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 ↩

Here’s a great set of articles showing off the new features in Php 5.3: Part 1, 2, 3, 4. It’s fun to watch languages evolve.

Dr. Alan Kay talks about the Meaning of “Object-Oriented Programming”. His summary:

OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I’m not aware of them.

BUS is a simple interactive fiction engine written in Python. It includes a basic world model and NL parser.

The Mozilla2 platform aims for mobile market. It’s about bloody time. It looks like webkit has already schooled Gecko in the embedded space, so the Mozilla team has some catchup to do.

A complete wiki comparison tool.

A thorough outline of code indenting styles (via).

Ken Rockwell compares a $150 and $5000 camera. Guess which one he prefers?

An interesting take on the 3 kinds of software developers. If you’re ever asked, “what kind of developer am I?”, be wary if they’re a perpetually intermediate developer (they won’t like the answer). Purgatorio is no fun.

The classic nethack game (tile screenshots) is now available for the Nintendo DS. Some background on the ubercool Nethack, a game that captured the essence of the nerd hacker in the 80s.