Greetings, color-space voyagers on board GIMP 1.3.

We are approaching our target coordinates and will soon go into feature freeze. Please bring your monitors into an upright position and prepare for download.

Lately the course has been changed; it was decided that our journey will not go past version 1.4 as was avised in the infamous "The Future of The GIMP" document. Instead the next stop will be 2.0. This doesn't mean that we will miss our rendezvous with GEGL, only the coordinates were changed.

The reason for this change is the fact that although there are some expectations for GIMP version 2.0 that will not be met, GIMP has improved a lot over the last three years and is certainly past the state that was imagined as version 1.4. People got used to refer to GIMP-1.4 as the next stable version and used to think of GIMP-2.0 as the all-singing-all-dancing wonder tool that would rule the world hand in hand with GEGL. This is still our goal but we feel that so much work has gone into the code base since version 1.2, that the time has come for a major version number increment. The application core has been completely restructured and large parts of it have been rewritten. Along with the port to GTK+-2.0, we continued the revamp of the user interface code that was started after GIMP 1.0 was released. The current code base gives us lots of room for further improvements and it should allow a smooth transition to GEGL. But I don't want to talk more on details of future development. We will be discussing this topic on the GIMP Developers Conference that is going to happen in about two weeks (see http://developer.gimp.org/gimpcon.html).

The plan is to go into feature freeze during the heat of the camp. We will then start to make pre-releases for 2.0 in regular intervals asking a larger audience to test our code. Hopefully we can get enough testers for all platforms including Mac OS and Win32 to be able to release version 2.0 with support for as many platforms as possible.

Before I get hyped away, let me get back to the original subject of this mail. GIMP version 1.3.17 is now available from the FTP server:

ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v1.3/v1.3.17/

and should soon find it's way to your favorite mirror:

http://www.gimp.org/download.html

There is a chance that you will experience build problems due to the inclusion of a new compositing sub-system that uses MMX and SSE to accelerate common operations in the layer compositing. If you experience such or any other problem with this release, please file a bug-report at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/. But please check beforehand if the problem has already been reported. If you are hit by the mentioned problems with MMX or SSE assembler code, you can fix your build using the --disable-mmx and/or --disable-sse configure options.

Below is a list of changes since version 1.3.16. There are some noteable improvements among them. More to come before the freeze...

Overview of Changes in GIMP 1.3.17 ==================================
- Made the text tool optionally create a path [Sven, Mitch] - Added the ability to reverse gradients to the blend tool [Mitch] - Added dithering to the blend tool [Alastair M. Robinson] - Changed all(?) GIMP-1.4 references to GIMP-2.0 [Sven] - Allow to transform paths using the transform tools [Mitch] - Added a simple CMYK color selector [Sven] - Added naive RGB CMYK conversion routines [Sven] - Generalized paint tools [Mitch]
- Finally a brush-shaped cursor for all paint tools [Mitch] - Started to integrate new composite functions [Helvetix] - Made the style for dockable tabs configurable [Mitch] - Some preparations for text transformations [Sven] - Store grid settings in XCF [Brix]
- Redone assembly checks and run-time checks for CPU features [Sven] - Added lots of mnemonics to the menus [Jimmac] - Support for comments in PNG files [Sven] - Constified the libgimp API and adapted all plug-ins [Yosh, Sven] - Cleaned up the brush/font/gradient/pattern selector API [Mitch] - Support for patterns with alpha channel [Bolsh] - Lots of bug fixes

Other contributors: Eric Pierce, Joao S. O. Bueno, Tor Lillqvist, Damien Carbery, Maurits Rijk

The weather forecast for our next stop, Altlandsberg, announces a hot sunny weekend close to a LovelyLake. Please make sure you are bringing your towel.

Happy GIMPing, Sven