GIMP Development News

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann worked on the print plug-in to get it into a state that is good enough for the 2.4 release, and sums up the remaining work needed on the print plug-in:

• the print dialog comes up with whatever unit is default for the user's locale, like the Print Size dialog. Decide whether that's fine or whether both should be changed to the default unit
• try to embed the "Adjust Page Size and Orientation" dialog
• a GtkPrint expert should look at setting the page size to the system default
• a GtkPrint expert should look at shortening the printing process
• fix the horizontal light bands coming from printing the image in stripes of tile height

[GEGL] Øyvind Kolås announced GEGL 0.0.4, the first public release of this graph based image processing framework. The public API is now in a state where extended testing is desirable!

[MISC] The GNOME CVS repository has been migrated to Subversion. gimp was one of the first modules to be migrated and is already available on svn.gnome.org.

[I18N] Gabor Kelemen proposed a patch for po-tips pot-generation failing, and Sven Neumann applied it.

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann fixed an Incorrect GUI label in Small Tiles plug-in.

[UI] Michael Natterer fixed a segmentation fault while creating new dock with Layers, Channels & paths, or opening the layers window, by not working with NULL mask view renderers.

[UI] Everyone had a nice time at the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress, during which Simon Budig implemented a new GimpRatioEntry widget that is already used by the crop and rectangle select tools.

[PLUG-IN] Aurimas Juška finished the SOC project "Save for Web", and made the Save for Web plug-in available in the registry. It allows visual adjustment of various image parameters such as quality, number of colors, dimensions, etc to reach optimal file size.

[RELEASE] Sven Neumann announced a tentative string freeze to give the translators a chance to start working on the message catalogs for 2.4. No string changes are allowed unless they fix bugs.

[TOOL] Peter Sikking wrote a specification for the rectangle and ellipse select tools, as well as the crop tool that uses the same user interface.

[UI] David Gowers improved tips of the day, and Sven Neumann aplied his patch.

[TOOL] Aurore D wrote a patch to fix jitter not working on some parametric brushes (those with an angle close to 90°), and Sven Neumann applied it.

[UI] Sven Neumann fixed "Configure this tab" not working in the "Undo History"-Dialog by changing "undo-editor-popup" to "undo-popup", since this was required by another bugfix.

[DOCS] Roman Joost announced version 0.11 of the GIMP User Manual, with spelling and grammar fixes, addition of the korean, norwegian and russian languages, support for the new table of contents view in the help browser that ships with recent development versions of GIMP, and new content!

[RELEASE] Jakub Steiner proposed a splash screen for GIMP 2.4.

[TOOL] Paul Gnuyen wrote a Polygonal Selection Tool specification.

[RELEASE] Sven Neumann made an update on the 2.4 showstoppers:

• rectangle tools are unfinished, there are some major regressions in the Crop tool and the tool options simply don't work (and look) good enough
• color management is unfinished
• healing brush is unfinished
• progress has been made on the scalable brushes, pixmap brushes still need to be changed to parametric ones, the scaling algorithm should be replaced by one that also handles upscaling

[UI] David Gowers refactored the code of the new palette based color selector module, and Michael Natterer applied his patch.

[UI] Simon Budig found a workaround for XOR drawn lines hard to see, which guarantees that there is always a contrast between the original image pixels and the stuff drawn on top of it.

[MISC] David Gowers wrote a patch to add actions to adjust brush spacing, and Michael Natterer applied it.

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann made the "Load Defaults" button in the PNG save dialog reset to factory defaults instead of popping up a warning dialog when the user hasn't saved default values yet.

[MISC] Michael Natterer made "Open As Layer..." use the image file's basename as layer name if only one layer is imported or if merge_visible was requested, and "basename - layer name" otherwise.

[UI] Sven Neumann made the UI clearer and more compact.

[PLUG-IN] Kevin Cozens fixed a problem with burn-in-anim.scm by not allowing one of the two layers to be a floating selection.

[SCRIPT-FU] Kevin Cozens made an optimization for string comparison in Script-Fu by using stored collation keys.

[MISC] Michael Natterer fixed 'Open as Layers...' add layers in reverse order.

[UI] A default setup for GIMP 2.4 has to be chosen, and some points have been discussed:

• absence of the selector boxes in the toolbox to save desktop space: the fg/bg color selector can almost be replaced with the Color tab, and the brush/patter/gradient selector is redundant with the respective tool options.
• docked dialogs would be: Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo ; and: Color, Brushes, Patterns, Gradients, and maybe Palettes.

[BUILD] Min Sik Kim wrote a patch to make GIMP build with Quartz GDK backend, and Sven Neumann applied it.

[TOOL] After a user's comment on autoscroll, Sven Neumann polled the gimp-user mailing list to know whether the paint tools should autoscroll the image view when reaching the edge of the window, and decided to turn that off.

[PLUG-IN] Simon Budig fixed the antialias plug-in erasing the topmost pixel row inside a selection.

[MISC] Michael Natterer made the brush spacing scale with the brush size.

[MISC] Aurimas Juška proposed a patch to fix RGBA to indexed conversion with dithering of transparency causes transparent pixels at fixed locations, and Sven Neumann applied it.

[PLUG-IN] Aurimas Juška wrote a patch for the Filmstrip plugin crashing, with recommendations from Simon Budig, and Sven Neumann applied it.

[TOOL] Saul Goode wrote a patch to handle Color Balance "range" correctly, and Sven Neumann applied it.

[PYTHON] Manish Singh made gimp-python comboboxes provide python objects by creating and unsing specialized wrappers for get/set_active methods for GimpIntComboBox and derived types.

[BUILD] Michael Natterer fixed a libgimp compile failure on win32 platform.

[TOOL] Pedro Alonso made a video tutorial about perspective clone tool.

[PDB] Joao S. O. Bueno Calligaris wrote a patch that adds some missing transformations to the PDB-API for strokes, and Simon Budig applied it: vectors now have a complete PDB interface for multiple components.

[TOOL] Adrian Likins wrote a patch which adds a GRand to the GimpBrushCore struct and uses it instead of using g_random_foo() functions, and Michael Natterer applied it.

[MISC] Simon Budig fixed loading XCF inverts channel order.

[UI] Sven Neumann fixed error console grabbing the focus and error console tab raised for all messages by only raising and focusnig the error console for severe error messages.

[RELEASE] Sven Neumann released the 2.3.13 development version, which has some nice new features like handling of embedded color profiles, scalable brushes, an improved help browser and a new Script-Fu Scheme interpreter.

[USABILITY] Peter Sikking explains some hard choices had to be made by the team about what workflow to support, and what to leave to other applications. The scenario categories identified were:

• high‐end photography
• creating original art, from 'found images'
• icon editing
• create web graphics
• automate repetitive tasks.

[RELEASE] Sven Neumann described the list of 2.4 showstoppers:

• finish rectangle tools
• finish color management
• finish healbrush
• check if the new print plug-in is ready for release

[MISC] Jernej Simončič wrote a patch to allow use of environment variables in pluginrc, to enable GIMP to use a precomputed plugin config for portable drives, and Michael Natterer applied it.

[PLUG-IN] Mukund Sivaraman fixed loglog smoothing crashes FractalExplorer and made loglog smoothing work again.

[MISC] Michael Natterer made all brushes scalable from the tool options. So far only downscaling is supported since GIMP lacks an algorithm for bitmap brush upscaling. He made the [ and ] shortcuts work for all tool tips.

[MISC] Michael Natterer changed ColormapEditor menu registration point to Colormap.

[USABILITY] Sven Neumann reports that the usability weekend with Kamila led to a list of usage scenarios that are considered typical for GIMP's target user base. The next step is an expert evaluation of the current user interface.

[PLUG-IN] Saul Goode wrote a patch to fix Small Tiles plug-in confusing horizontal and vertical flips, and Sven Neumann applied it.

