Also, on the new site we have forums. For other recent synfig related news, please read the recently released issue of Synfig Irregular News.

• PXEGeek's Tango ArtLibreSet icons were committed
• The compile error with newer ffmpeg versions was fixed
• madsen reappeared, compiled the latest svn version for his Mac and posted screenshots (1, 2)
• Lots of useful demonstration videos were posted on youtube.
• The wiki moved to a new server and more people have access.
• The wiki spambots were effectively killed off
• The wiki was upgraded and image uploads are enabled
• A whole bunch of documentation was written on the wiki
• Dooglus fixed the plant layer and other things
• PXEGeek built and uploaded recent Win32 SVN versions
• Some more people tried building on MacOSX and wrote some docs
• Darco released the prologue code!!!! This is for educational use only. Do NOT modify it or use it in your own animations.
• Zelig produced a short animation of Sy N' Fig (ogg, youtube) a couple of mascots for synfig
• We released two new versions of each of ETL, synfig and synfigstudio
• fouressence is excited about doing a redesign for the website !

We're almost ready to make a new release. There have been lots of changes since the last release, so please help out by downloading and testing this release candidate.

Release candidate source code is available here for ETL, synfig, and synfigstudio. Windows binaries are available on the download page.

Read on for the list of changes since the last release.

It is time for another Synfig Meeting. It has been scheduled for July 28th at 6PM UTC. As per last time, we'll use the IRC channel and possibly gobby (or the wiki) for meeting minutes and other notes. There is a rough agenda, please add any suggestions to the wiki page (or comment below and we will add them).

See you all then and happy drawing!

We've finally managed to squeeze out a new release. This one is mainly focussed on bug fixes (thanks to dooglus mostly) and a few new features. There are also some pretty new icons in the GUI done by PXEGeek.

As usual, we need your help. If you know C++, are an artist, can document things or are willing to learn, please join the mailing lists and IRC channel and start helping out.

Be on the lookout for an announcement about an IRC & gobby meeting that will happen soon.

Read on for some of the changes that were made...

• dyloxin, the IRC logging bot, has been up and down lots of times and dooglus has plain text logs for when it is down. darco says it is a problem with the jabber transport and is investigating as time permits.
• dooglus continues to kick the ass of tons of bugs, pabs fixes a few too.
• pabs committed a partially complete MNG output plugin.
• mod_libavcodec got fixed, but it may have bitrotten since then, please test it.
• pxegeek has created Tango ArtLibreSet icons for synfig in .sif format to replace the ones on the main menu.
• Unfortunately we missed the deadline for SoC, and we weren't ready for students anyway. Perhaps next year. Please add ideas to the wiki page.
• Atrus put out some Fedora Core 6 RPMs of synfig SVN alongside his Windows installers.
• Atrus has been busy updating the Windows build to fix various things (inc uninstall) and also include support for OpenEXR (SVN build 483 and higher).
• Atrus also posted instructions for how to setup a windows build environment and build Synfig under windows.
• pxegeek and others have been trying out those instructions with some success.
• ChrisVP has a preview of the Synfig website re-design. He has turned the PNG and static HTML mockups into a Drupal site. This will hopefully be brought online to coincide with the next official Synfig release (check the roadmap wiki page page for more info on that).
• CIA was subscribed to our SVN repository, so we now receive commit notifications on IRC and have a web page to view commits. For now it is updated by polling SVN, so notifications will not be instantaneous.
• Lots of improvements were made to the documentation on the wiki by dooglus, zenoscope and others.
• pabs and pxegeek had fun trying to get the plant layer working, with some success (1 2 3), it still has lots of bugs though
• We are in UbuntuStudio
• There is a Gallery wiki page for users to link their creations from.
• dooglus added a new odd/even winding style for regions.
• timonator showed up and started writing a beginners tutorial.
• The blender community had a heated discussion about synfig.
• We got mentioned on CNET.
• I updated the NEWS (etl synfig synfigstudio) files in SVN, check them out for what is in SVN for the next release.
• madsen did some work on a MacOS package, but has been off-line for a while, still need someone to maintain a MacOS port and builds (someone from Ampersand Laboratories is interested in helping though).
• pabs moved to another city, started working full-time and has been without a computer/net access for ages, hasn't worked on synfig for a while. pabs will be at debconf for the next 3 weeks so he'll probably do some work on synfig (maybe even the release).
• dooglus' laptop hard drive broke down, he moved to a different country, and spent a week on the beach, so his flood of fixes ground to a halt. He'll be back ‘real soon now’.
• snapsilverlight showed up again, he had found a wikipedia page that might help him with his redraw tool idea
• We STILL need more people fixing bugs, usability issues and rendering artefacts, so come join us on IRC and the mailing lists and hack the code! Alternatively a good animation tutorial and more documentation is needed too (please add to the wiki).
• We need some news writers to make this news-sheet more regular - you'll need to subscribe to both the lists, watch the irc logs and svn logs and watch recent changes on the wiki. When you see something you think is newsworthy, post it on the News wiki page, then we'll post the contents of that page on the front page when it gets big enough.
• Be on the lookout for an IRC meeting announcement, maybe before, maybe after the release.

This is a digest of things happening around synfig (SVN, IRC, Lists, wiki) since the last news update.

