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Friday, January 18, 2008

Jan 2008's meeting - report and links

Oxygen wasn't rationed, but we were just about at capacity for 2008's first wefcpug. Maybe everyone needed something to kickstart the brain after holiday season.

Here are the links for the presentations -

The GIMP is an open source graphics program long known to Linux and Unix users, and (as I reported a year or so back) has been ported to the Mac, where it works in the X11 windowing environment. At least, it DID work, until Leopard was released. There are now two updates that restore a working Gimp to the platform:

the latest version of the Gimp itself here at the charmingly named Wilber-loves-Mac site. (Worth visiting the second link first if you need to read things up.)

and an open-source modified version of the Apple X11 system for Leopard installations. My understanding (which only just stretches this far) is that the modified X11 on this link adheres to the XWindows standard in ways that the X11 bundled with Leopard does not. If you're happy downloading a modified X11 (which I believe incorporates changes into the Quartz graphics layer as far as it affects X11) you can make it work! One of the open-source developers quotes an Apple team member saying they hope to make this an official Apple update one day.

So - you might want to wait until the next point upgrade to the OS, 10.5.2, which we expect any day now.

Other Leopard news: Skype and AudioHiJack have both released updates to be better compatible with Leopard.

Simon Walker presented the first Show'nTell of 2008, creating an impressive 30" commercial spot in Motion from humble ingredients. His website is here.

Anika Tokarchuk showed trailers and clips from her Tibetan trilogy of films - read more about them here.

Next meeting - Feb 4th