The free software GIMP editing celebrates its 20th anniversary this week. The opportunity for the development team to review the story of the project and announce its next major developments. In Focus, the arrival of GEGL, the new image processing engine, scheduled for the unstable version 2.9.
GIMP is an acronym that originally meant “General Image Manipulation Program”, before become “ GNU Image Manipulation Program .” The first version release November 21, 1995 is the result of a small project developed by two students, Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball. They were part of the eXperimental Computing Facility, a club of the famous Berkeley University (from which the BSD UNIX) for students who have not yet had their diploma.
GIMP has become known largely for its customization, in the manner of what was later found in Firefox. The software can be enriched with numerous extensions to extend the functionality. Meanwhile, GIMP was enriched Capacities on image editing, color management, painting, design and so on. The interface regularly criticized in the past, will later be revised over several years.
The GIMP plans are now fully turned to the major release 3.0. But had to get there, several steps will have to be crossed. First, a version 2.9 called “unstable” because serving as a bridge to test the features added before 2.10, which itself will be designed for general public use. The great contribution of GIMP 2.9 (and thus 2.10) will GEGL, the new image processing engine on which the team is now working for a while.
This version 2.10 will be particularly important SINCE in addition to providing the GEGL engine, several features will appear, such as treatment with 16 or 32 bits per channel, a first support (partial) image format OpenEXR, better color management, etc. Version 3.0 will have a major change in large part number with the move to GTK + 3. Then available, the software has been rewritten almost from top to bottom.
Meanwhile, and to celebrate the 20 years of software developers offer a stable version 2.8.16. It presents mainly fixes a few small interface revisions, more reliable operation under OS X, updates translations and the support layer groups for openraster files.
Vincent Hermann
Editor / journalist specializing in software, especially operating systems. Never travels without his sword.
No comments:
Post a Comment