On November 21st, a new Inkscape (a very fine scalable vector graphics editor) was released.

Inkscape 0.43 is now available thanks to the work of many developers and the sponsorship of Google's Summer of Code program which sponsored four students to work on features for Inkscape. The main new features in this release are:

• Connectors: Objects can be connected using auto-routing lines.
• Inkboard Collaborative Editing: You can connect to other Inkscape users over a network and edit a shared document.

Very excited about the connectors, since I have been using inkscape as a free-form diagraming/modeling tool.  While flexible not as easy to throw stuff together as a traditional visio type app.  Connecters were the missing piece.  Be quite easy to build up a personal catalogue of useful svg shapes for diagraming, especially with resources like the open clip art library around.  The open clip art library has available over 6900 SVG files created by over 500 artists.

Three cheers for Google's Summer of Code, which helped some of my favorite open source projects.  Inkscape and Drupal included!  Oh and by the way, Windows users your not left out on all this great software, like the Gimp (free photoshop like software), inkscape is available for Windows.