Using Inkscape to Make Patterns
Susan showed off the inkscape plugins she has made to draw cloth patterns, so you can make clothes by using inkscape and a plotter device (to draw the pattern). It was pretty cool to hear inkscape being used to make physical items.
DeviantArt Demonstration
Two deviantArt people were here talking about how they foster communities, ideas, sharing and how they support the use of open source tools and creative commons licenses.
They have a New API which should allow tools to create plugins to export to deviantArt. It uses OAuth2. The idea is that you can sync updates to your deviantArt files from your programs.
Open ColourSpot, The Problems
In printing there is a system of colour matching called PANTONE, which is an arse of a proprietary colour system. Unfortunately we don’t yet have a good free culture replacement for this. This is the concern of the Open ColorSpot project. ginger ‘both lower case, no seriously, she means it’ coons gave a good talk about the frustrations in trying to lead the project against the industry invested interest.
JonCruz talks about Linux Printing (and how it’s dead)
Basically Jon’s talk talked about how badly the Linux platform supports the professional printing industry. This is a walk through all of the problems and gaps in the functionality we currently have. Much more so than the desktop itself, we suffer not being able to supply good tools for artists and print professionals.
Colour correction is one of those problems, but also things like 6 colour, CMYK handling and other controlled printing methods (Halftones, true black, registration issues etc)
One interesting idea is “Supporting 80% isn’t enough” and Jon is passionate in expressing how just supporting the common users doesn’t get you noticed. The press isn’t interested in apps which do boring every day things and attracting new users and programmers to a project can really be about supporting more edge cases than just always going after the 80%.