I’m sure most of the people reading this will know already, but Blender 2.42 has finally been released! Hooray! Do go and check out the extensive Release Notes, not just to see the beautiful demo images and movies but to read about the enormous amount of improvements that are in this version, many of which have come directly thanks to the work during the Orange project.
From my own perspective here, once again I’m proud and very happy to have played a tiny part in it’s creation, at Orange and away. My favourite contributions this time round were:
- Floating panel window edge snapping; not an obvious headliner, but makes working with floating panels much nicer
- Video sequence editor visual redesign, following on from this old blog post with mockup. And it only took 2 years to get around to it! 🙂
- Nice lighting setup/checkerboard/hair in the buttons preview render
- Empty display types and size; right now there are only two styles, need ideas for more!
- Cut/Copy/Paste selected text in a button. Should have done it before, but was obviously too lazy
- Three simple composite nodes: Separate RGBA, Separate HSVA, Set Alpha. Lots of fun and I hope to do more. An early patch for Combine RGBA is in the tracker!
- Colour sampler (eyedropper) now in the colour picker popup. It lets you sample a colour from anywhere on the Blender window
There’s also been some fun with the news reports. Blender.org got hit hard by the news article on Digg that some sadistic person submitted there. Also, presumably after reading through the Elephants Dream blog after hearing about the Blender release, one of the many Slashdot Wikipedia ‘enthusiasts’ posted an article mentioning me and linking to my unfortunate experience putting the Elephants Dream DVD menus together. I feel so honoured to have my name up in lights while providing an opportunity for the self-important misanthropes in the Slashdot peanut gallery to delight in some more of their irrelevant ranting. Bravo.
All in all though, a good release. Here’s to the next one, of which I’ll try to keep you all informed of my work towards.
I truly hope to see the Buttons window redesign for next release.
I do think that Blender needs some more thoughts on the UI, specially on the default .blend , something that makes it easier for new comers and even more productive for common users.
Perhaps you can do a discussion at Blend Conference about this, I think now is the time, to start thinking on the event refactor, get keyboard mapping and so forth.
I really think that Blender has evolved enough in all other areas and that the UI is the one that needs some focus now. It can be even better.
Cheerz and thanks for your efforts,
— Rui —
Thanks! I hope I can get moving faster on that work soon too. Right now, I’ve got a few other things on that I need to spend some time on first.