[TOOL] Michael Natterer made new "Rect select" tool restore settings.

[UI] Michael Natterer fixed the black border around palette colors sometimes missing by taking the additional row/column of pixels the grid line takes at the bottom/right side into account.

[MISC] Sven Neumann fixed thumbnails not always matching the image by not storing thumbnails any longer when saving a file, but still generating a preview when loading one and also from the File Open dialog. A thumbnail is still stored when saving as XCF (or compressed XCF).

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann fixed a crash on invalid menu paths.

[SCRIPT-FU] Kevin Cozens made Script-fu compile on win32 with MSVC.

[USABILITY] The OpenUsability sponsored student project received fourteen application from all over the world. Peter Sikking lead the selection process, and chose Kamila Giedrojć as an interaction architect associate.

[DOCS] Roman Joost added support for ODF generation of the Gimp User Manual.

[MISC] Michael Natterer fixed profile migration not converting paths in gimprc by adding gimp_rc_migrate() which resets all GimpParamConfigPath properties to default values.

[UI] Michael Natterer made it possible to add any kind of icons to Recently Used Filters menu (not only stock-id ones).

[MISC] Sven Neumann worked on color management. GIMP will detect an embedded color profile when loading an image file and asks you how the profile should be handled.

[UI] Michael Natterer fixed palette display being wrong if number of columns is set to 1 in editor.

[UI] Michael Natterer fixed "Open as layer" loading garbage when opening an animated gif, with the help of the new file_open_layers() function that has a "gboolean merge_visible" parameter.

[SCRIPT-FU] Martin Nordholts wrote a Filter -> Render -> Cloud -> Difference Clouds script to ease the use of this common step in tutorials, and Sven Neumann added it to CVS.

[PLUG-IN] Michael Natterer addedd "Auntie Alias" by Adam D. Moss, a plug-in which does nice antialiasing on lineart using the Scale3X edge-extrapolation algorithm.

[PLUG-IN] Michael Natterer fixed a crash after parsing pluginrc.

[PDB] Simon Budig implemented a new API for vectors needing a PDB interface for multiple components and PDB interface for stroking vectors.

[PLUG-IN] Michael Natterer added a mechanism that should prevent undo corruption by broken plug-ins and scripts, and should allow script-fu rollback on error.

[SCRIPT-FU] Michael Natterer fixed gimp-quit crashing Gimp when used through Script-Fu by not sending a return value if executing the procedure closed the plug-in.

[SCRIPT-FU] Kevin Cozens updated the Script-Fu plug-in to use the TinyScheme Scheme interpreter.

[TOOL] Martin Nordholts wrote a patch to make rectangle selection have "Round corners" as an alternative to "Feather", and Michael Natterer applied it.

[UI] Martin Nordholts wrote a patch for 0.1 px brush-scale-inscrease shortcuts and other brush shortcuts, and Michael Natterer applied it.

[PLUG-IN] Aurimas Juška wrote several patches to add support for saving 24 bit files, fix a bug in the load routines for this format, honor the run-mode parameter,and add support for the loading and saving of Vista 256x256 PNG Compressed Icons. Sven Neumann applied them.

[PYTHON] Eric Lamarque wrote a patch for Gimp python unusable if pygtk not installed against python, and Manish Singh applied it.

[UI] Michael Natterer improved error handling for "Open Location".

[TOOL] Michael Natterer made scissor tool allow to create holes into selection by separating selection tool function (select, move, cut, ...) from selection mode (replace, add, ...)

[UI] Sven Neumann added he missing mnemonics in Rotate tool window.

[TOOL] Michael Natterer fixed changing preview mode not working in transform path by allowing to show the grid for path transforms.

[TOOL] Michael Natterer fixed the previews of transformations currently useless for selections by showing the outline of the selection while transforming it.

[MISC] Michael Natterer started from a patch by William Skaggs to implement Edit->Fade, which allows to modify the paint mode and opacity of the last drawable operation (fill, plugins etc.).

[INSTALLER] Jernej Simončič added an "Open in GIMP" explorer menu entry for GIMP on Windows.

[SCRIPT-FU] Kevin Cozens has been working for a long time on Tiny-fu, the replacement of Script-fu. He tried to minimize the number of differences so that the switch would be easier, as a switch to Tiny-Fu will affect some of the scripts available in the registry as well as others floating around the net. The next step is to replace Script-Fu scheme interpreter with the Tiny-Fu one.

[USABILITY] Philip Ganchev made a proposal to offer a search interface for menu items.

[TOOL] Joao S. O. Bueno Calligaris announced he started a plug-in for rich text editing.

[PLUG-IN] Aurimas Juška provided a patch for supernova filter preview disappearing, and Sven Neumann applied it.

[MISC] GG wrote patches to fix numerical accuracy in Lanczos routines, and William Skaggs applied them.

[DOCS] As the the Hard Light algorithm in the glossary was incorrect, William Skaggs applied Steven Brown's patch to correct it.

[DOCS] Maciej Katafiasz thinks INSTALL doesn't properly list Python requirements, and Sven Neumann made improvements on it based on his patch.

[MISC] Michale Natterer added message severities and made sure all messages are routed through a central function, so redirecting to the error console or stderr work again.

[UI] Sven Neumann changed the internal API to accept printf-style format strings and avoid markup in translatable messages.

[PYTHON] Manish Singh added slice support to the colors types to fix sequence interface on color incomplete.

[TOOL] Michael Natterer fixed Rectangle & Elipse Selecttools select menu item 'none' not updated by flushing the image after clearing the selection and after anchoring a floating layer.

[UI] Michael Natterer fixed several bugs by remembering the settings in the scale and resize dialogs for images and layers: remember last scale method setting, make canvas, layer, image resizing dialogs remember preferences, and remember last used scaling units.

[PLUG-IN] Michael Natterer fixed ImageMap plugin rectangle drawing dirty by using GDK_XOR instead of GDK_EQUIV.

[SCRIPT-FU] Saulgoode has finished the review and localization of Script-Fu blurbs.

[PLUG-IN] Aurimas Juška wrote several patches to clean the Windows icon plug-in and fix some of its bugs, like winicon plugin can't create or open windows vista icons. Sven Neumann applied the one that fixes file-ico-save ignores run-mode parameter.

[PLUG-IN] "gg" proposed a patch for extending matrix size in Convolution Matrix plug-in to 7x7, and William Skaggs applied it with coding style fixes.

[MISC] Geert Jordaens wrote a patch to add lanczos and cubic interpolation methods to the transform operations, and Kevin Cozens applied it.

[UI] William Skaggs applied David Gowers' patch for Layers->Offset uses image dimensions rather than drawable dimensions.

[MISC] David Gowers porposed a patch for gimp_image_convert_set_dither_matrix trying to be too smart, and Sven Neumann applied it.

[UI] William Skaggs fixed the misuse of term "Affect" in Transform tools label by changing it to "Move" or "Transform".

[PYTHON] Manish Singh fixed Python Whirl & Pinch not working by restoring its old behavior.

[TOOL] Sven Neumann unset the scroll lock on the Free Select tool so that free select tool autoscrolls like paint tools, and also on the Foreground Select tool.

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann made Fractal Explorer's save routine use g_ascii_formatd() to fix Fractal explorer not able to load it's saved files in German locale.

[MISC] Tor Lillqvist found the reason why RGBA to indexed with dithering of transparency causes transparent pixels at fixed locations, and William Skaggs wrote a fix following his suggestion.

[SCRIPT-FU] Kevin Cozens announced the Tiny-Fu 1.1.0 release, which supports both GIMP 2.2 and current CVS GIMP. Tiny-Fu 1.1.0 coexists with Script-Fu, but next release will make it impossible to have both at the same time, in the interest of simplifying the transition to Tiny-Fu from Script-Fu.

