FLOSS+Art

On Thursday 11th June I gave a presentation about Open Source Software and its relationship to open source software. You can download my slides. There’s lots of information in the notes so be sure to check.

In general I covered the usual things including what programs there are availble to facilitate creativity. One thing I wanted to emphasise was the need for more collaboration between coders and artists/non-coders.

What makes many of the open source creative programs so powerful is their extensibility. In many of the programs have a scripting environment where plugins can be written, often in Python, that can do many things, such as batch processing, modifying an image in real time or just about anything that the programmer can imagine. A problem that we (the open source community) face is that not everyone is a coder. So, they may see the scripting environment as a drawback instead of a feature.

So, I think there needs to be more education about the capabilities of the software and demonstrating of what can be achieved by learning programming and understanding more about your tools.

WordPress Idea – Trackback for themes

I’ve suggested an idea for future wordpress builds.

The overall idea is that theme authors can see potentially see who is using their theme. This wouldn’t be automatic, and maybe there could be two options such as 1) send notification to theme author and 2) allow information to be displayed on authors’ website. I feel this could help notify users of any theme updates and also link them with people who have used the theme and modified it in any way.

I’m making a theme for portfolio websites at the moment so this would be a useful feature for me. Go vote!