I’ve had several hours to play with Inkscape 0.46 since it was released, and despite the minor version increment, a lot has changed.

New features

• A “fill” tool, making it trivial to turn bitmaps into vectors quickly
• 3d drawing shapes (including perspective)
• A tweaking tool, making it easy to nudge/blur/soften shapes
• Several new effects (including path effects)
• Many performance improvements, including huge improvements in blur speeds
• Better gradient tools
• Dockable tool windows (nicely done too)

I’m especially excited about the “fill” tool, as it simplifies tracing scanned sketches and logo bitmaps. The tool creates vectors using a flood-fill algorithm, based on the zoom level and configurable limits (fill method, threshold, gap-closing, etc.). In my tests so far, I’ve been able to turn pencil sketches into vectors quickly¹, as well as scans of real-world-objects.²

1. Normally tracing complex sketches takes me hours ↩
2. I created the fuji logo by scanning + fill-tracing an old, decaying T-Shirt logo ↩

My new hero: DadHacker. Fun stories from 80s game programming.

Ben Fry has a beautiful set of images and prints of Atari 2600 game code and data segments. The images show the code, the jump maps, and data blobs used by the games. The prints are based on his dismap project.

An old-school Atari zine’s history of the PPC architecture.

Antic magazine’s graphics software history page. Antic was a great magazine and the Atari ST was a fun platform.

The mythical (but ROFL funny) Atari 2600 webserver page.

Microsoft released the BSOD screensaver last week, a monotonic form of the BSOD XScreensaver (which includes crashing hits like: Microsoft’s BSOD, Linux’s very own kernel panic, the Mac bomb, the Mac sad face, the Amiga guru meditation error, and the AtariST bombs).

Some Saturday AM AtariST nostalgia, including my favorite Basic toolkit STOS. Fun, fun stuff.

A new game has been released for the Atari 2600 VCS platform, only 29 years after its birth. It looks good too, considering the games of the time.