I finally took some time to get GIMP# up and running with the latest Mono and GIMP releases. Not sure how I’m going to continue from here, but I will probably first update the code with the latest C# language features. Also since GIMP 2.6 has been out now for more than half a year, I will only support this version. Stay tuned for a maintenance release soon!

Finally a new GIMP# release. Major highlights for this release:

• Many improvements to get the Photoshop actions plug-in usable: 10 copyright-free actions are now verified and can be downloaded from SourceForge
• An abandoned plug-in to load GEM image files was ported
• The Russian translation was updated (thanks Alexandre!)

The next GIMP# version will be released as soon as I’ve got 20 correctly working Photoshop action files.

I just ported an older GIMP plug-in to GIMP#. It’s the Sky plug-in which is part of the PhyModMedia plug-ins. First result:

Now I only have to clean-up the UI a bit, optimize the code somewhat and release it as part of GIMP# 0.14.

Btw, this plug-in was chosen as a result of this poll which asked for your favorite abandoned GIMP plug-in. You can still vote for yours!

Yet another language joins the long list of GIMP programming languages. This time it’s Nemerle. I can’t say I have studied the ins and outs of this language yet, but the syntax seems to be very close to C#. It didn’t take me very long to create a GIMP# plug-in written in Nemerle. This very basic plug-in computes the average color of all pixels of an image and fills the image with that color. What surprised me most is that the plug-in written in Nemerle was almost exactly as fast as a similar plug-in written in C#. A few months back I already reported that the same plug-in written in IronPython is 4 times slower.

Hopefully I can soon report on how well IronRuby is doing.

I just released GIMP# 0.13. Highlights for this release:

• Improved support for Photoshop action files
• Many bugfixes and smaller enhancements
• More GIMP 2.4 API coverage and corresponding unit tests

For the next release I bumped the Mono dependency to 1.2.6 so I can now use cool new C# 3.0 features Plans for GIMP# 0.14 include adding support for another .NET language (VB, IronRuby, F#, Boo, etc.), and improving Photoshop actions support to about 55 %.

Yesterday I installed Fitnesse, an acceptance testing framework. The idea is to learn about this tool and use it to test GIMP#. GIMP# is already covered by 200+ unit tests, using NUnit, but having a few more tests on a somewhat higher level is certainly not going to hurt.

To install Fitnesse I followed the steps described in a tutorial by Cory Foy.

The steps it took me to get Fitnesse working:

• downloaded the zip file and unzipped it
• had to chmod +x the run.sh file
• start the FIT server (./run.sh)
• replaced the backslash by a forward slash in “!define TEST_RUNNER {dotnet\FitServer.exe}“
• renamed FitServer.exe to FitServerOrig.exe and created a small wrapper script called FitServer.exe that basically does a “mono FitServerOrig.exe”. This can be avoided if you use binfmt_misc

Next step is to write some fixtures for GIMP# code and actually test it.

As you can see in the screenshot below (the dialog of a sample plug-in written in C#) I got GIMP# running on my MacBook Pro.

The problem mentioned in my previous post was that there were multiple instances of some libraries. Mostly caused by me messing with both MacPorts and Fink. I reinstalled everything from scratch and this time I only used MacPorts for installing GIMP and GTK. Mono and GTK# were built from source. There are still some issues with libjpeg which resides in two different places. Some info about that can be found here.

There are three things on my list before I will release GIMP# for OS-X:

1. Execute a set of about 200 unit tests
2. See if all plug-ins work the same way as they do on my Linux machine
3. Create an installer

If all goes well this is a matter of days…

I made some progress putting GIMP# on OS-X. There were numerous hurdles, like compiling Gtk#, installing and running GIMP, setting the right paths, forgetting to install the development packages of several libs, handling with different extensions for dynamic libraries, etc. etc. Most of this was of course caused by my unfamiliarity with the Mac as a development platform. However I’m proud to present you the following screenshot:

I know, this is not a fully functional GIMP# plug-in running, but if you look closely you can see that the ncp plug-in which is written in C#, registers itself. It still crashes as soon as I try to run it, but hopefully I will be able to fix that after a bit of debugging.

Once I get it running, I will start experimenting with an installer for the Mac. Any suggestions on a good one are welcome.

Update (July 16): the AverageBlur plug-in works fine. This is about the only plug-in that doesn’t use any Gtk# stuff. All other plug-ins still crash as soon as I try to run them.

Now that we have released GIMP# 0.12 it’s time to start thinking about the features for 0.13. The current release didn’t contain many new features, apart from IronPython support. For 0.13 my plans are:

• continue working on Photoshop actions support. This has been on hold for some time, mainly because I didn’t have access to a Windows machine with Photoshop installed. My goal is to get 50 % of my action files (about 200) working in the next release.
• I already did some experiments with Visual Basic. It’s pretty straightforward to make it possible to write GIMP# plug-ins in VB.
• Move to our new house. Oh wait, this isn’t GIMP# functionality. However, it will have some impact on my already scarce time I can spend on development. So don’t expect a release within the coming 2 or 3 months.

I’m also looking forward to introducing C# 3.0 features (like lambda functions) in GIMP# but I guess right now it’s a bit too early to do so.

I just released GIMP# 0.12. Highlights for this release:

• Initial support for IronPython
• Major bugfixes
• More GIMP API coverage and corresponding unit tests

A windows installer will (hopefully) follow shortly. I also got some advice that I could use `checkinstall’ to create Debian and rpm packages. This seems worthwhile to investigate since only Mandriva  includes GIMP# at the moment.