Gnome Art

The Libre Graphics Meeting gathers developers and users of free software graphics applications together every year. The conference, now in its 3rd edition, has become hugely important to the volunteer developers of the projects involved. It has led to increased co-operation between projects, and has resulted in improvement on features like inter-application drag & drop, colour management and resource sharing.

This year, the organisers need your help. They have just launched a campaign to raise $20,000 in two weeks to help cover the travel costs of people who could not otherwise attend the conference. You can also help by embedding a badge to increase awareness of the campaign in your website.

For anyone using a Wacom or similar graphics tablet in gnome I've released two handy apps you might want to try out. The first is a control center applet that allows you to switch between absolute and relative modes of input and also adjust the pressure curve and click force. The second is a small panel applet that shows how much pressure is currently being applied with whatever pen is in use.

Check out the project here (http://alexmac.cc/tablet-apps) or a take a quick look at a pretty screenshot here (http://alexmac.cc/tablet-apps/tablet-prefs.png).

Xara has announced the availability of their vector graphics application Xara Xtreme for GNU/Linux. It is ported to Linux using wxWidgets and GTK+ and the source code is available under the GPL. They have screenshots available online and they look very nice. Going forward they want to cooperate as much as possible with the Inkscape team so hopefully a beautifullly vectorized future lies ahead for us. So be sure to grab the latest source or binary and give it a testrun.

The GUADEC committee is launching a logo and web theme contest (see details). We have recently adopted Drupal as the platform of the GUADEC website (currently in a fully funtional beta version). The deadline for submissions is 31/jan/06 and the winner will get 2 GUADEC vip passes, 2 return tickets to Vilanova (Catalonia, Spain) and one week accommodation for both participants. GUADEC is the main event of the GNOME community, celebrated once a year. GUADEC2006 is held the last week of June and Vilanova is in the Mediterranean coast, 45km south of Barcelona.

One obstacle for Linux to overcome on the desktop is the lack of a consistent visual interface. While Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X offer users and developers consistent themes, Linux supports a plethora of dissimilar desktop environments and window managers. The Tango Desktop Project is working to change that.

The Tango project is an effort to establish high-usability visual themes for Linux desktops that function consistently across multiple desktop environments. Tango evolved from private discussions between Novell's Jakub Steiner and Mozilla Visual Identity Team lead Steven Garrity. The project went public at the Boston GNOME Summit in October. Project participants are working on specifications for cross-environment themes and a fully compatible theme they hope will be adopted by vendors.

Read the rest

Jakub Steiner wrote: One thing I have been working on recently together with a few folks is what we now call the Tango project.

Tango aims to address a problem of visual inconsistency between applications commonly running on user's desktop when she/he is running a GNU/Linux distribution. Different projects have their own style that is consistent with itself (mostly), but the final user experience on the "linux desktop" is not so smooth. Just like there is a lot of standards people have been able to agree on across free software projects, Tango tries to propose a few building bricks to make the consistent visual experience possible.

The winner of the 2.12 splash screen competition is GNOME in Silk - evolving 2 by Xilef. The new splash screen will be used in the official GNOME 2.12 release in a few days.

As Garrett LeSage was on vacation for the end of the contest so he wasn't able to select a winner. However, Jakub "jimmac" Steiner (of gnome-icon-theme fame) stepped in and chose this splash screen as his favourite, and also selected some runners up (see below). His reasons for this choice were:

With the imminent release of the GNOME 2.12, the time has come to find the ideal splash screen to go with it. Now is your chance to join the ranks of the precious few who have had their artwork associated with a major release of GNOME! This time, the contest will be judged by Garret LeSage of linuxart.com

The LugRadio team have a new episode out. One of the highlights of this weeks show is an interview with Carl Worth, maintainer of the Cairo project. Cairo is very important for GNOME as it allows us to greatly improve the look and feel of GNOME further to stay competitive with MacOSX and future Windows releases.

The GNOME Art Collection written in ruby is a collection of tools for managing art from the art.gnome.org website. The first app, GNOME Art is a graphical frontend for art.gnome.org. Backgrounds and all themes can be downloaded and previewed. Backgrounds, icon themes and splash screens can be installed directly. GNOME Splash Screen Manager is an
application for managing the splash screens of your GNOME desktop.

Downloads, Screenshots and more!

As you may have noticed, art.gnome.org as recently undergone a major reworking. Some of the new features you can now find here include:

• New website design
• New User system
• Comments system
• Rating system
• Variants, license and version options for themes and backgrounds
• Background resolution submission

I would like to thank all those involved in these improvements, with special mention to Michael Gebhart who helped with the coding, and to Eric Bobbitt and Marco Bonomo who helped with the new site design. And of course Ross Golder who validated the code for release onto the gnome.org servers, and to the all the people who helped test the site and provide the all important suggestions and comments!

The GNOME 2.10 splash screen contest is now closed. Thanks to everyone who submitted entries. In just a few days, we gathered more than 220 entries - a tribute to the popularity and success of GNOME. There were many high quality entries which made choosing a final splash screen very difficult. However, a decision had to be made, so, the splash screen chosen is.... here.

The well known image viewer and browser, gThumb, had a new version today, 2.6.0. New features include but not limited to: Allow to CD burn the current catalog. Use the Gtk+ UI Manager to handle menus and toolbar. Use the Gtk+ FileChooser for saving and loading images or selecting folders. You can rate the application here.

art.gnome.org is, in connection with their upcoming second anniversary, holding the GNOME Art Awards. The nominations for the awards are currently taking place on the GNOME Support forums.

art.gnome.org is back again, without the basic site! Go to your favourite gnome-theme site and enjoy!

The functionality of the site is restored to 100%!
Many thanks to Ross Golder and Alex Duggan, and the new maintainer that now is Thomas Wood.
Now gnome-users can check this beautiful site, and, in conjunction with gnome-look.org, the gnome-desktop experience is double!