An OmniGraffle stencil for mocking up iPhone applications.

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 ↩

An example of cross-platform development without resorting to cross-platform GUI widgets. Damn straight!

One of the best developers I know pointed me to a Django tutorial. Django is a Python-based Rails equivalent, that’s even less imposing than Rails. It’s a good corollary framework to Rails,¹ as the approach is different enough to make you think a bit.

1. Especially useful if you’re still trying to find a good framework, or thinking about design approaches ↩

Subtraction points out a large Flickr set of user interface elements, a slick repository of web interface element metaphors. I love pointing developers at good examples, and then watching their imagination explode.

Here’s a short article about a machine learning project written in pygame. It’s an interesting approach with some intriguing possibilities (yes, I’m tempted).

I’ve added a new theme for those of you browsing the site with an iPhone or iPod Touch. It’s based on Joe Hewitt’s iUI library, with some WordPress plugin magic.

Take a look at the Ext library documentation and examples. Ext is a Javascript UI framework that looks as good as any client-side kit I’ve seen (and the docs are fairly complete too). Also check out the World of Solitaire, an impressive DHTML Solitaire game.

A slightly hyped summary of Amazon’s scalable web services.

Here’s a rich QT-based code formatter.