From: Timothy Hunter <cyclists@...>
Date: 2006-01-25T00:37:56+09:00
Subject: [ANN] RMagick gets face-lift, book and movie deal

I've just uploaded RMagick 1.10.0 to RubyForge.  This is the first major
release of RMagick since last October.  This release includes the
following changes:

o New methods in the Image class
     add_noise_channel: Add noise to specified image channels
     vignette: An RMagick example makes its way into the ImageMagick API!
         Soften the edges of an image to produce an oval vignette.
     crop_resized: Create a thumbnail with an exact size (thanks Jerret
         Taylor!)
     export_pixels_to_str
         Super-fast export pixel data to a string buffer

o New Colorspace enumeration values for the Cineon and DPX image formats

o All known bugs fixed

o Removed the feature tests for unsupported releases of ImageMagick,
   producing a faster configuration step. The configure script ensures
   that the installed version of ImageMagick is one that RMagick
   supports.

o RMagick checks at execution time to ensure that the version of
   ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick in use is the same as the version for
   which it was configured.


RMagick News
============

Apress's new book, _The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick_, by Michael
Still, devotes a chapter to using ImageMagick from Ruby programs via
RMagick.

The GraphicsMagick project is auditioning for the motion-picture
post-production business by adding support for industry-standard image
formats to the upcoming 1.2 release. The scripting interface of choice
is Ruby (of course!) via RMagick.


What is RMagick?
================

RMagick is an interface to the ImageMagick (www.imagemagick.org) and
GraphicsMagick (www.graphicsmagick.org) image processing libraries.
These libraries support more than 90 image formats, including GIF, JPEG,
PNG. RMagick includes RVG, a 2D drawing API and has comprehensive HTML
documentation.

RMagick 1.10.0 is available as always from RubyForge:
http://www.rubyforge.org/projects/rmagick