Sam Phillips Well you may have noticed that there's been some time between now and the last KC Gimp. I've been away on business, and a little vacation for the past few weeks, and was unable to keep up with putting out KC Gimp. Because of the amount of news that has piled up and the amount of time that has gone by I present this weeks short synopsis of the most major news while I was gone. Next week should be much longer as it will have all of the other stuff that I didn't have time to cram into this weeks. So enjoy!

Marc Lehmann pixel fairy wrote, in netscape, there is a way to run it so that the current process loads in the page you request (gnome makes heavy use of this) any chance of this for the gimp? id really like to be able to click on an image in a file manager to have it load into the current gimp process. Simon Bundig came up with a quick hack to make it work using script-fu, but warned that it was a big security hole for "connected" pc's!. He expected that Marc Lehmann would probably create a one line perl script to do the same thing, but without the nasty security hole. Shortly after Simon's message, Marc replied with the one line perl script.

Marc Lehmann Marc Lehmann started the ball rolling on the next stable release of the Gimp, version 1.2, by releasing his list of things that should be in the next release. The major things that he wanted to see in the next release that hadn't yet made it into the current developer series were better Internationalization, the new help system, the return of the iscissors tool, and an api cleanup. He also said the TODO file contained a lot of interesting ideas to implement still, but none that would be essential for the new release. In a later thread Yosh wrote,That being said, I'm going to set a tentative feature freeze date for August 18, with a 1.2 release target date by the end of the year. (GIMP 2000 ;) After Yosh gave the cutoff date for new features, everyone put what features they were working on for the release. This next week looks like a madcap rush of development.

Michael Natterer Zach Beane In a move to make the Gimp more like Photoshop Michael Natterer added the ability to drag layers around the Layers, Channels, and Paths dialog. After discovering the new functionality Zach Beane suggested making the interface more like Photoshop by being able to drag the layers onto the buttons to perform actions like copying and removing layers. He also suggested something that Photoshop doesn't have, dragging an image from File->Open to the layers dialog to create a new layer in the existing image from the image opened, an idea everyone liked a lot.