[UI] Martin Nordholts wrote a patch for 0.1 px brush-scale-inscrease shortcuts and other brush shortcuts, and Sven Neumann wants it to be reviewed for inclusion in GIMP 2.4.

[MISC] William Skaggs applied Geert Jordaens' patch to fix transformation tools with Lanczos interpolation brightening the result.

[PLUG-IN] William Skaggs fixed a ripple plugin crash and a Line Nova crash by setting the minimum value for period and randomness to 1 instead of 0.

[DATA] Michael Natterer did not want to make read only brushes editable through the Brush Editor, and fixed the inconsistency by not allowing editing of read-only generated brushes with keyboard shortcuts.

[UI] Sven Neumann added a new CMYK color-selector that uses littleCMS for the RGB <-> CMYK conversion. This is built instead of the standard CMYK color-selector if lcms is available.

[MISC] Michael Natterer moved all tool error messages that can happen when clicking the image to the image window's statusbar, using the new gimp_statusbar_push_temp() API. He also fixed all the bad and inconsistent messages.

[PYTHON] Sven Neumann and Manish Singh made everything ready for review and internationalization of gimp-python scripts.

[PLUG-IN] Paul L. Daniel wrote a converter for Adobe Illustrator palette files (.ai) to GIMP palette files, and is working on integrating his code into the GIMP.

[RELEASE] Raphaël Quinet put some guidelines for a new splash screen for GIMP 2.4.

[MISC] "gg" provided a patch for scaling image causing an offset, particularly with Lanczos, and William Skaggs applied it. Geert Jordaens also works on it.

[UI] J. Baker has thoughts on tool names and tooltips and provided a patch that William Skaggs applied.

[PLUG-IN] Maciej Katafiasz reports cancelling opening a URL doesn't stop download, and Michael Natterer fixed it by opening a process group for this plug-in, and killing the entire group so the plug-in's children, like wget, are killed too.

[UI] J. Baker gets Script Errors with Edit > Paste As, and Michael Natterer has already addressed the problem for internal functions.

[GEGL] Øyvind Kolås opened several bugs in the GEGL product, which could help make the integration with legacy GIMP code much easier.

[PYTHON] Manish Singh fixed PyGimp GimpHSV interface can cause crash when passing integers.

[PLUG-IN] The request for Lense distort plugin inclusion has been accepted and the modified plug-in committed by Sven Neumann.

[TOOL] Sven Neumann rewrote the Alignment tool UI without tables and separators, fixed button icons missing, and added the tool to the image menu.

[PDB] As calling deprecated procedures crashes gimp, Michael Natterer fixed the way one can disable them.

[TOOL] Sven Neumann fixed endian issues that were causing a perspective tool preview corruption.

[SOC] Dave Neary made a SoC roundup, and thinks that the GIMP's participation can be called a success. Out of 8 projects chosen, 6 have successfully completed their goals, or are well on the way. At least 5 will continue working on the GIMP after the project is finished, as volunteers. So we're eager to participate again in future editions!

• Proposal for implementing vector layers in the GIMP: Hendrik Boom's code is in the soc2006-vector-layers branch in CVS and will be merged after 2.4, since this is such a drastic change
• New/Extended Brush System: Philip Lafleur rather worked on GEGL all Summer, and his contributions are helping make sure that the GIMP 3.0 will be that bit closer, once 2.4 gets out the door
• Vanishing point cloning: Pedro Alonso Ferrer's code is already in CVS, he has written some nice docs and a tutorial for the tool
• Healing Brush: Kevin Sookocheff's code is in CVS, and was in the 2.3.11 release
• Ruby-Gimp scripting: Scott Lembcke's code is in the gimp-ruby module of GNOME CVS
• Proposal for wavelets-based imaging applications in GIMP: Divyanshu Vats successfully completed jpeg2000 support, and a number of image filters integrating wavelet transforms
• Save for Web or set of filters: Smorkalov Andrey Urievich started well, but stopped work on the project after the mid-term evaluations
• GIMP resources repository: Lauris Bukšis-Haberkorns also did not continue work on the plug-in and resources distribution system after the midterm evaluations

[I18N] Sven Neumann explains we have started to use translation contexts in GIMP, and there are several translations in CVS that got this wrong and translated the context too. Translators should review their translations and fix the problematic strings.

[PLUG-IN] Aurimas Juška ported the Lense distortion plugin to newer GIMP APIs with Sven Neumann's help, and the plug-in is now included. Aurimas still works on it to port the preview code to GimpZoomPreview.

[PYTHON] David Gowers started reviewing and internationalizing gimp-python scripts by marking strings for translation in gimpcons.py and gtkcons.py. Sven Neumann added basic infrastructure for a gimp20-python translation domain and applied a less aggressive version of David's patch. gimpcons.py can serve as an example for further review of strings and marking them for translation.

[PLUG-IN] Tom Williams pointed out JPEG Open dialog needs a preview thumbnail when asking about EXIF orientation, and Sven Neumann added it.

[PLUG-IN] skottish experienced a Depth Merge plug-in crash on 64 bit Linux, and William Skaggs fixed it.

[TOOL] Heiko Schmidt reported Gimp crashes when inserting sample point, and Michael Natterer fixed it by only using the active tool for sample point moving if it is a GimpColorTool but *not* a GimpPaintTool with color picking disabled.

[TOOL] Heiko Schmidt noticed that in new rect select tool, selection outlines were not visible immediately, and Sven Neumann fixed it.

[UI] David gowers wrote a patch to make palette search smarter, and Sven Neumann aplied it.

[TOOL] Jeffery Small finds the crop rectangle difficult to move, and William Skaggs fixed this behavior by keeping updating the rectangle when the pointer goes outside boundaries.

[TOOL] Alexander Rabtchevich regrets switching to another tool from clone tool doesn't clear the source cross, and Michale Natterer fixed it.

[UI] J. Baker and David Gowers made suggestions for User Interface mnemonic changes, and Sven Neumann took care of them.

[PLUG-IN] Jez Kabanov doesn't want script-fu to change default filter settings, and Sven Neumann found the bug was in the unsharp mask plug-in and fixed it.

[TOOL] David Polberger reported GIMP crashes when cloning from one view to another, and "Sample Merged" is enabled, and Michael Natterer fixed it by instructing the paint_core to make a copy of the projection whenever we clone from the same *image*, not from the same display.

[UI] Sven Neumann added more information to the image info dialog.

[UI] Sven Neumann made "style" dialog element in stroke-path dialog less ambiguous.

[TOOL] Michael Natterer fixed selection tool: modifiers pressed before click should only do one thing and after cropping once, expand from center is selected automatically the next time by adding a new tool API for modifier key events while the tool is active and implementing it in the rect select and crop tools.

[MISC] Sven Neumann fixed Gaussian Blur preview showing artifactual color bands by fixing calculation of offset into the source buffer.

[RELEASE] Sven Neumann released a new development version, GIMP 2.3.11, and reminds there are still a couple of show-stoppers for GIMP 2.4.

[SOC] Michael Natterer merged the "Perspective clone" branch soc-2006-perspective-clone to CVS HEAD. Thanks a lot to Pedro Alonso Ferrer for this nice contribution!

[TOOL] Ville Pätsi reported that the new crop tool doesn't stop at image borders, and William Skaggs provided a fix. He also removed the "crop vs resize" option.

[PLUG-IN] Walter van Niftrik reported saving indexed images with an alpha channel as Raw only writes half the image, and Sven Neumann fixed it.

[TOOL] Michael Natterer factored some code shared between the clone tool and the new healing brush, and cleaned up the latter.

[TOOL] Michael Natterer added all GIMP_FOO_TOOL_GET_OPTIONS() macros which return specific tool options types and do all casting themselves.

[UI] Sven Neumann added a simple widget to display a user hint: GimpHintBox.

