On 17th, 18th and 19th of March 2006, the Libre Graphics Meeting will be held in Lyon, France. The goal of this event is to extend the traditional Gimp Convention to bring together developers and users of the best of Free Software graphics applications - GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, Blender and more.

Talks and meetings will be held. More information at the Libre Graphics Meeting web site.

Version 2.2.0 of GAP, the GIMP Animation Package is now available for download at ftp.gimp.org. GAP provides a number of plug-ins that extend GIMP with capabilities to edit and create animations.

Version 2.2.9 of the GNU Image Manipulation Program is now available. This is a bug-fix release in the stable 2.2 series and fixes a couple of problems. The source code can be retrieved from ftp.gimp.org and its mirrors. Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become available soon.

The Create Project at freedesktop.org aims to catalyze communication and sharing between Open Source “creative software” communities by providing a third-party space for shared infrastructure. Currently it features a blog aggregator, a Wiki and a mailing-list. Please have a look yourself and consider to join this very much welcomed effort.

It took a little longer than usual, but finally there’s a new development release available from the FTP server. GIMP 2.3.4 is another milestone on the road to version 2.4 of the GNU Image Manipulation Program. A detailed list of changes is available from developer.gimp.org.

Please note that this is an unstable development release, there are bugs and lots of rough edges that need to be polished before 2.4. If you want to try it nevertheless, please read the release notes for the development releases.

Thanks to Karine Delvare who translated a tutorial originally written in French by Dave Neary, developer.gimp.org now features a nice in-depth introduction into writing a GIMP plug-in. Go read it and learn how easy it is to create a new plug-in in the C programming language.

The French-speaking GIMP users may be interested in a new book called “Gimp 2 efficace” written by Cédric Gémy, author of “(A la) SOS GIMP”. The book starts with the basic steps such as installation and configuration for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and moves on to more complex topics including layers, color correction and finally scripting. The table of contents and a sample chapter can be downloaded from the publisher’s web site.

The GIMP team is proud to announce a new release of the user manual for GIMP 2.2. This release features lots of new content for the english, french, german, italian, and chinese manuals.

You can download gimp-help-2-0.9 from ftp.gimp.org.

Please keep in mind that the user manual still needs review and contains grammar and spelling errors. Every contributor who wants to help us with patches or just by proofreading the manual is very welcome. There’s information about how you can help at our project page: http://docs.gimp.org.

Usability is an important but also a very difficult subject for a large and complex application like GIMP. Many user interface decisions are being made by developers who often have little experience in user interface design. In order to improve this, we need the help of experts. To find them, GIMP has joined the OpenUsability project. Here’s a platform where Open Source developers and usability experts get together. We hope that this will help us to learn more about how GIMP is actually being used and how we can improve the user experience. If you think you can help, please join the effort.

A week after some GIMP developers got together at the hacker gathering in the dutch swamps, a new development release is presented. GIMP version 2.3.3, dubbed “What The GIMP”, is a preview on the upcoming GIMP 2.4.

This release features the prototype of a new foreground selection tool that is being developed in cooperation with the department of Computer Science at the Freie Universität Berlin. The SIOX algorithm makes selection of foreground objects a lot easier. Instead of trying to trace the object boundary, the user now only has to specify the region of interest and some representative foreground pixels. SIOX (Simple Interactive Foreground eXtraction) does the rest. A video illustrates the work with the new tool.

More details can be found in the press release (also available in German). The source code of GIMP 2.3.3 can be downloaded from the usual places. If you want to give it a try, please read the release notes for development releases.