Week highlights: GIMP team started planning v3.2 development, new releases of Inkscape, jc303, Qtractor, and KnobKraft-orm.

GIMP

When the team released v3.0, they said they’d try to make shorter release cycles. This week, Jehan started going through bug reports and feature requests and changing milestones. Some tickets are now scheduled for v3.2, others are scheduled for v3.4, and others have milestones removed entirely.

This is an ongoing process, the triage is not done yet, and there are no promises whatsoever on either specific features for v3.2 or the release timeline. Still, a good step in the right direction.

On the dev front, CmykStudent updated an old patch by Massimo Valentini, that implements non-destructive transformations of text layers (rotation, scaling, flipping, but not the perspective transform yet). Here is an editable flipped text layer:

I did some quick testing, and there are a handful of issues there at the moment: dysfunctional undo, text layers getting clipped instead of being automatically expanded, and more. I’m also unsure if the overall approach is sound architecturally (think of transform masks in Krita, for example). Nevertheless, it’s a start.

Inkscape 1.4.1

The team released a bugfix update with some improvements and a couple of new features:

• Inkscape now shows a splash screen when launching (this can be disabled)
• Affinity Designer importing has been improved
• Some toolbars now have more collapsible groups, so that Inkscape can fit on smaller screens
• Modular grids now render with the inverted Y axis
• Irrelevant alignment options are now correctly hidden on opening the Align and Distribute dialog
• ASE color palettes using the LAB color space are now imported correctly
• Various PDF importing fixes and improvements.
• Various improvements for boolean operations.

See here for full release notes.

FreeCAD

The team announced the availability of an opt-in telemetry addon that aims to provide raw data about FreeCAD installations to help identify higher-priority platforms and possible improvements for out-of-box user experience (based on how people customize FreeCAD and what addons they install). You need to update the cache in the addon manager and then install it manually.

The official post comes with an FAQ that covers the main questions people could possibly have (mostly based on what concerns people had about Audacity a few years back).

Just for fun, I ran two polls, one on Mastodon and one on X/Twitter. It’s not a huge amount of data, but it’s still fun to watch the response. Here are Mastodon results, and here are X/Twitter results. Overall, people are more supportive than not by a large margin.

In other news, the project has impressive development activity. There are close to 200 pull requests in the queue. Until recently, this only happened during feature freezes when no new features were undergoing review. Seems like a large PR queue is the new norm. This may require two merge meetings a week.

There’s some interesting 3rd-party development going on, too. Aik-Siong Koh and Jose Gabriel Egas Ortuño posted a demonstration of their recent work on multibody dynamics + FEM animation. This work was originally sponsored by Ondsel.

Meanwhile, Frank David Martínez is working on FreeCAD-Blender integration.

jc303 v0.12

This new version of the TB-303 emulator now features a built-in Overdrive effect based on GuitarML research and BYOD DSP implementation:

I did some quick testing, it works nicely and is not too heavy on the CPU:

Builds are available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. You can get them here (and read the full release notes).

Qtractor 1.5.4

Rui worked some more on the MIDI step input in Qtractor: it now extends clips automatically, plus both step input and overdubbing are now aggregated and fully undo/redo-able. This release has some more improvements and fixes. An AppImage build and an RPM are available on SourceForge.

KnobKraft-orm 2.6.2

While I don’t own any vintage synths, I can definitely sympathize with people who buy even fairly recent gear like Sequential Take 5 and then don’t even get to have a librarian application to manage their patches. So KnobKraft is definitely in demand even if you don’t use Linux.

Here’s a raw list of synths and other MIDI-capable devices that got support in recent releases: Roland V-Drums TD-07, E-mu Morpheus, Roland Juno-DS, Moog Voyager, Waldorf M, Elektron Digitone, Yamaha FS1R, Yamaha TX81Z. Support for various other synths has been confirmed and moved from alpha to beta.

By the way, KnobKraft appears to support Line6 POD series patches now, so you don’t have to be a synth player to be interested. You can download the latest and greatest here.

Artworks

Marauder Camp and Sunken Ruins by Terraform Studios, environment concept art made with Blender for Skydance’s Behemoth game:

Goddess Temple by Shiro 2049, made with Blender, ZBrush, 3DCoat, and Photoshop:

Mountain Ridge by Philipp Urlich, made with Krita:

Clantonburg: the Floating Factory by Muru Zhou, made with Blender and Photoshop:

The Gate of Whispering Stones by Adam Galambos, made with Blender, Unreal Engine, etc.