[MISC] Sven Neumann removed the code for a threaded tile swapper, as it hasn't been used for a long time and never worked correctly.

[UI] Sven Neumann made pan using the space bar possible by adding a new gimprc option "space-bar-action".

[TOOL] William Skaggs fixed the text tool not handling TAB correctly.

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann finished fixing an emboss filter crash.

[SOC] Mentor and student surveys are due September 8. Daven Neary also wants to mail a small number of questions to students, to evaluate how we're doing with new contributors.

[SOC] Michael Natterer merged the "Healing Brush" branch soc-2006-healing-brush to CVS HEAD. Thanks a lot to Kevin Sookocheff for this nice contribution!

[RELEASE] Sven Neumann wants volunteers to finish review and localization Script-Fu blurbs and gimp-python scripts before string freeze.

[DOCS] David Neary committed Henning Makholm's XCF spec, now someone needs to review it and fix the places where it is wrong with regard to the CVS version of GIMP.

[MISC] Geert Jordaens wrote a patch for scaling image causing an offset, particularly with Lanczos. William Skaggs helped him improve it.

[UI] Michael Natterer applied David Gowers' patch so that eyedropping can select a matching palette entry if possible.

[UI] Wouter Bolsterlee asked that duplicate images remember directory, and Sven Neumann implemented it by letting the save dialog default to the folder of the duplicated image.

[TOOL] Sven Neumann changed the move tool option "Change current layer or path" labels as suggested by J. Baker.

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann fixed an inability to save a jpg/png file as an eps file when preview is selected.

[TOOL] Sven Neumann fixed an extract foreground segfault by using gimp_rectangle_intersect() to reduce the working area to the region of interest.

[UI] Michael Natterer fixed gradient view of "Device Status" dialog should use each devices context for gradient view and gimp-edit-blend's CUSTOM_MODE and pushing the context by changing GimpViewable preview rendering to have a context to get FG/BG/whatever from. He also added endpoint color types to allow the use of (changeable) forgeground/background colors in gradients.

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann fixed an emboss filter crash.

[PLUG-IN] William Skaggs improved memory handling in PNG plugin.

[TOOL] Sven Neumann fixed transform tools appearing unresponsive when set to path mode and there are no paths.

[SOC] Students projects are due August 21!

[UI] Tor Lillqvist wrote a patch for fontconfig, that should fix a couple of longstanding problems with fontconfig on Windows that manifest themselves especially in GIMP, like invalid font cache slowing start-up.

[PDB] William Skaggs provided a patch for undo, as vectors need a PDB interface for multiple components.

[MISC] Sven Neumann proposes a patch for not always using the Normal mode after merging layers that lets the merged layer inherit the mode and opacity from the bottom-most layer of the merge set.

[BUILD] Damien Carbery reports that location of G_GNUC_INTERNAL breaks Solaris build. Sven Neumann fixed it.

[TOOL] Huzheng spotted a rotate code bug and Sven Neumann fixed it.

[PLUG-IN] Peter Kirchgessner updated his patch for missing/too many data in writing FITS file.

[TOOL] William Skaggs committed his progress on selection tool: modifiers pressed before click should only do one thing.

[TOOL] William Skaggs spotted that in rectangle tool, "fixed-center" does not work when "fixed-aspect" or "make-square" are set, and fixed that.

[UI] Sven Neumann fixed a crash when forgetting to confirm save by setting the GTK_DIALOG_DESTROY_WITH_PARENT flag.

[TOOL] William Skaggs added support for handles at midpoints of edges and "Keep Height" and "Keep Width" in scale tool.

[TOOL] Sven Neumann fixed a GIMP crash while performing an arbitrary rotation of a layer by returning if gdk_drawable_get_size() returns 0 for width or height.

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann made GIMP save ICO files properly when indexed.

[UI] William Skaggs made changes so that when Alt is pressed, selection tools do not update options on Shift/Ctrl.

[SOC] Google Summer of Code projects are getting committed to the GIMP CVS! Tests and reports are welcome.

• Kevin Sookocheff committed his healing brush to the GIMP CVS, in the soc-2006-healing-brush branch.
• Hendrik Boom has working vector layers in the soc-2006-vector-layers branch of the GIMP CVS.

[SCRIPT-FU] Sven Neumann asks for review and localization of Script-Fu blurbs, and review and internationalization of gimp-python scripts. The reviews should be done quickly to give the translators enough time to deal with the new strings.

[TOOL] Tom Lechner had a new take at providing a patch for layer opacity and combine modes not being used in transform previews.

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann applied Aurimas Juska's patch for the icon loading problem - top missing, which fixes it by opening the file in binary mode.

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann applied Piotr Filiciak's patch for full support for 16/32bits bitmaps (*.bmp) and support for alpha channel, which merges the save dialogs.

[PDB] Sven Neumann applied David Gowers' patch for gimp_edit_bucket_fill missing option to fill transparent layers and increasing the discrimination of the Fuzzy Select tool.

[MISC] Jakub Steiner reported the brush size is limited to 256 when enlarging with an input controller, and Sven Neumann raised the limit to 4000.

[MISC] Michael Klein wrote a patch for gimp-remote to print the XID of toolbox window, and Sven Neumann applied it.

[TOOL] Karine Delvare fixed new "Rect select" tool not restoring settings thanks to Karl Günter Wünsch's patch and Michael Natterer's comments. The tool options properties still need some cleanup.

[MISC] Sven Neumann fixed selection not selecting full transparent parts by not autocropping the buffer contents.

[MISC] Michael Natterer fixed GimpDrawablePreview accessing non-existant tiles and segfaulting by drawing only within the intersection of the the passed coordinates and the selection.

[TOOL] Sven Neumann fixed intelligent scissors tool failing to move terminal points.

[TOOL] Michael Natterer fixed rounding and double vs. integer inconsistency when dealing with mouse coordinates to ease moving points when using IScissors tool.

[PYTHON] Sven Neumann fixed Whirl and Pinch C & Python version menu path clash by moved whirlpinch.py to the test_scripts category to prevent it from being installed in stable releases.

[TOOL] William Skaggs applied his patch for brush drawing can produce wrapped results with even-dimensioned brushes.

[MISC] Sven Neumann applied his patch for being unable to find room for a tile, by actually enabling tile cache locking and adding a missing lock in tile_idle_preswap().

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann fixed autocrop cropping more than it should.

[SOC] Michael Schumacher pushes students to hurry for the two last weeks, and to show their code and get it into CVS.

• Kevin Sookocheff continues his work on the healing brush and Sven Neumann adviced deriving it from the clone tool
• Kevin Cozens reports good progress from Scott Lembke for the Ruby binding
• Pedro Alonso now has a UI for the perspective clone tool

[RELEASE] William Skaggs wrote a rectangle select tool specification to get thingsgoing the right way for the 2.4 release. He also expressed concerns over the slow progress towards the release.

[PLUG-IN] Toby Speight found a way to workaround the fact that a plug-in needs to be installed to the GIMP plug-in directory which may be different than what's configured as the plug-in's prefix.

[USABILITY] Sven Neumann announced a OpenUsability sponsored student project for GIMP.

[RELEASE] William Skaggs marked several bugs as blockers for 2.4:

• selection tool: modifiers pressed before click should only do one thing
• Should select/crop tool options put controls in an expander?
• New "Rect select" tool setting of the aspect ratio is cumbersome
• Alt behaves incorrectly for new rectangle/ellipse selection tools

[TOOL] saulgoode proposes a patch for Image preview in transforms keeping original version visible.

[TOOL] Karl Günter Wünsch proposes a patch for New "Rect select" tool not restoring settings, but Sven Neumann thinks too many properties are serialized and that this should be cleaned up.

