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 ↩

It looks like WordPress 2.5 is out today, and despite the crappy release notes, it looks like an interesting release. In this release: a new admin panel, built-in gallery, better upload tools, avatars, improved sidebars, improved security, and API cleanup. And, they’ve added “shortcode” to the base engine, a replacement for my SimpleLinks syntax.

Someone asks what if Apple released OSX for the PC? I can’t see it happening, mostly because random PC hardware tends to suck¹.

1. Drivers, MOBOs, flakiness, and other pain+suffering ↩

Another release of the e-Editor for Windows. This release (1.0.4) includes: split screen, tab reordering, faster startup, and more.

Opera released a new version of their mini browser this week, and here’s how it fares on the ACID2 test.

A sliding tab view script (uses Prototype), a speedy web based (js) drawing tool, and a nice striped table script.

A longish interview with Joel Spolsky as part of the recently released Founders at work book.

Cory Doctorow released his newest book Overclocked under a CreativeCommons license. He’s also released it on paper, available at Amazon. This is a great way to sample new (to me) authors.

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).

Vista’s last mile, a report on the time crunch leading up to the impending release. The article has a few tidbits on how Vista is being tested:

With each day’s build, Microsoft is running a battery of automated tests against around 1,000 of the leading software programs. It has written 750,000 lines of code just to create the test patterns, which take 355 servers the better part of the day to run.