Andy Fitzsimon

Ok, so here is the beauty of open source. Things like this happen all the time. Infact they have happened so often that I never bothered blogging about it until today:

9:00 am

Some authors had submitted screenshots for a document.. Screenshots of the same 7 steps In 20 odd language.

Fortunately, the screenshots were only taken of the application window for most languages. Unfortunately, the size of each window was radically different ranging from 1600×1200 maximised to 600×300.

“I know an easy fix, the gimp will save us”

10:00 am After an hour of manually scaling down ui components of all these screenshots to fit the same neat 500×420 scale, it was time to output each screenshot as a png and commit it back to our repo.

Time for the crop tool

The crop tool in the gimp is quite handy:

You can both crop the current layer only… (neatly removing the junk around your selected area on that layer only).

You can also crop the whole image… ( needed when you have a large canvas from all those big screenshots and now need to output just the small portion as a stand-alone image.)

This next part is potentially heart breaking for the graphics geek in a deadline rush ( but dont worry I saved).

Anyway, I had cropped all my screenshot layers so that only the borderless area was visible. I then wanted to crop and save each layer as quickly as possible (beacause the clock was ticking).

The “current layer only” is really handy because it will only allow the user to move the crop reigon within the crop area of the current layer. This means if i had previously used the crop tool to neaten all my crud on the edges of each screenshot(layer) I could then use the crop tool to make my selections on each layer really fast because of the constrained selection area. This was working great from Traditional Chinese all the way to Korean.

10:30 am THEN IT HAPPENED!

I had a crop selection overlapping my layers crop area and clicked on the notorious “current layer only” option. I proceeded to grab one of the corner handle from the crop area and attempt to move it back inside the current layers area (thinking the current layer only option would snap this back inside).

Instead of my desired behaviour: BOOM gimp segfaults on me, crashing without warning. (not a problem, remember i had saved.. calm down)

This was a deadline where I couldn’t have afforded to re-perform any of the steps i just mentioned.

11:00am Once I got the screenshots out the door I pounced to my IRC window and pasted a makeshift bug report asking for confirmation then slammed open gimp’s bugzilla page and looked for duplicates.

Joao confirmed and mentioned he had looked at the crop tool code recently so he would be able to examine the cause.

11:30am Doing other things, i got caught by the same bug once before lunch. That was the second time …. bud i’d filed a bug … never again!

2:00pm

I came back from lunch and sitting in my bug report was a patch to fix my problem!

ONLY 3 HOURS AFTER FINDING A BUG MY PROBLEM WAS FIXED.

In that time: Joao had managed to replicate, work on and submitt a patch that solved the crash.

You won’t believe the number of times inkscape developers pjrm, bulia, nathan and more have fixed program functionality like this.

Now imagine trying to get that though even the most exclusive SLA with Adobe. It just won’t happen. And especially not for free.

Update: Joao is modest
joao: but this was slow.
joao: I’ve seen bugs in gimp from report to fix commited in less than 20 minutes.
joao: I am nowhere near these times.

No new shapes, no altered colours, just deleted strokes and svg blur revitalising an old favorite into a new aesthetic

story: While Inkscape’s feGaussianBlur support was first being implemented, I did this quick demo on some old Bluecurve assets created by Garrett for a colleague to illustrate how easy it is to ‘remix’ vector artwork.

 One day I’ll hopefully come back and do more with the bluecurve set. I’m not sure…
Honestly, I think OpenClipart+Tango + Echo+Fedora are my priorities once I get a free second from:

Another dfong inspired vectorisation

svg version

will someone finish it for me ?

Dear lazyweb, I’m done playing with this.

It was great fun but needs alot of work to get useful for the project. Why dont you try fixing it up for me.

download both illustrations in the one svg file

Inspired by Dianas blog post: I quickly tried my luck at a hot air balloon and got distracted by drawing plants. Will try again at lunch tomorrow.

Click for SVG

Will take it apart and throw on openclipat later (logoless of course)

I just had to buy some Batik artwork while I was in China late last year. Not because im a fan of the production process (an amazing amount of craft & effort), but because Batik the Apache SVG tools are just so awesome.

Most of Inkscapes initial coding for SVG compliance was checked against Batik as a role model for valid renderings from the SVG spec. But this is not why I had to have some Batik of my very own.

FOP and batik are essential parts of the professional open source publishers dream tool-chain.

Even graphics geeks like me can look at graphical admonitions in a book ( you know those Tip, Warning, Note & Caution callouts we see in technical documentation ) and throw in some Inkscape generated SVG icons and volla. Automated builds of PDFs now contain 100% sexy vector callouts.

Even technical illustrations/diagrams come out great and because they are single source managed in SVG we can translate whole books right down to terminology in illustrations in one simple build.

When it comes to any large print run of single materials like cd covers boxes, posters and cards I’m the first to jump into a session of Scribus. but when it comes to translating & building from docbook and xml FOP FOP FOP batik & inkscape fop fop rinse & repeat.

One of the purest forms of leadership I can think of is when something both inconvenient & innovative happens and the people capable of stunting its growth refuse to stand in the way.

One day I hope to witness a decision like that being taken place. It would truly be a privilege to surrender profit & power for a universally beneficial change.
In the meantime we have Vista. Congratulations to the Microsoft team

No hang on,
This post was meant to be about mentorship. Something I would really benefit from.

I am currently seeking a design mentor who has the time and motivation to take me on as a mentee:

• Somebody who can understand motivations for free software & free culture.
• Relate to durkheim’s theorys of a collective conciousness & Understand design theory as it applies to communities, brands & cultures.
• Freedom of communication design, typography, design across cultures and countries (especually the ones i dont yet understand).

If pretty much anything there rings a passionate tune and you are willing to share your experience, please drop me a line here.