[PDB] David Gowers proposes a patch to extend the PDB interface to increase the discrimination of the Fuzzy Select tool.

[SCRIPT-FU] Sven Neumann fixed script-fu filter positioned under the image by adding missing call to gimp_window_set_transient().

[UI] Sven Neumann fixed repeat "last used filter" not working for script-fu filters by relaxing the check so that all plug-in procedures that take an image parameter are added to the filter history, and made sure that procedures are removed from the history when they are unregistered.

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann applied Robert Ögren's patch for warp plugin segfaulting on 64bit arches.

[UI] Sven Neumann fixed message dialogs appearing behind plug-in dialog by adding a new function gimp_message() as a replacement for g_message() and using it whenever there is a GimpProgress, after having made message dialogs transient for the progress window.

[PLUG-IN] Michael Natterer fixed Script-Fu lava closing GIMP by not accessing an array before checking if it's long enough, and removed the extra return value in the plug-in.

[MISC] William Skaggs added sample points to be saved in XCF.

[TOOL] William Skags stopped new rectangle selection from displaying wrong previous selection area when resizing.

[MISC] William Skaggs fixed DoG plugin: preview not updating by not stopping emission of "value-changed" signal.

[SOC] Perspective clone tool: Pedro Alonso had a paint core working but still needs to add a GUI so the users may define the perspective plane in a similar way that they do via perspective tool.

[MISC] Dave Neary explains what expenditures he thinks the GIMP's money should be used for:

• paying for the GIMP user manual to get into a publishable state, and get it published
• travel/participation in certain conferences which have the potential to bring attention, money or people to the project
• improve our infrastructure
• GIMP conferences and get-togethers (although these can be and have been fundraised)

Hardware for individual developers, a server, or sending people to any old conference are things Dave doesn't think we should spend money on.

[SOC] Kevin Sookocheff cancelled his project to implement a healing brush and patch tool like in Photoshop, but provided the code he wrote so far, that contains the proper math for the tool but doesn't display right yet.

[MISC] David Gowers provided a patch for custom dithering patterns, and Raphaël Quinet applied it.

[TOOL] Chris Moller wanted to increase the discrimination of the Fuzzy Select tool and provided a patch. Michael Natterer applied it with modifications suggested by David Gowers.

[TOOL] Karl Günter Wünsch wrote patches to improve rectangle tools behaviour when resizing with fixed ratio and Karine Delvare applied them.

[MISC] Ari Pollack reported a segmentation fault with malformed gradient files, and Raphaël Quinet fixed it.

[TOOL] Karine Delvare fixed the new rectangle selection tool not allowing resizing along the vertical by changing the place a zero division check was made.

[TOOL] Raphaël Quinet updated the status bar messages so that hidden features in all paint tools are visible in the UI.

[PLUG-IN] Michael Natterer fixed RUN_WITH_LAST_VALS broken for compose plugin by enabling "compose_by_drawable" for GIMP_RUN_WITH_LAST_VALS.

[TOOL] Michael Natterer fixed the 'select regions by colors' tool not updating the selection in realtime when changing the threshold by making by color select behave the same way as fuzzy select.

[PLUG-IN] Michael Natterer fixed missing default activation for .pat save dialog by enable "activates-default" on the name entry.

[TOOL] Michael Natterer fixed selection tools with Alt+Shift or Alt+Ctrl should not check if pointer is in selection by not requiring hovering the selection for moving the selected pixels, but checking for the presence of any selected pixels instead.

[BUILD] Raphaël Quinet fixed a compilation failure by not declaring a symbol "link" because this conflicts with the system call declared in unistd.h.

[SOC] Michael Schumacher reminds students and mentors that there are four weeks left before the deadline. Short status reports:

• GIMP resources repository: good progress (at mid-term evaluation, Lauris Bukšis-Haberkorns had a database layout and some initial code, a registry export script, and more)
• vector layers: Henk Boom has vector layers that work, a rudimentary dialog for the stroke/fill properties, but still needs to fix the XCF storage of these layers
• wavelets-based imaging applications: Divyanshu Vats first worked on a JPEG2000 plugin, and now on denoising and inverse halftoning
• gimp-ruby binding: Scott Lembke has an almost complete binding except for an interactive console, gettext support, and documentation. You can register procedures in a way similar to script-fu, call procedures as Ruby methods, and use GIMP types as Ruby objects.

[TOOL] Karl Günter Wünsch complains about the new rectangle select tool and opened several bugs about it: doesn't restore settings, setting of the aspect ratio is cumbersome, displays wrong previous selection area when resizing, and does not allow resizing along the vertical. He provided a patch for that last bug.

[TOOL] Frédéric Mantegazza also has a feature proposal to automatically switch from x:y to y:x, which was added to add option menu of std. aspect ratios to crop tool.

[MISC] Dave Neary reminds everyone to try and make the GIMP project and its development mailing-list more friendly to new developers.

[TOOL] Chris Moller wrote a patch to increase the discrimination of the Fuzzy Select tool and the by-color select tool. Michael Natterer gave him some stylistic tips to make it even better.

[UI] airfullbete reported the shrink from image border radio button was not working, and Michael Natterer fixed it.

[MISC] Olav Vitters found errors in .desktop file break bug-buddy support, explained how to fix them, and Michael Natterer committed the fix.

[TOOL] Michael Natterer applied Wim Lewis' tiny code cleanup in gimplevelstool.c.

[MISC] Michael Natterer fixed Eye tool in the Layer Dialog not working in a hebrew environment.

[SOC] Michael Schumacher reminds mentors about the mid-term evaluations due on July 5th, 2006.

[MISC] Sven Neumann changed several bugs' target milestone to 2.6, as they are unlikely to be fixed before the 2.4 release.

[PYTHON] Joao S. O. Bueno Calligaris wrote a patch for PF_FILE not working, and Sven Neumann applied it. The pygtk version check in the configure script still needs to be updated.

[BUILD] Daniel Richard G. reports gfig plug-in has multiply-defined symbols and proposes a patch to put extern variables where they belong. Sven Neumann applied it.

[MISC] Joao S. O. Bueno Calligaris implemented free angled guides, but Sven Neumann wants to wait for 2.4 to be released before committing such a new feature.

[DOCS] Joao S. O. Bueno Calligaris found out pdb text functions disregards type_size parameter (pixels / points) and wrote a patch to fix the documentation by stating that the size-type parameter is ignored. Sven Neumann applied it.

[I18N] Zbigniew Chyla proposed some patches for internationalisation improvements, and introduced the context concept for translation strings. Sven Neumann applied them.

[PLUG-IN] Joao S. O. Bueno Calligaris reports Whirl and Pinch C & Python version menu path clash. Sven Neumann made plug_in_menus_setup generate unique keys so that two procedures can be installed to the same menu entry.

[UI] Philip Lafleur drew a new splash screen for GIMP 2.4, but Sven Neumann and Raphaël Quinet stated they would rather use it for a development version.

[MISC] Manish Singh fixed validation of INT8 parameters broken by turning d_int8 and d_int8array into guint8.

[UI] Sven Neumann changed default window hints back to "normal" as Gimp didn't show up in KDE task switcher (Alt-Tab).

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann fixed Perspective Tool Crashes by not calling bounds() and recalc() with a NULL display.

[UI] Sven Neumann made splash make a better guess about text color by taking the actual text area into account instead of using a hardcoded region.

[PDB] Raphaël Quinet made a proposal for a libgimpmetadata API, but Sven Neumann is still reluctant to see such code in GIMP's core, as it could crash on corrupt metadata from camera manufacturers.

[TOOL] Raphaël Quinet explained how hidden features in all paint tools should be visible in the UI.

[MISC] Eric Lamarque wrote a patch for gimp-remote not passing URIs properly, and Sven Neumann applied it.

[BUILD] Ari Pollak pointed out MMX burn function doesn't compile under gcc 4.1.1 and provided a patch. Sven Neumann applied it.

