Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

G`MIC (GREYC`s Magic For Image Computing) Sees New Stable Release

G'MIC (GREYC's Magic for Image Computing) is a framework for image processing that comes with a large number of pre-defined image filters and effects (almost 400, with an extra 300 testing filters). There are several interfaces for G'MIC: a command line tool, a web service, a Qt based interface for real-time webcam manipulation, a library and a GIMP plugin.

Below you can see a screenshot with the G'MIC GIMP plugin in action:

GIMP GMIC

Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr Might Get A New Icon Theme


In an Ubuntu Developer Summit session today, Matthieu James (Graphic/Visual Designer at Canonical) presented the design guidelines as well as some of the work done to create a new icon theme for Ubuntu (both desktop and touch).

GIMP 2.9 (2.10 Development Builds) Available In New Ubuntu PPA

Thorsten Stettin has created a new PPA for Ubuntu / Linux Mint users who want to use the latest GIMP 2.9 development builds.

There won't be a GIMP 2.9 stable release - 2.9 is used for development and will result in the next stable GIMP version, 2.10.

The major new feature in GIMP 2.10 will be a complete port to GEGL / high bit depths and the latest GIMP from GIT already allows working in 16bit and 32bit per color channel mode, both integer and float:

Easily Download And Install Google Web Fonts In Ubuntu With TypeCatcher

TypeCatcher is an application that allows to easily browse, search, download and install fonts from the Google Web Fonts collection, which includes hundreds of open source fonts.

New UbuntuForums.org Design On The Way

new ubuntuforums design

The Ubuntu website and basically all the official Ubuntu related websites have been upgraded to use the new Ubuntu branding, except for Ubuntuforums.

But that's about to change. Mike Basinger create a blueprint @ Launchpad regarding this matter which has already been accepted, so it looks like we'll be getting a new Ubuntuforums design soon (I'm not sure when).

Mike also posted a link with a test theme for Ubuntuforums. To check it out for yourself, head over to www.mikesplanet.net/forums. What do you think about the new proposed design (note: the link is marked as "test theme" so it may not be the actual new theme or it may change)?


Update October 31: Some changes have been made to the design so I've updated the screenshot.

New Way To Get The New Official Ubuntu Font Family

In case you don't know, the new Ubuntu font which is supposed to be shipped with Ubuntu 10.10 is only available in a private PPA for now.

A while back we posted about getting the official Ubuntu font by joining the Kubuntu-users group. There were way too many people joining this group so it was revoked access to the private PPA. In a discussion with Paul Sladen, he pointed to a new way regular users can get access to the Ubuntu Font Family private PPA: go to https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-typeface-interest and click "Join this team" (you'll of course need a Launchpad account). You should receive an email when you have been accepted to this team (it will take a while - I'm not sure how long). When this happens, do not install the deb! Add the PPA so you can stay up to date with the latest versions of the font!

Mult-Platform Color Picker: Gpick (Linux & Windows)

Gpick is a tool that allows you to click any color on your screen and copy it's RGB, HEX or HSL value to the clipboard.

Here is a video with gpick in action:


Features:

  • Fast color picking
  • Magnified screen area
    • Magnification from 2 to 10 times
  • Colors automatically named
    • Closest color name is found using CIE94 color difference function, which is closer to the way humans interpret color differences, than difference of red, green and blue color amounts
  • Palette export function
    • Inkscape/Gimp Palette (*.gpl)
    • Adobe Swatch Exchange (*.ase)
    • Alias/WaveFront Material (*.mtl)
  • Picked colors can be copied to clipboard in multiple formats
    • Hexadecimal notation - #rrggbb
    • Functional RGB notation - rgb(red, green, blue)
    • Functional HSL notation - hsl(hue, saturation, lightness)
    • Custom conversions can be done, but requires some Lua language knowledge
  • Oversampling with five falloff types
    • Multiple pixel values are averaged to help picking colors from sources with noise, patterns and etc, where each pixel is different and overall color is produced by different amounts of particular color
  • Mix two or more colors using variable number of steps and different mixing types
  • Create lightness and/or saturation variations
  • Create harmonious colors
Download Gpick (Packages available: Windows .exe, Ubuntu .deb and source files)

[via ubuntutips]

Shadow Effect with CSS3


Shadow text

If you are using Firefox 3.5+, Opera 9, Safari 1.1 or a pretty new version of Google Chrome, you will see some shadows around the text above. That's all done with CSS. This is the code used for the above font:

{ text-shadow: 2px 2px 2px #BFBFBF; }

Playing around with this, you can achieve some other cool effects like:



Some random text

{text-shadow:0 0 4px #fff, 0 -5px 4px #ff3, 2px -10px 6px #fd3, -2px -15px 11px #f80, 2px -25px 18px #f20;color:#fff;}

text-shadow was included in CSS2, removed from CSS2.1 and returns in CSS3. Also, CSS3 introduced the box-shadow property which is supported by Firefox 3.5+, Safari 3.1 only:

There should be a nice grey fading shadow under this box..

CSS for the above shadow box:

{ box-shadow: 10px 10px 5px #888; -webkit-box-shadow: 10px 10px 5px #888; -moz-box-shadow: 10px 10px 5px #888; padding: 5px 5px 5px 15px; background-color: #EEEEEE; }

Or this:


There should be a hard black shadow above this one, and the shadow should follow the rounded corners.

Which has the following CSS code:


{ box-shadow: -10px -10px 0px #000; -webkit-box-shadow: -10px -10px 0px #000; -moz-box-shadow: -10px -10px 0px #000; border-radius: 5px; -moz-border-radius: 5px; -webkit-border-radius: 5px; padding: 5px 5px 5px 15px; background-color: #EEEEEE; }

Note: Adding -moz- and -webkit- in front of box-shadow and border-radius is required so that the shadow and rounded corners will render proprely in Firefox and Safari.

In case you don't use a CSS3 compatible browser, here is a screenshot of Firefox 3.5 browsing this post:

the power of css3

For creating advanced text-shadow and box-shadow, try this website.