News_(2008)

title: News (2008) permalink: /News_(2008)/

NOTOC

29 December 2008

Here's a new stable version, 7.16.4. There are changes to help ubuntu 8.10 and fedora 11, plus some doc fixes and one tiny bug fix, but that's it.

19 November 2008

We've just added a fancy new interpolation system to the development version of vips. Previously, each operation had it's own interpolator wired in. Now, there's a way of writing a generic interpolator that any operation can use, and a set of fast, high-quality interpolators to choose between.

We have some Interpolation samples with a short explanation. To try it out, build from SVN trunk. You'll see some new options in the nip2 image transform operations.

13 October 2008

There's yet another new stable version, 7.16.3. This fixes the cancel problem that David Joyner found last week. I really hope this is the final 7.16 for a while :-( I've merged the 7.16 cleanups back into trunk, and we now have 7.17.0, the next development version. My plans for this next version are:

I have a project with Nicolas Robidoux to add his YAFR resampler to vips. This is a fast, high quality bicubic interpolator. We should all get better quality image resizing and rotation.
I have a project with Jesper Friis to improve the vips type system. The plan is to add compound types (eg. "array of x") to vips, so that plugins can pass much more complex objects to nip2 and back. We plan to use this feature to add vector overlays to images.
plus some minor stuff

If anyone has more ideas, do chip in.

Monday 6 October 2008

That took a while, but we now have a 7.16.2 announced on Freshmeat and friends. See What's New in 7.16 for a summary of the new stuff. The supported download area has sources plus a windows binary.

Wednesday 10 September 2008

A first release of 7.16 is out. The website is being updated, if no one reports a problem before Monday, we'll announce to the world.

Thursday 17 July 2008

Yet another supported update: 7.14.5.

Changes:

better ImageMagick detection makes FreeBSD builds work (thanks Adam)
option to disable desktop updates (thanks Adam)
bug fix in nip2 helps matrix operations

Thursday 5 June 2008

There's a new stable version up, 7.14.4. This fixes a couple of crash bugs, a couple of minor bugs, and adds a few small features.

The big news is an all-new Windows build system. We are now cross-compiling from Linux to Windows and everything is working much more smoothly. It's much easier to update now, so we have been able to switch to a more recent gtk library stack. nip2 ought to feel noticably snappier.

We also finally have a working libvips.dll, so Windows programmers can easily use vips from their own code. There's a win32dev in the download area containing zips of all the files you need, plus some scripts to help build them. Check the readme.

There's some news on the development version too. We have a branch with pluggable image loaders, so you can easily add new image formats to VIPS and have them appear in all the interfaces. Plus there are improvements to the Python API to make it much easier to move images between VIPS and other image processing libraries.

Wednesday 26 March 2008

vips-7.14 is now final and supported and development have swapped. We'll post an announcement on Freshmeat etc.

There are a couple of new pages on the website:

What's New in 7.14 : Quickly lists the major new things in this version. How it works : Is a technical introduction to the insides of vips.

Monday 3 March, 2008

vips-7.14 is launched! We have a new supported download area with the stuff in. Source only for now, builds and packages coming in the next few days.

Friday 25 January, 2008

Princeton have launched version 1.0 of the PARSEC benchmark suite. This is a set of sample programs for testing parallel computer architectures. One of the sample programs is based on vips, which is very gratifying.