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 ↩

I realized a few weeks ago that there are at least 3 design paths C++ programmers can take:

• Fusion, you mix C and C++
• Mr. Object. You like deep trees of C++ objects
• Object Zen. You use objects, but avoid the depths of purgatory. ¹
• Template-dude. You think in meta, and apply generic C++ (templates and such)

Who are you? Which styles did I miss?

1. Added for Steve ↩

An argument against mixing nulls and objects. I agree that gratuitous use of nulls is a bad sign in C++ (and a horrible sign in Java/C#).

A clear analysis of page load time optimization techniques. The most interesting bit I found:

“consider evenly spreading those objects over four hostnames … (resulting in) average latency dropping to about 1/4 of what it was before”

A great Palm development weblog (thanks Steve).

Boost is a mamoth set of STL-like C++ libraries. Tonight I bumped into Boost’s lexical_cast, a funky set of objects that convert between strings and types using a notation similar to other standard C++ casts (throwing exceptions as needed). I’m not sure if I should be offended or excited by the approach, as it’s evil and incredibly cool at the same time.

Let’s Make Unix Not Suck
“There is one practical problem: objects are typically implemented in a OOP-enabled programming language and those objects are exposed to the programming language only (even if they can be exposed to other languages, this is typically not very simple and sometimes never gets actually done).”

Moodss and Moomps
Moodss is a graphical monitoring application. It is modular so that the code accessing the monitored objects is completely separate from the application core. The core takes care of managing modules (loading and unloading), displaying modules data through sortable tables and diverse graphical viewers, handling user set threshold conditions with email alerts, recording and browsing data history from a database. It looks a bit like a next-generation spreadsheet tool, some interesting thinking here.