[TOOL] Raphaël Quinet reported incorrect cursor shown if Shift/Ctrl are pressed while over edges in the rectangle tool, and William Skaggs fixed the problem.

[RELEASE] Sven Neumman added a new About dialog logo for GIMP 2.4, which is now the application logo.

[USABILITY] Sven Neumann made it possible to open desktop links with gimp if the file is a link.

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann removed the gimp-print, gonmeprint and winprint plug-ins. Gutenprint comes with a GIMP plug-in, and William Skaggs started writing a new plug-in based on GtkPrint, that will be available on GIMP 2.4.

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann implemented colormap sorting and applied Mukund Sivaraman's patch for it.

[UI] Jakub Steiner commited his new default icon set for GIMP 2.4.

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann fixed ImageMap filter scrolling rulers off-page.

[UI] Jakub Steiner proposes a new default icon set for GIMP 2.4, following the Tango style guidelines, which allows (among other things) the same icons to be used on a dark background. New stock icons are also being drawn.

[MISC] William Skaggs wrote a patch to fix brush drawing producing wrapped results with even-dimensioned brushes.

[PLUG-IN] Joao S. O. Bueno Calligaris updated his patch for Fractal Explorer to work with gray images and to not preserve alpha, and Sven Neumann applied it.

[PLUG-IN] Jean-Luc Coulon reported Gnome Print gives stretched output, and William Skaggs fixed the issue.

[USABILITY] Joao S. O. Bueno Calligaris pointed out Fractal Explorer Preview should be standard gimp preview resizeable widget. Sven Neumann doubled the size of the preview area as a quick workaround, but the plug-in needs a real resizable preview, or even better a GimpZoomPreview.

[USABILITY] gbz suggested that Image->mode menuitems should be radio button type and Sven Neumann iplemented it.

[MISC] Tor Lillqvist saw that GIMP looks at environ directly, which breaks for non-ASCII on Win32, and committed a patch to fix that.

[UI] William Skaggs made layer mode changes optional in history by implementing "strong" undo/redo commands that continue undoing so long as they only encounter visibility changes.

[RELEASE] Sven Neumann announces the GIMP 2.3.9 release, one of the last development releases before the long awaited GIMP 2.4.

[TOOL] William Skaggs announced the rectangle and ellipse selection tools replacement with the new adjustable ones. Testers are welcome!

[USABILITY] Saulgoode wrote a patch for border selection without feathering, and Michael Natterer commited it.

[UI] Fritz Jetzek asked for a 'Select All' feature in Error console, and Sven Neumann implemented it.

[SCRIPT-FU] Kevin Cozens wrote a patch to fix an application crashes if 'Refresh scripts' is chosen while a Script-fu dialog is still open, and Sven Neumann committed it.

[MISC] B. Pedersen reports scaling with lanczos does not work with alpha channel. William Skaggs fixed it by reverting some variables declaration from gint to gdouble.

[PDB] Saulgoode explains the description of "Selection sharpen" operation is incorrect. Sven Neumann fixed the documentation of the PDB function 'gimp_selection_sharpen'.

[RELEASE] Sven Neumann states there is a need for a new About dialog logo for GIMP 2.4.

[MISC] Joao S. O. Bueno Calligaris wrote a patch to implement free angled guides.

[BUILD] Eric Lamarque reports he cannot build gimp on Solaris 8 and provided patches to make it work. Sven Neumann applied the first patch, while the second one would reopen the -ansi -pedantic build bug, thus a common solution is searched for. Eric also reports he cannot build selective gaussian blur on Solaris 8 and his patch was committed by Simon Budig.

[UI] Michael Natterer added a way to reset gimprc options in the Preferences dialog.

[USABILITY] Sven Neumann simplified the installation interface: it will always migrate old user settings, not ask any question, and only show the dialog in case of an error.

[UI] Sven Neumann added support for animated splashes.

[TOOL] Karine Delvare added golden section guides to cropper, rectangular and elliptic selection tools, and other types of guides.

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann applied Clarence Risher's patch that adds support for 'registration color' during decomposition.

[UI] Sven Neumann deprecated the GimpFileEntry widget, and advises to use GtkFileChooserButton instead.

[SOC] William Skaggs describes how students should work with GIMP CVS, Bugzilla and IRC, how GIMP will be branched for them, and how they can get a CVS account. The next established deadline is June 26, when Google will want to get mid-program evaluations of student progress.

[SOC] Pedro Alonso designed some mockups for his vanishing point cloning tool and asks for feedback.

[SCRIPT-FU] Kevin Cozens discusses tiny-fu status, and how it could replace script-fu as a scheme interpreter, even though scripts will need to be modified to run with tiny-fu.

[RELEASE] Sven Neumann raised several bugs' priority so they are considered before the 2.4 release:

• toolbox icons on dark background
• Curves of the curves tools look strange when points are moved close to each other
• Text along a path

[USABILITY] David Gowers asked for reopening the bug about automated selection of a color on indexed colormap. Michael Natterer confirmed that selecting the palette index doesn't work when picking with a paint tool, and proposed a fix.

[TOOL] William Skaggs committed a set of changes that hopefully fixes crop tool's reported sizes should stop at image edge, by adding a new "constrain" property to GimpRectangleTool that determines whether to clip at the image bounds when computing dimensions.

[SCRIPT-FU] Kevin Cozens proposes a patch that shows a message 'Refresh scripts' is chosen while a Script-fu dialog is still open.

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann applied Loren Merritt's patch for a selective gaussian blur optimization that replaces the floating-point implementation with a fixed-point version. He also made an API addition for libgimpbase with the CPU detection code.

[MISC] Sven Neumann fixed a crash while starting up and loading brushes by not choking on brush files with empty names, and added a warning for brushes saved with an empty name.

[PLUG-IN] Pedro Alonso reported a metadata plugin crashes for some jpeg files (invalid XMP block). Raphaël Quinet found the error in the XMP metadata and made the metadata plug-in handle this error.

[UI] Michael Natterer fixed 'import palette' from image disrespecting selection mask by adding "Sample merged" and "Selected Pixels only" toggles to the dialog.

[UI] Michael Natterer applied David Gowers' patch to add actions to change to next/prev palette color.

[PLUG-IN] Michael Natterer applied Martin Collins's patch to add support for saving PBM format.

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann fixed Gimpressionist plugin segfaults upon saving a new preset by checking for NULL before using a string pointer.

[PDB] Sven Neumann fixed 'gimp-channel-combine-masks' not UNDOable by pushing a channel undo.

[SCRIPT-FU] Sven Neumann fixed Script-Fu server should suppress progress popups by installing progress handlers that do nothing.

[UI] Michael Natterer fixed the inability to cut/paste colors in colormap dialog by making sure text widgets get all key events first.

[BUILD] Manish Singh applied Daniel Richard G.'s code fixes for -ansi -pedantic build.

[MISC] Michael Natterer made paste respect selected channels by not temporarily setting all image components to active while compositing.

[UI] Michael Natterer fixed path cursor changing hotspot when cursor modifier changes by using the "bad" cursor modifier instead of the "bad" cursor.

[UI] Michael Natterer added new cursors for edge and corner resizing, put them to use in the rectangle tool, and re-enabled selection moving.

