Using PDF documents on Linux used to be quite unpleasant. The PDF viewing apps were ancient and ugly and the quality of the rendering was nasty.

Today, though, the picture is much better. OpenOffice.org does a great job of creating PDFs and a relatively new viewing application called Evince has made browsing/reading a pleasure.

Evince is a lot like the Preview application on Mac OS X. One thing that Preview.app does well, though, that Evince cannot do is display Photoshop files (PSD).

While the Gimp can open/save PSD files, it does not support Photoshop layer-effects and some of the layer-mask features. The end result is that many Photoshop files look broken/incomplete.

Preview.app manages to show pixel-perfect previews of Photoshop files, including complex layer masks and effects. I presume (but don’t know), that preview is using a flattened bitmap that is included in the Photoshop file rather than parsing/rendering all of the layer effects itself. If anyone can confirm/deny that this is the case, please do.

If it is indeed the case that Photoshop files include a flat bitmap of rendered version of the file, presumably Evince to use this to preview PSD files.

The Offer

This isn’t the kind of thing I’m capable of doing myself, but I would love to see it happen so I am putting out a bounty out for this to be done. I’m willing to pay $100 USD to the person who can implement PSD viewing in Evince.

Requirements for Payment:

• Evince must display recent Photoshop (6, 7, CSx) PSD files accurately, including layer effects and other complex Photoshop-specific visuals.
• The code must be included upstream in Evince. If they don’t accept your code, you don’t get paid. I’d suggest getting in touch with the Evince maintainers and keep in touch with them during your development. If you do all the work and they don’t commit it, you’re out of luck. Note that I have not been in touch with the Evince maintainers about this.
• The code must be committed upstream by the end of 2006.
• If there are intellectual property issues that prevent the code from being included in Evince, the offer is off the table – you might want to investigate this first.
• Money will be sent via PayPal after the code has been committed upstream in Evince.
• If multiple people complete the project, the one who gets their code (or the majority of it) committed will get the bounty.
• If no one completes the project, I will keep the money for myself and roll around in it.

If you do have a go at this, contact me and let me know you’re working on it and I’ll give you a heads up in case it’s already underway somewhere else.

$100!?! Screw you! That barely pays for an hour of work

Yeah, I know. $100 is not a lot of money. I’m not trying to hire someone to write this code and I have no illusions that this is even close to enough money to actually cover the work required. Rather, I’m doing this as a cheap stunt to get the attention of someone who might have been interested in doing this anyhow.

Ze Frank’s “Scribbler” turns your crappy sketches into something beautiful.

Me: Wanna see a movie tonight?
Her: Sure! Have one in mind?
Me: Yeah.
Her: What’s it about?
Me: It’s a slide-show by Al Gore about global warming.
Her: …

I’ll spare you an actual movie review of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and (appropriately, I think) fire a few bullet points at you instead.

It was an hour-long commercial for Apple.

There were plenty of scenes of “Al working hard on his presentation” with clear shots of the Keynote UI (look how he drags and drops!). The Apple logo on the back of his PowerBook was almost the visual anchor in many scenes. Just think how much energy Al’s gonna save when he upgrades to a Dual Core!

I wonder how many viewers of the film will be aware of Gore’s status on the Apple Computer, Inc. Board of Directors.

Next to video and film, Powerpoint is one of the great medium of our time.

I mean “great” as in “[r]emarkable or outstanding in magnitude”, not as in “[s]uperior in quality or character”.

The presentation Gore gives avoids the typical bullet-point-slide format for the most part. There aren’t even too many distracting slide transitions. Still, it is essentially a PowerPoint presentation (yeah, yeah, I know – he uses Keynote, not PowerPoint – see above). I can’t imagine the movie being a success if it was purely based on an hour-and-a-half speech by Gore. I can’t see people lining up for an Al Gore, David Suzuki, and Stephen Lewis triple-bill.

The visual aspects of the show make the speech palatable. The photography was perhaps the most compelling. Regardless of their real meaning and weight, some of the before/(twenty-years)after photos were extraordinary. The visualizations of data was equally compelling, but also just as questionable. The charts went way beyond the Tufte-style elimination of all but the essential. The scale was removed from most graphs leaving little more than a scary red line that screams, “look at that line, it’s going UP!”

Oh yeah, and here’s my review: interesting, entertaining, too many Apple cameos, not much new here, but a good summary of everything you’ve already heard about climate change.

Sloan’s new album is almost ready – it’s a single 30 track CD, or a double vinyl LP

Political correctness meets search and replace

Sitting by the pool-side at a friends’ place while in Toronto last week, there were a load of wireless networks available:

Of course, none of them worked.

Side-note: wireless used to suck on Linux. Not anymore.