A while back I wrote about the awesome open-source image editing program Paint.NET, which is available only for Windows. Although I'm thrilled there is an open-source option for Windows users, Paint.NET is one of those apps that is so cool, I wish it worked in Linux! Thankfully, there's another app in town with similar features, and it's cross-platform!

3-D printers are becoming popular tools, dropping in price and becoming available to almost everyone. They can be used to build parts that you can use around the house, but more and more, they also are being used to create instruments for scientific work.

At the start of this quarter we looked at how 2013's graphics developments were more incremental than revolutionary, perhaps with the need for LTS stability in mind. Things are looking quite different this year, with several major changes quietly under way.

Last October, our last look at graphics focused on the plans laid at September's X Developer's Conference. In the three months since then, these plans have come to fruition, reasserting the continuing relevance of X.org compared with Wayland and other compositing display servers.

Don't get me wrong, I love The GIMP. We all love The GIMP, as our Readers' Choice awards show this month. If I'm being completely honest, however, I rarely have the need for such a powerful application. Usually, regardless of what computer system I'm on, I pick Pixlr as my image editing program.

X.org The X.org Developer's Conference was held in Portland this September, providing a venue to discuss a range of topics relating to OpenGL, drivers, the X server, Wayland and Mir.

X.org The X.org project is working towards the next major release, with August seeing mostly minor releases of various X components. Most notably of these were the mesa 9.2 release, new -intel and -ati driver releases, and a second pre-release of a new stable Xserver.

The graphics stack in Linux comprises a number of distinct projects, and in this article we'll take a look at the current development of X.org, Wayland, and Cairo.

As Linux users, we tend to take programs like GIMP for granted. Thankfully, as of version 2.8.2, GIMP is available as a native application for OS X! Because everyone reading this most likely is familiar with how awesome GIMP is for photo editing, it's worth mentioning there is another open-source photo-editing application for OS X named Seashore.

In these columns, I have covered several different scientific packages for doing calculations in many different areas of research. I also have looked at various packages that handle graphical representation of these calculations. But, one package that I've never looked at before is gnuplot (http://www.gnuplot.info).

In quantum physics, one of the calculations you might want to do is figure out how two or more particles may interact. This can become rather complicated and confusing once you get to more than two particles interacting, however. Also, depending on the interaction, there may be the creation and annihilation of virtual particles as part of the interaction.

High-energy physics experiments tend to generate huge amounts of data. While this data is passed through analysis software, very often the first thing you may want to do is to graph it and see what it actually looks like. To this end, a powerful graphing and plotting program is an absolute must.

Dia is an application designed for quick creation of structured diagrams such as simple, line-based illustrations, flowcharts, UML charts and network diagrams. Being a vector based tool, there is some overlap with other applications such as Inkscape, but Dia's focus is on diagrams that are more functional than aesthetic.

Using OpenGL and GLUT, you can increase the speed of your image processing by using the power inside your system's GPU.

When I first started with graphics - I plotted pixels onto the screen by calculating a memory address and then poking the corresponding value. Times have changed since then.