The Wine project has released stable version 1.4 of its Windows-compatibility service for Linux (and other non-Microsoft OSes), the culmination of 20 months' worth of development. The new release adds a host of new features, including new graphics, video, and audio subsystems, tighter integration with existing Linux, and improvements to 3D, font support, and scripting languages.
Thanks to my photography background, I tend to equate “image manipulation” with “photo adjustment and retouching” – but of course that is just one task. For a lot of jobs, image manipulation means dull work like repeatedly converting, resizing, and compressing images for output – fitting them to the proper size for a post on the Web site, converting to the right format for print, and many other similar, repetitive tasks. You can use tools like GIMP and Krita for this class of work, but you would usually be better off firing up a dedicated batch conversion tool – saving yourself considerable time and mental energy. A comparatively young tool called Converseen is a good place to start.
Right this very second, you are looking at a Web browser. At least, those are the odds. But while that's mildly interesting to me, detailed data on where users look (and for how long) is mission-critical. Web designers want to know if visitors are distracted from the contents of the page. Application developers want to know if users have trouble finding the important tools and functions on screen. Plus, for the accessibility community, being able to track eye motion lets you provide text input and cursor control to people who can't operate standard IO devices. Let's take a look at what open source software is out there to track eyes and turn it into useful data.