ReleaseAnnounce041
Revision as of 06:16, 9 February 2005 by BryceHarrington (talk | contribs) (Writing the press release)
subject line for email: Announcing Inkscape 0.41 Release . www.inkscape.org
Inkscape 0.41
Draw Freely.
The Inkscape community is proud to announce the release 0.41 of Inkscape, "A Cross-platform Open Source Vector Graphics (SVG) Drawing Tool."
The primary focus of the 0.41 release has been on bug fixing. Inkscape has already earned a reputation for being robust and hard to crash; but there were a number of corner cases and rare bugs that we took great pleasure in squishing for you. In particular, many fixes have gone in particular to Windows and Internationalized character sets; even more so than in past releases we owe deep thanks to the many users who have worked patiently with us to report the problems and validate these fixes. Several serious crashes, memory leaks and mis-features have been corrected, and certain areas now see noticeable speedups. We only wish we could have fixed more! See our Known Issues section for problems we know about but didn't have time to fix for this release.
Of course, no Inkscape release would be complete without at least a few new features. First, we've built on the black and white tracing functionality introduced in 0.40 with a surprisingly powerful color and grayscale tracing capability. Second, a new clone tiler facility has been added for creating patterns, tesselations, and other sorts of pattern tiling arrangements.
In addition, user requests and comments stimulated a number of improvements to unit handling, extensions, the Invert Selection command, layers selector, icon theming, and more. Translations have also received an amazing amount of attention this release, including several new translations of tutorials. All this and more can be seen in explicit detail in the 0.41 Release Notes.
We were quite strict with ourselves to avoid adding new dependencies and to hold off on ambitious new features we have planned in order to make 0.41 especially stable. The only dependency change is a minor version update for the Boehm garbage collector libgc, which we increased to version 6.4 due to freezes that occurred in some circumstances on Windows and Linux.
However, for 0.42 we intend to go a bit wild with some aggressive changes that we've been working on experimentally on the side for several months now. We expect these changes to destabilize the codebase considerably, so it may be a while before our next release; please wish us luck. The first of these changes is a complete reimplementation of the graphical user interface using Gtkmm. The second is the incorporation of a new DOM that will provide the core that we can finally build a scripting system on. Both the interface design and scripting have been remarked on by reviewers lately so we know this work takes Inkscape in the right direction. Wish us well, and if you'd like to get your hands dirty with us doing this implementation work, please drop by!
Download your packages (Linux, Windows, Mac OSX):
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93438
For many more details, see the Release Notes for 0.41:
http://www.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ReleaseNotes041
Community submitted screenshots:
http://www.inkscape.org/screenshots/