I'm really happy to be able to publish this blogpost; it's been something I've wanted to announce for a few weeks now.
As many of you know, since .NET Core went open source, I've been building a library called ImageSharp. (cross platform 2D graphics library, all that jazz). What started as a crazy idea, like the proverbial acorn, has blossomed into something much bigger and better...
Introducing Six Labors #
Six Labors is an organisation concentrating the combined talents of Scott Williams, Anton Firsov, James Jackson-South (Me) and Dirk Lemstra to bring into the world a suite of awesome, Open Source, .NET tools.
We think it's a fantastic way for us to ensure our work flourishes and helps us spread the workload a little.
Working with these chaps on ImageSharp has been an incredible experience for me and has allowed us to build something that really is world class. They each bring something special to the project and have taught me personally a huge amount about both programming and managing open source projects.
Making our collaboration official seemed like a no-brainer. We hope you agree.
As of today we have 3 main projects. You can find them all on Github
ImageSharp #
ImageSharp is a fully featured, fully managed, cross-platform, 2D graphics API designed to allow the processing of images without the use of System.Drawing.
Built against .NET Standard 1.1 ImageSharp can be used in device, cloud, and embedded/IoT scenarios.
Shapes #
Shapes is a 2D polygon manipulation and interrogation library written in c# and targets .NET Standard 1.1 making it entirely cross-platform and will run on everything from android phone, to windows desktops, to Linux servers and everything in between.
Shapes is currently still in alpha but is being used by ImageSharp for its line and vector drawing code.
Fonts #
Fonts is an true type/woff compatible font loading library written in c# and targets .NET Standard 1.1 making it entirely cross-platform. This means it will run on everything from Android phone, to Windows desktops, to Linux servers and everything in between.
Fonts provides text measuring, layout, and abstracted rendering systems. You just need to plugin your own rasterizer (like ImageSharp).
So What's Next... #
Well... Actually I lied earlier. We've still got to move ImageSharp into the organisation repo (We need to close a couple of PR's first) Once, we've done that and a little cleanup we're going to push ImageSharp to Nuget along with the rest of our projects so you can download and experiment with it.
Eventually we're going to introduce support contracts for our libraries so you can save time on your projects with direct access to us. (Think developer questions, architectural guidance, feature requests).
This site will become the go-to place for news, documentation for all our libraries so please bookmark and share this site and comment on our blogposts. We're building high quality software here that we want you to benefit from!
Cheers!
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