SwatchBooker
SwatchBooker copied to clipboard
Update website
http://www.selapa.net/swatchbooker/ makes it look like Swatchbooker is an abandoned project.
When clicking on "Download" and it goes to Launchpad (related issue: #2) and there's nothing else to indicate that there are recent releases or that there has been any active development since 2010.
Please update the links on the website and also make it look like there's active development. (If you had something like "New release: $RELEASE_VERSION, $RELEASE_DATE" and a link, it'd do wonders. But then, of course, it'd need to be manually updated. At least changing the links would help.)
I'd love to help design a new site, but is the project essentially dead?
I originally opened this issue years ago, as SwatchBooker is great software that fills a niche (of converting color palettes, which is extremely useful when someone only makes a palette available for a proprietary app like Illustrator and you want to use it with Inkscape, GIMP, and so on)... and the latest release on GitHub was 0.7.6 from 2017 and the latest released version from Launchpad (linked from the website) was 0.7.3 from 2010. This is still the case, with those versions and release dates, meaning that the "latest" formal public release is 14 years old now.
There are a ton of other color palette apps now (many on Flathub), but none have the featureset of SwatchBooker, especially with importing and exporting colors.
I guess it's probably frozen in time due to dependencies due to the Python 2.7 -> 3.x migration and being based on lcms1, when lcms2 has been out for a while too. Additionally, it's Qt4 when Qt6 has been out for quite some time. DisplayCAL, another niche color-specific app (for calibrating screens) also hit the same dependency wall, where migrating wasn't straightforward. Meanwhile, all Linux distributions moved on years ago and dropped Python 2.7 support (as it stopped being supported at the end of 2019, after multiple attempts to deprecate it).
There are some branches and forks that attempt to deal with the migrations; I'm not sure how well they work, however:
https://github.com/olivierberten/SwatchBooker/network
The best ways to be able to use SwatchBooker are probably running a very old VM (ideally without Internet access, as to not risk old exploits)... or to try to get it packaged for Flathub, like what happened with DisplayCAL, as it's possible to build packages with old dependencies and run them in a sandbox (of some degree, depending on the settings).
...Or using Wine to install an old version of Python for Windows and then the released Windows version of SwatchBooker?
(Getting the fork @ https://github.com/efa/SwatchBooker, which has been ported to more recent dependencies, packaged on Flathub is probably the best bet at this point?)