[SOC] William Skaggs welcomes the eight students who will be supported this summer by Google:

• Hendrik Boom, mentored by Simon Budig for adding vector layers in GIMP
• Philip Lafleur, mentored by Sven Neumann for a new/extended brush system
• Pedro Alonso Ferrer, mentored by Manish Singh for vanishing point cloning
• Kevin Sookocheff, mentored by Bill Skaggs for a healing brush tool
• Scott Lembke, mentored by Kevin Cozens for Ruby-GIMP scripting
• Andrey Smorkalov, mentored by Bill Skaggs for user interface improvements
• Divyanshu Vats, mentored by Simon Budig for wavelet-based imaging/Jpeg2000 support
• Lauris Bukšis-Haberkorns, mentored by Michael Schumacher for GIMP resource repository

[RELEASE] William Skaggs continues raising selected bugs' priority so they are considered before the 2.4 release:

• Use action based menus in Imagemap plug-in
• rearrangement of Xtns Menu options
• Icon loading problem - top missing
• 'import palette' from image disrespects selection mask
• Script-Fu server should suppress progress popups
• Add VBR brushes to default installation
• Extract foreground makes GIMP segfault

[UI] David Gowers improved his patch to add actions to change to next/prev palette color, with advices from Michael Natterer.

[PLUG-IN] Dov Grobgeld wrote a patch for his DICOM plug-in crash. William Skaggs applied it.

[PLUG-IN] Martin Collins improved his patch to add support for saving PBM format.

[UI] Michael Natterer proposed a patch to allow cut/paste colors in colormap dialog.

[UI] Michael Natterer thinks there should be a way to reset gimprc options that have no prefs GUI, because of the undiscoverability of these options.

[BUILD] Daniel Richard G. improved his patch with code fixes for -ansi -pedantic build.

[RELEASE] Michael Natterer reminds that sample points are not saved in XCF, and that this should be implemented for 2.4.

[PDB] Leeksoup reported that gimp_drawable_transform_scale_default behavior is not conform to spec. Michael Natterer confirms all of the transform PDB wrappers don't care about the layer offset and produce wrong results if the layer is not at 0,0 ; and fixed it by add the drawable's offset to the x and y returned by gimp_drawable_mask_intersect().

[PDB] Raphaël Quinet and Michael Natterer worked on the Procedure Browser (PDB) crashing after refreshing Script-Fu, found out the culprit script, and the reason why it led to a crash. Michael Natterer fixed it by using g_hash_table_replace() instead of g_hash_table_insert() and making sure the used key is always the name of the first procedure in the list.

[PLUG-IN] Loren Merritt proposes a patch for a selective gaussian blur optimization.

[TOOL] Michael Natterer fixed the curves tool (damaged image when changing mode from RGB to grayscale) by calling tool_manager_control_active(HALT) instead of trying to reset the active tool by destroying and re-creating it.

[PLUG-IN] William Skaggs fixed palette color order changes when indexed palette PNG is saved and wants testers.

[TOOL] Michael Natterer applied a heavily modified patch from Michael Schumacher which always shows the clone source handle even while not painting.

[MISC] Michael Natterer fixed INDEXED (not INDEXEDA) layers above the bottom of the stack being always invisible.

[RELEASE] Sven Neumann replaced all uses of GimpFileEntry with GtkFileChooserButton (except for GimpPathEntry), and proposes to deprecate its use efore the 2.4 API freeze.

[PLUG-IN] William Skaggs fixed jpeg plug-in having multiply-defined symbols.

[PLUG-IN] Michael Natterer fixed PNG export options dialog being way too large by moving "Load defaults" and "Save defaults" buttons to a separate line.

[UI] Michael Natterer added Akkana Peck's script to reverse the layers in an image.

[UI] Michael Natterer fixed Import a New Palette not using Number of colors when importing from an indexed image.

[USABILITY] Martin Nordholts thinks the New Layer button in the layers dialog should bypass the dialog and use last values. The shift modifier key does just that, but Martin thinks shift-click is a dramatic loss of workflow. Alexandre Prokoudine and Simon Budig argue that the shift modifier key is used in several places to bypass a dialog, and that this state of things is good for consistency. Simon reminds that this very New Layer button behaved the other way around at first (shift-click to get the dialog), but that an important feature was undiscoverable, thus the change.

[TOOL] William Skaggs committed a set of major changes to the UI of the alignment tool, which make it work mostly like alignment tools found in vector graphics programs, and wants testers. He also thinks aligning layers and linking them are similar tasks that could benefit from the same UI.

[MISC] Robert L. Krawitz announced Gutenprint 5.0.0-rc3, featuring a Macintosh OS X Universal Binary, explicit support for many more printers, CUPS and Foomatic/IJS producing correctly dimensioned and positioned output, the GIMP plugin displaying the thumbnail image correctly in CMY mode, and many printer-specific problems being fixed.

[RELEASE] William Skaggs raised several bugs' priority so they are considered before the 2.4 release:

• easy way to view/edit image parasites (author, copyright, image title, etc.)
• Add support for ICC color profiles
• Find alternatives to the Floating Selection when pasting
• UI clarity - re-organize scripts and plug-ins in the menus
• Support for gimpprint 5.0
• Vectors need a PDB interface for multiple components
• Actions to change to next/prev palette color
• Merge Palettes is unimplemented
• add virtual file-system support (gnome-vfs)
• allow to override use of embedded thumbnails
• Gradient Editor can be wider than GIMP_VIEWABLE_MAX_PREVIEW_SIZE
• selection tool: modifiers pressed before click should only do one thing.
• Transient dock setting and multiple files
• INDEXED (not INDEXEDA) layers above the bottom of the stack are always invisible

[DATA] Joao S. O. Bueno Calligaris and Carol Spears worked python scripts to add palette sorting and palette to gradient functionality. Michael Natterer committed them.

[USABILITY] William Skaggs committed Dave Neary's patch to fix dilate/erode being mis-named (refer to opposite operations).

[PLUG-IN] Martin Collins provided a patch to support saving PBM format.

[PLUG-IN] Steve Kelem reports that the ImageMap filter scrolls rulers off-page. Sven Neumann provided a patch that starts fixing the problem, and encourages new contributors to try and finish the patch.

[USABILITY] Gero Mudersbach asked for the possibility to select a layer in the image window by context menu or shortcut. There is already a Ctrl-Tab shortcut (Alt-Tab in 2.2) to cycle through layers, but there was a better on-drawable layer navigation suggestion that is now reopened.

[PLUG-IN] Piotr Filiciak would like full support for 16/32bits bitmaps (*.bmp) and support for Alpha channel, and provided a patch.

[BUILD] Daniel Richard G. reported a compilation failure while doing a -ansi -pedantic build, and provided a patch to fix the issues. Manish Singh discussed some parts of it and applied the rest.

[TOOL] Michael Natterer fixed a crash made with text tool's editor by finding a suitable display and fully setting up the tool.

[MISC] Michael Natterer allowed creating/adding layer mask from arbitrary channel.

[USABILITY] Michael Natterer implemented the possibility to use clipboard as brush.

[UI] William Skaggs fixed a segfault when closing image while saving it by making sure dialog has not been destroyed when setting sensitive.

[PLUG-IN] William Skaggs fixed Greyscale TGA files not being opened correctly by gracefully handling incorrect alpha info in header.

[UI] William Skaggs fixed problems when scaling by height in inches by using ROUND() to prevent incorrect chainbutton logic.

[SOC] William Skaggs wants GIMP mentors to look over the applications and decide which ones they would like to mentor.

[PLUG-IN] Michael Natterer ported Adam Moss' Auntie Alias plug-in to the 2.4 API and applied GIMP coding style, as he considers to include it. Adam gave a link to the Scale3X algorithm.

[UI] Simon Budig fixed reversed gradient coloring types HSV_CCW and HSV_CW by making the hue angle in the triangle color selector behave mathematically correct.

[UI] In the context of a Linux Format article on getting involved with GIMP development, Michael J. Hammel submitted a patch to add a clear keyboard shortcuts button in Preferences. Michael Natterer made suggestions to improve the patch, and applied it.

[PLUG-IN] Joao S. O. Bueno Calligaris improved his patch for Fractal Explorer that should work with gray images and should not preserve alpha, based on Sven Neumann's and Simon Budig's comments.