• dyloxin, our lovable irc logger bot, is down. darco tried to feed it some more trees, but he couldn't coax it back to life yet.
• dooglus got SVN access and is crushing bugs like a madman! lots of crashes and a rendering artifact are fixed in SVN
• I got mod_libavcodec building again, but it crashes when you try to use it
• madsen tried building synfig under fink and is working towards an app bundle for OSX
• darco made a couple of commits to get closer to OSX support
• bunch of win32 fixes by Atrus. Latest unofficial Win32 version is up to SVN 264. Uninstall is a bit broken ATM though.
• disabled studio tools (polygon, draw, sketch, width) can be re-enabled using environment variables. The variables are named like SYNFIG_ENABLE combined with an underscore and the uppercased name of the tool.
• dooglus made bline looping work much better
• dooglus added tooltips to the preview window buttons
• I learned some GTKmm and made a nicer “feature not implemented” dialog
• pxegeek created a new gallery page on the wiki for users to link to their animations.
• I added links to google/youtube synfig videos on the sidebar, in addition to the existing links to flickr and technorati.
• I called for people to review the new README (ETL,synfig,synfigstudio) files in SVN.
• ChrisVP volunteered to come up with a new design for the website and maybe wiki, along with a bit of promotion
• Libre Graphics Meeting 2007 is happening in Canada during May and we are looking for someone to represent synfig there and promote synfig to developers who might want to get involved. There is a similar meeting at FISL 8.0 in Brazil during April.
• ChrisVP also found out about ArtLibreSet, a tango icon naming spec for graphics-related software. It would be a nice easy project for anyone who doesn't know C++ to convert synfigstudio to use standard tango names and ArtLibreSet icon names instead of custom ones. Basically, you would need to rename all the images and modify synfigstudio/src/gtkmm/iconcontroler.cpp and synfigstudio/images/Makefile.am. There is even a script called icon-naming-utils that can help with this process. This does need some theming work though. Check out his message on the synfig-devl list for more info. We also need the existing icons to be redone according to Tango guidelines.
• sciboy discovered a QT application for traditional animation called Pencil (check related software on the wiki)
• Bombe is looking at writing a new colour dialog
• Google's Summer of Code is happening again, some people suggested we should participate. We need people to be administrators or mentors or have project ideas. The deadline is March 12th if we want to apply. Please look at and edit the GoogleSoC
• xerakko committed the start of some documentation to SVN, based on information available on the wiki. The module is synfig-docs, see the SVN page for how to check it out and the build instructions on the wiki for how to build.

If you have anything more to add, please add a comment.

I'm back from sailing the high seas and into the thick of synfig stuff.

While I was away:

• lots of patches were sent in
• some patches were applied to svn
• a new unofficial Win32 build was created
• questions were asked on irc

Stuff achieved for the next release:

• We have a Win32 build maintainer, for at least a year (welcome Atrus)!
• g++ no longer seems to miscompile synfig and if it does there is a simple workaround
• the OOM condition when building synfigstudio on non-i386 platforms may not occur, this needs testing
• Lots of crashers and other bugs fixed
• A couple of small features added
• Some parts of the UI were reworked

Things that still need to be fixed for the release:

• We need a MacOS build maintainer and a good MacOS build (preferably a universal build).

Things that we probably should fix, not sure if they are release blockers or not, please provide feedback about this:

• The synfigstudio gif, dv, ffmpeg and imagemagick targets still crash. synfig ones are fine though.

Stuff that would be nice, but isn't essential:

• Move away from the bootstrap scripts to autoreconf
• Make synfig and synfigstudio relocatable (ala portableapps.com)
• Fix all the bugs and add all the feature requests
• Achieve world peace

On 27th August, we had a meeting to discuss some things:

• Adding some more people to replace what I did (I'm going away from the Internet for 3 months): be available help users on IRC, look at new bugs that get posted, watch the IRC logs, comments posted to the website, changes to the wiki and act accordingly.
• ideas for expanding the amount of people working on synfig.
• the roadmap for 1) the next release 2) future releases

The meeting minutes and IRC logs are available now, please read them and get involved!

Also, the ffmpeg import and render target was recently updated for modern ffmpeg (thanks to Luka Pravica for investigation and the solution). Results are in SVN (revision 181), so please test that too

Also, the synfig IRC channel has been pretty quiet lately. Anyone out there working on or using Synfig? We'd love to see what people are working on.

PS: due to spam, we had to add a captcha.

For those who don't know me, I've been involved in Synfig since I started packaging it for debian. Mainly I helped work out some compilation and copyright issues.

If you feel like chatting a bit, feel free to drop by #synfig on irc.freenode.net. It is, at the moment, the semi-official IRC chatroom for Synfig. I drop by whenever I remember to. If you have questions, comments, or just want to say hello, feel free to drop by!

UPDATE: If you are using Jabber, give #synfig@freenode.irc.deepdarc.com a try.

UPDATE: If you are are not able to stay permanently connected, you may be interested in viewing the IRC logs (colour, plain).

*hint-hint*

UPDATE: I'm also taking the wiki down for a bit as well. Everything just had to break at once right when things were getting busy... But that's how it always works, right?

Hey you! Do you want access to bleeding-edge Synfig? Well, I have good news. Anonymous access to the Synfig subversion repository for Synfig is now enabled! Here are the URLs to the respective repositories:

• http://svn.voria.com/code/ETL/
• http://svn.voria.com/code/synfig-docs/
• http://svn.voria.com/code/synfig-core/
• http://svn.voria.com/code/synfig-studio/

UPDATE: Argh! This weekend was a bit of a loss as far as Synfig is concerned. I spent the weekend sick and putting together Ikea furniture. I think I'm just going to tar up what I have on Subversion right now, as I believe it should work with GCC 4.0 on linux but I have been unable to test it. (I only have GCC 4.0 on my Macintosh computers) I'll update later today about this.