‘Unimount’ Does it seem familiar? Paramount Studios was the inspiration… It seemed a natural fit for the Inkscape mountain landscape. I’m traditionally a Corel Draw user (since 1989) and was a professional graphic designer for many (many) years. Now I also teach computer graphics (among other computer-ly things) to high school students. We first used Inkscape as the ‘free’ and open alternative to Corel Draw or Illustrator (for PCs). As I and my students used it extensively over the past several years, we found it stands by itself on its own and not just because it is ‘free’ but because it works and meets the needs and expetations of my students and myself. With each consecutive update, it becomes more stable and I’m compelled to use it more and more often. Thanks for the cool software and the means to show off some new related skills.

Retailers are now listing Front Mission Evolved for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 for release on June 30.

Heartsounds – The Song Inside Me

What if it’s all I can offer?
What if my life was just meant to be this?
What if through thick and thin and the highs and lows, there’s just nothing left to resist?
I’ve found my true calling and it’s never sounded so fucking good
I know this one part of my life will keep me breathing as long as I’m part of this earth

For years I’ve seen things come and go (but every night I dream the same sounds)
Through friends gone and battles I’ve lost (I’ve learned to follow the song inside me).
One day will come when the stars in the sky will align to show that I can make something of these notes I’ve been hearing in my sleep
I’ll show you the song inside me

I’ve been reduced to the chords that flow from my hands and capture my thoughts
They take them prisoner, they don’t let them escape until these thoughts… these songs, are resolved
And nothing will come of my days and my nights till these notes all seem right
I’ll lie awake and dream of a time when my voice will be heard and the words will come to life

I’ve found my true calling and it’s never sounded so fucking good
I know this one part of my life will keep me breathing as long as I’m part of this earth

Woohoo! We’re most of the way through this development cycle, so that means it’s that time again! The Inkscape team and community is winding down development and preparing to release Inkscape 0.48. As usual, since we will be releasing a new version of Inkscape in the near future, we need to have a new About Screen done.

Basics:

• Our goal is to show off what the new version of Inkscape can do in an artistic manner.
• We don’t have a particular theme this time, but since our goal was for a faster development cycle, perhaps something related to speed would be interesting.
• You should use a current BZR build (aka nightly build) to show off some new features. Nightly builds can be obtained from our downloads page (link is below) under the “Development Versions” section. It is highly recommended to get the most recently dated version.
• The contest will run from March 15, 2010 – April 15, 2010.

Rules:

• The canvas dimensions must be 750×625 px / 600×500 pt (your image can bleed outside of the canvas, but anything outside of the canvas border will not be rendered).
• Your image must be licensed appropiately: CC BY-SA, GPL, or any other “open” license.
• It must be made in Inkscape only with no post-processing as we will require the SVG file to use for the about screen. Note: Your SVG file will be distributed with Inkscape 0.48 (hence the need for the above requested licensing).
• It must load relatively fast since it will be rendered in real-time when someone views the about screen (the SVG’s file size needs to be taken into consideration too).
• It must include the Inkscape logo and the following text “Inkscape”, “0.48″, “Draw Freely.”, “www.inkscape.org”, and last but not least, your name, signature, or online handle (whichever you’d prefer).
• There can be a maximum of two (2) entries submitted per community member.
• It must not contain anything inappropriate or otherwise offensive.
• We will need for you to post your SVG file online as well (either here on DA or on your own blog, website, or FTP) at the time of submission. You may need to put it in a zip file if DA won’t allow you to upload SVG. If your SVG files are not online by the contest deadline, those entries will be disqualified.
• Have fun!

Deadline:
April 15, 2010

Prize:
Having your art be the About Screen for the new version of Inkscape and a credit for your work.

Judging:
Preliminary judging will be done by the Inkscape community on DeviantART. The community judging period will be from April 16, 2010 – April 22, 2010. When we have an official “Top 3”, they will then be turned over to the Inkscape developers for final judging. Please note that once turned over to the developers, after they have chosen the winner they may have requests for modifications.

Relevant links:

• Inkscape Website
• Inkscape downloads page – We will have testing/development builds available for all platforms ASAP.
• Draft Release Notes – These are VERY helpful to learn about what new features you can take advantage of.
• Entries from last About Screen Contest
• Please show the news some love!

Submissions:
As with our previous contests, please post your submissions to your gallery or scraps and then post a reply to this Journal entry with a link.

Good luck everyone!

source

Finally, Smashing book has just shipped

Smashing Book has just shipped

[updated]

And the book has arrived…

Smashing Book + wrapping

After over a year of intensive development and refactoring, Inkscape 0.47 is out. This version of the SVG-based vector graphics editor brings improved performance and tons of new features, some of which are as follows: timed autosave, Spiro splines, auto-smooth nodes, Eraser tool, new modes in Tweak tool, snapping options toolbar & greater snapping abilities, new live path effects (including Envelope), over 200 preset SVG filters, new Cairo-based PS and EPS export, spell checker, many new extensions, optimized SVG code options, and much more.

Full release notes for more information about what has changed, enjoy the screenshots, or just jump right to downloading your package for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.

Hiza Ro of Blender Indonesia has launched the first Indonesian Blender e-magazine, .Blend Magz! Check out the first issue here!

The magazine is available in both PDF and a freeware-viewable version.

PDF file size: 22.1MB

Chrome OS is a brand new free operating system built around the revolutionary Google Chrome browser.

The project aim is to provide a lightweight Linux distribution for the best web browsing experience.

Featured software in Chrome OS:

• GNOME 2.24 desktop environment
• Google Chrome 4.0.207 web browser
• OpenOffice.org 3.0 office suite
• Flash Player 10.0 plugin
• and much more!

System requirements of Chrome OS:

• Processor: Intel Pentium, Xeon or newer; AMD Duron, Athlon, Sempron, Opteron or newer
• RAM: min. 256 MB
• Hard disk: min. 1 GB
• Graphics card: supports most modern graphics cards

source: About Chrome OS

There you if go. So if you want to have a taste on early development stage just head on to dowload page

They provided free virtual image appliance but You need a free VMware Player or VirtualBox in order to run this appliance.

You’re using pirated xp edition. Come on, you could get your hands on pirated edition but don’t know how to pass wga?

I do aware that percentage of IE 6 user based on w3c schools browser stat still around 15.9% and not to support the 15.9% could leads to cutting off potential clients – not that I have many clients :D. But I don’t care, because you don’t care about the nightmare on having to support 3 versions of IE browser, and whining about why are you using 3 different CSS for each browser and not to mention .PNG transparency issue.

Hey you’re the web designer, it’s you job. Now that’s crass naive.