[UI] Nick Smith suggests that odd-sized layers' layer previews should be sized better, so that you see them entirely instead of croping them to image size. Sven Neumann thinks the current implementation has its advantages as well, and advised to take the discussion to the gimp-devel mailing-list to reach a consensus on the proposed change.

[PLUG-IN] Steve Kelem reports that the ImageMap filter scrolls rulers off-page.

[MISC] Sven Neumann applied a patch from Mukund that replaces remaining movntq instructions in MMX assembly to fix the crash when using "addition" mode on a grayscale image.

[MISC] Michael Natterer fixed 'make check' failing to link in app/config, implemented a workaround for linked transform causing noise in background layer, and added "Selection from Text" and "Path from Text" to menus.

[PERF] Campbell Barton thought Photoshop handled large files faster (with the curves tool for example) thanks to a bigger tile size than GIMP, and wanted to make tests with different tile sizes. After Sven Neumann explained where to modify it in the code, Campbell tested 16, 128 and 512 tile sizes. on a 8000x8000 image, and didn't notice many speed differences except 16 was a lot slower. He also asked if working on a smaller copy of the image at 1:1 had been considered, and the answer is: yes, but noone works on it.

[SOC] Kevin Sookocheff showed interest in the "Save for the Web" plug-in and the Healing Brush. Ori Bernstein wants to apply for the text tool improvement.

[UI] Jernej Simončič created new icons for Windows based on the icons included in GIMP 2.3.8.

[MISC] Carol reported that F1 on Buffers Dialog causes gimp to crash. Sven Neumann relaxed the checks on GimpParamSpecs to fix it.

[USABILITY] Saulgoode thinks one layer merges should be permitted and provided a patch. Sven Neumann implemented this suggestion in GIMP.

[USABILITY] Frank Klemm asks for a fast history list access, proposing a new top-level menu to hold recent files. Sven Neumann reminds that GIMP will start using GtkRecentManager and the associated widgets as soon as GTK+ 2.10 is released and we depend on it.

[PLUG-IN] Joao S. O. Bueno Calligaris states that Fractal Explorer should work with gray images and should not preserve alpha, and provided a patch for it.

[PDB] Michael Natterer has finished PDB and plug-in refactoring. There is still some work needed on the plug-in system, but the code is now much cleaner. Testers needed!

[UI] Michael Natterer fixed the broken drag & drop from tools dialog to devices dialog.

[PLUG-IN] Manish Singh fixed loading multilayer gif with transparency fails.

[SOC] The GIMP wiki SoC page has been updated with new projects ideas.

[MISC] Sven Neumann calls to new developers to fix simple bugs like PostScript colour output looking pale, making a configurable minimum canvas padding area, and rectangle selection could have "Round corners" as an alternative to "Feather". Carol Spears notes that this last one is very similar to border selection without feathering.

[TOOL] Sven Neumann suggested to use the newly introduced Jitter setting to filter out jitter in hand-drawn curves / draw smooth lines, and use a negative setting that would smooth the curve.

[SOC] Sven Neumann thinks size entry widgets using some simple math could be a good Summer of Code project. Simon Budig added some directions.

[PLUG-IN] Andreas Røsdal worked on the redeye plug-in by Robert Merkel so an easy red eye removal tool could be included in GIMP. Sven Neumann commited his patch, David Odin added a zoomed preview.

[TOOL] Sven Neumann reminds that implementing Edit->Fade would help with having a history brush.

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann explains that optimized animated GIF preview in open is screwy because the preview code doesn't do the alpha channel binarization for indexed images that the projection is doing. He implement a thumbnail load procedure that loads only the first frame of a GIF animation, the remaining problems being handled in the thumbnails do not always match the image bug.

[PDB] Sven Neumann fixed Path to Selection giving PDB Error.

[PLUG-IN] Huub Schaeks reports that loading multilayer gif with transparency fails. Michael Schumacher thinks that the changes done in the gif.c code cleanup should be examined.

[MISC] Sylvain Fourmanoit deplores the Gimp Python documentation do not go to great lengths explaining how a Gimp Python plug-in can be called from Script-Fu, and submitted a patch for an expanded documentation on Script-Fu, that was applied by Sven Neumann.

[MISC] Lode Leroy reports an error in pygimp:sphere.py : gimp-context-set-foreground failed. Sven Neumann explains we should let the PDB know whether a color value has an alpha channel or not, it can then ignore the alpha channel if it is irrelevant like in this case. He committed the fix.

[MISC] Manish Singh fixed usage of a long deprecated libpng API. GIMP 2.3 now requires libpng 1.2.2.

[MISC] Michael Natterer added a GimpPluginManager object, which keeps all plug-in related stuff that was kept in the Gimp instance.

[UI] Sven Neumann further simplified the installation dialog code, which can now perform a non-interactive installation when running without a display.

[SOC] Dave Neary registered GIMP as a mentoring organisation for the Google Summer of Code 2006. A lot of ideas for possible projects were proposed, and Michael Schumacher offered to be a mentor. All those ideas are sorted in the GIMP wiki SoC page.

[USABILITY] William made a mockup for Dockable Image Window (Tabbed MDI, not WiW MDI).

[TOOL] Simon Budig wrote a patch for curves of the curves tools that look strange when points are moved close to each other implementing natural cubic splines, as hinted by Peter Heckert.

[TOOL] Jozef Sivek has an enhancement request for the perspective transform tool to have the ability to apply a curve bend.

[PLUG-IN] Nick Smith reports that Optimized animated GIF preview in open is screwy.

[MISC] Manish Singh and Simon Budig fixed several errors reported by G. Fischer.

[PLUG-IN] Sven Neumann fixed the JPEG Plugin using gimp-image-remove-layer improperly and strange optimized animated GIF playback.

[MISC] Tor Lillqvist wrote a patch to check if windows are positioned off monitors.

[ALGO] Sven Neumann applied Lode Leroy's patch to use Otsu's method of calculating optimal "threshold" value.

[UI] Sven Neumann simplified the user installation dialog.

[DOCS] Roman Joost announced version 0.10 of the GIMP User Manual, with a restructuration, spelling and grammar fixes, addition of the croatian language, technical fixes an new content!

[USABILITY] Amar Takhar asks how hard organizing brushes via directories would be.

[PLUG-IN] Clarence Risher has been looking at the plug-in-decompose treats alpha channel incorrectly, and proposes to allow for an alpha channel during decomposition with any color space. He also proposed a patch to support 'registration color' during decomposition.

[UI] Casey Stanley wants to re-size Brush editor dialog's preview size. Sven Neumann gives tips on how to implement that.

[MISC] Kevin Cozens commited a patch to improve formatting of output from gimp-procedural-db-dump.

[PLUG-IN] Nick Smith thinks that autocrop crops more than it should when fully transparent areas are involved.

[PLUG-IN] Clarence Risher started a code cleanup on gif.c, and proposes a patch to manage aspect ratio save/load for GIF images.

[USABILITY] Simos Xenitellis would like to add a "Zoom Previous" functionality and keyboard shortcut.

[PLUG-IN] Nick Smith reports a strange optimized animated GIF playback: the bottom row of pixels doesn't behave properly. He would also like GIF playback to have a zoom and speed-control feature.

[UI] Maurits Rijk noticed there are no icons in Recently Used Filters menu. Michael Natterer gave tips on what to modify to get the icons.

[PDB] Michael Natterer has got addicted to PDB refactoring, and is now proceeding with plug-in invocation clean-up which is closely related.

[PERF] Sven Neumann made a lot of variables const to clean the code and reduce the number of relocations.

[MISC] Manish Singh fixed an installation problem by honoring the $(DESTDIR) variable.

[RELEASE] Carol Spears added a new splash screen, nicknamed "Where's bolsh?". Sven Neumann released the 2.3.8 development version.