magazine APCMag posted a review of GIMP in their "First Looks" section.

BSD/OS 3.x Binary
Bert Driehuis let me knew about a new pre-compiled binary for BSD/OS:

A binary for BSD/OS 3.x is available from ftp://ftp.bsdi.com/contrib/bsdos3.x/apps/graphics/. This is a kit with BSD/OS shared libraries, so it's small and fast. Unfortunately, I couldn't find docs on libtool, so providing patches to support building out of the source tree are not included (and no, I didn't feel like rooting around inside the libtool scripts, yikes :-)

Note, however, that this binary is a couple versions behind.

Sunday, May 31st, 1998

Linus Says Nice Stuff About GIMP
Linus Torvalds, father of Linux, gave a non-keynote keynote presentation at the Linux Expo on Friday titled "Ramblin' Linus." While he talked about kernel stuff and interesting things he's working on, he also singled out GIMP as an important sign of the progress of Linux. I don't have a transcript but the gist of his comments indicated that people are writing great programs that aren't only for hackers or engineers. Thanks Linus!

Thursday, May 28th, 1998

Pics From The Expo
Nick Stock was kind enough to snap some pics of a group of us GIMP guys while standing around at the expo. You can check them out here. Keen, eh?

Tuesday, May 26th, 1998

Linux Expo Draws Nigh
Tomorrow, I leave for Durham, North Carolina. I'm going to be attending the Linux Expo. If you happen to be going and you see me, say hello. I'll be wearing either a C++ hat or an alias|wavefront hat. I also have a pic on my home page although I won't be carrying a guitar at the Expo. See you there!

GTK 1.0.3
GTK 1.0.3 was released a few days ago. It fixes some nagging bugs on certain platforms. You can get it from ftp.gimp.org.

Monday, May 25th, 1998

GIMP Manual 1.0 Released
Version 1.0 of the GIMP Manual by Karin and Olof represents a very important step for GIMP. Here is the notice they sent me:

This is release 1.0.0 of the GIMP User's Manual (GUM). This is the first stable release of the manual, a product of almost a year of work. It is available in HTML, PS, PDF and FM (FrameMaker) source code. Please read COPYING for the license terms of the manual.

The manual is about 590 pages long and there have been several imporvments over previous versions. Be sure to pay special attention to the new Gallery chaper which contains many nice images and a hints on how to make them. The Gallery is a good example of what you can do with the GIMP. All images in the manual is 100% pure GIMP images.

The HTML version is suitable for online manual, PS and PDF are suitable if you want to print it on a regular printer or have a nice looking online manual. The FM source code is only useful if you want to contribute to the Graphic Documentation Project. Submissions to the GIMP User's manual will follow under the license agreement in the COPYING file.

The HTML version of the manual, while convenient for an online manual, is not the same quality of the PDF or PostScript formats. Improvements will be made to the HTML version later. This release was under a time constraint. New Chapters:

• Gallery
• Prepress
• Advanced animations
• Compiling
• Fonts
• Mike's Script-Fu School (needs update)
• Etc, Etc...

Some notes if you want to work with the FameMaker or PostScript versions: The decompressed PS is about 170 MB. If you work with the FM version you will need to adjust the image and font values for memory handling inside FrameMaker otherwise it will not display or print the Render and Galley chapters. This is because these chapters have a large number of large images. The decompressed FM is about 235 MB.

We hope that the GIMP Users Manual will be useful to the GIMP user community and welcome all comments and suggestions.

Yours,

Karin & Olof

karin@frozenriver.ale.se (karin@frozenriver.com summer '98)

PS. We want to thank Matt Wilson for his helping hand.

It's available from ftp.gimp.org.

Thursday, May 21st, 1998

Adrian Has Some Kickass Scripts
Adrian Likins has been keeping some of his killer scripts hidden from the world. Particularly cool is the Chip Away script. Check 'em out.

New Gimp-Perl
Marc Lehmann has uploaded a new version of gimp-perl to the Registry. gimp-perl is a system that allows you to write scripts, extensions, and plugins in Perl. New in this release is Gimp::Fu (see the tutorial mentioned in an older article.

More Script-Fu Scripts
Urpo Lankinen (aka WWWWolf) dropped me a note to let me know he's got a few nice Script-Fu scripts written up. They're available from his Script-Fu page.

Wednesday, May 20th, 1998

Perl/GIMP Tutorial
Dov Grobgeld has written an introductory page about using Perl for writing GIMP scripts. Wanted to write some Script-Fu scripts but scared of Scheme? You may find Perl a little more familiar to you. Check it out here.

Sunday, May 17th, 1998

GIMP 0.99.31 Released
GIMP 0.99.31 was released today. It contains some new Script-Fu scripts, some updated plugins, bugfixes, and more. There is a script (included since 0.99.29) called gimptool you should check out; it allows you to quickly build plugins that consist of a single C source file. You should also upgrade GTK to version 1.0.2 (see related story).

In case you're wondering, there was no 0.99.30 release. 0.99.30 just plain looks funny.

It's available for download from ftp.gimp.org. RPMs should be available from Trond Eivind Glomsrød's great ftp site soon.

Saturday, May 16th, 1998

New Plugin: Onroot
Andy Thomas has written an amazingly useful little plugin. It allows you to draw an image on the root window in a variety of ways, similar to what XV can do. You can get it from his web page. It's not quite at the registry yet.

Print Plugin Update
Michael Sweet has made another update to the Print plugin bringing it up to version 2.0.2. Here's Mike's announcement:

This one fixes a few bugs that have been reported (can't drag the preview image, PostScript printing doesn't work without a PPD file) and adds support for the CRet (4-level) modes of the HP DeskJet 800 and 1100 series printers (much better output!)

It's available from the Registry or from Mike's GIMP page.

GIMP News Article Archive
You can now view past articles from GIMP News (since February 22nd) in a convenient Article Archive. Wondering when GIMP 0.99.23 came out? Now you can find the answer!

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