I started using Twitter last week. My interest was triggered by a very cool workshop on programming in Scala that was given at the company I work for. Twitter has a nice API which is very easy to use from Scala or any other programming language. I still try to figure out what the business case could be for using Twitter, but for the moment it’s quite fun to do a few daily updates on what keeps me busy and/or interested.

My Twitter ID is @mauritsrijk (direct link). I probably am going to use it to give more frequent updates on my GIMP# activities.

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!

I slowly picked up GIMP# development again. To get my brain in the right mode I added a plug-in in yet another .NET language: Oxygene which is a kind of Object Pascal. From what I’ve seen it is a pretty decent language although I never understood why people would like to type 10 characters (“begin;” and “end;”) instead of 2 curly braces just to open and close a block

For those interested: currently I run Mandriva 2009 with VirtualBox 2.0.2 on my loyal MacBook Pro for development. The fancy IDE I use is called Emacs.

IronRuby and the Fan Programming Language will probably be my next targets.

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.

A new milestone: in February the number of monthly GIMP# downloads surpassed 1000 for the first time. A big thanks goes to Ivo Rytir for the win32 installer and the patches he has submitted. His installer accounts for 60 % of the downloads. I happen to be in his hometown Toronto for the Agile 2008 conference this year and I will certainly buy him his favorite beer: Pilsner Urguell. Cheers Ivo!

A new release of GIMP# is available. New in release 0.14 are:

• Nemerle sample added
• Boo sample added
• Visual Basic sample added (I know.. don’t ask )
• F# sample added
• Ported abandoned Sky plug-in (part of PhyModMedia plug-ins)
• GIMP# now uses C# 3.0 features for cleaner code

Have fun.

Thanks to Ivo Rytir there now is a Windows installer for GIMP# again. It can be downloaded from the GIMP# homepage. I haven’t tried it myself since I don’t have a Windows system. Please send me an e-mail or leave some comments here if you run into problems, so I can forward them to Ivo.

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!

I almost got my first F# plug-in running on GIMP#. It took me some time to get used to the syntax even with a background in functional languages like Lisp and Scheme. Only thing left to figure out is how I can override a C# function that returns an IEnumerable. What I’ve got sofar is:

override x.ListProcedures() : seq<Procedure> =
let procedure = new Procedure()
procedure.MenuPath <- “<Image>/Filters/Generic”
// And now what?

The C# signature of this routine is

protected abstract IEnumerable<Procedure> ListProcedures() ;

Hope to find an answer pretty soon.

Update 3 December 2007: seems that returning an IEnumerable is quite easy (many thanks to Robert Pickering):

[procedure] :> seq<Procedure>

After Boo comes bah. I’m probably going to burn in hell forever for having done this, but I actually created a Visual Basic plug-in for GIMP. The code is currently in CVS at the GIMP# Sourceforge page. Don’t look at the code unless you have a very strong stomach. Promise to myself: I will never ever create Basic code again. On a more serious note: the performance of the Visual Basic plug-in is comparable to the C#, Boo and Nemerle version!