Went to the LinuxTag in Stuttgart this weekend. This was the first big Linux event I attended and it was a lot of fun and I got to meet quite a few people I only new through the Internet.

One of them was Bernhard Reiter from Intevation and FFII who gave a talk about free GIS software. I knew him as a Sketch user and he thinks Sketch would be a good basis for a free viewer of geographical data. Let's see how that'll work out.

I also talked with Simon Budig about possible cooperations between Sketch and GIMP. The reorganizations planned for GIMP 2.0 may provide a good opportunity to functionality that's useful for both projects, such as the color selectors or gradient editor, into libraries that both programs can use.

After the official end of the show on Sunday I had a conversation with Michael Meeks and a few of the other GNOMErs who were still there about Sketch, libart, the GNOME canvas, Bonobo and other things. Somehow I feel that I'll have to look into bonoboizing Sketch as soon as I find the time.

RMS gave a keynote on Saturday. He didn't say very much that I hadn't already read somewhere but it was still very interesting and entertaining because I hadn't seen him before.

After RMS' talk the show was over for the day and the stairs back down to the show floor were blocked by security guys, so I couldn't get back in to get to the party that the other Bernhard had told me would be going on. Fortunately, there was a side entrance that was still open and they didn't have any controls there, so I could sneak in even though I wasn't an exhibitor (is that the right word here?). The party was fun with free beer, free Würstchen (although I was too late for those :-( ) and live music.

Sketch

I've released a new development version of Sketch on June 24th. It has one feature that I haven't seen anywhere else before. You can not only have multiple views for one document but also multiple editors. The difference is that if only create new views they share the set of selected objects, if you create new editors they manage their own selections. I have no idea yet how useful having multiple editors really is and the current implementation has some limitations when it comes to editing bezier curves, so I may take this feature out again before 0.8.

The translation of the French user documentation is underway now and I've seen the first translated sections. It looks good so far.

LinuxFund

LinuxFund.Org (the Tux credit card guys, not to be confused with linuxfund.com) started the beta-test for developer grants. I registered an account and a few hours later was informed that I was one of the first five to do that. Wow.

I want to apply for grants to help with Sketch's development, but when you want to submit a project you have to accept their "Grant Submission Agreement" which seems to state that grants are only available to U.S. residents. This is perhaps understandable in the current stage, but I sure hope that this restriction will be lifted in the future. After all, in their FAQ they state that they want to "be a multinational foundation with fund raising and development grant activity all over the world". I'll have to ask them about this.