Archive for March, 2009
Inkscape Growing Feature Palette
Posted by A R Baboon in Graphic Design, Linux and Systems on March 23, 2009
One of the lead developers of Inkscape, Jon Cruz has been advocating for better color management in the Libre Graphics projects a lot recently. According to a post on Jon’s blog today, Inkscape is going to grow its support for swatches and swatch books. If it includes strong support for spot (solid) colors these changes will definitely affect graphic designers quite a bit. Some of the efforts listed include enhancing the swatch UI including more drag and drop, including gradients in swatches, and support for swatch book swapping and sharing. The description seems to indicate that switching a swatch book/set will replace the color on all objects that used swatches. The would allow a designer to explore and present different versions of the same work without any change to the objects at all. Sweet.
Freshmeat.net Finally Updates Site
Posted by A R Baboon in Code, Graphic Design on March 15, 2009
Freshmeat 3.0 Screen Cap
Freshmeat.net has updated its site after many years of stagnation. It is such a shame because they were very well positioned to have really good marketshare any they mostly sat on their laurels. For example they should have been on top of the code search business. Maybe they will take over the extension/addon business from dysfunctional services like Addons Mozilla Org (AMO) [shakes fist]. AMO is a very well designed site/service with a crappy moderation process behind it (and I have personal experience).
The old design was an example of good design at the time with a not overcrowded feeling and convenient but mellow quick link icons. I In any case, my biggest dislike with the old site was the search. It may have been ok in a pre-Google world but if you cannot beat Googles search you need to embed it.
Freshmeat 3.0 Design Close-up
In this new design the listings are nice and compact. Textual buttons appear on mouse over to remove some clutter (I kind of liked the icons as opposed to text for repetition). Unfortunately they have removed a quick way to visit the homepage or full change log. They replaced some of the info effectively with a more modern tag construct but other info is missing. The search is much better but the language of a listing does not display in the results. The language was pretty important to me when browsing for a library. I have not seen if there is a good set of syntax for the search. Google codesearch like lang:c license:MIT syntax would be nice.